Rusty Warner

An effective cross-channel marketing hub (CCMH) can position marketing as an indispensable component of an organization’s customer-obsessed growth engine. Think of your CCMH as much more than a campaign management platform. Instead, leverage it for next-gen customer engagement based on compelling, contextually relevant experiences. Forrester defines a CCMH as: Enterprise marketing technology that supports customer data management, […]

Decades ago, the alcohol industry launched its ubiquitous “Drink responsibly” marketing campaign. In 2024, it’s time to “AI responsibly” in marketing technology (martech).

Imagine having a butler who anticipates and serves your needs. Just as Alfred faithfully supports Batman, your personal assistant earns your trust through silent understanding. Now think of this relationship in terms of your experiences with brands. Do those experiences feel invisible and immersive? In Gotham City, Alfred ensures that Batman’s utility belt is always […]

Hanging prominently in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City is a giant infographic that explores the physical, technical, and social components of modern artificial intelligence. Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler’s 2018 “Anatomy of an AI System” is a visual essay that spares no detail as it traces the lifecycle of an […]

Marketers want to capture as much zero- and first-party data as possible, whether that’s email addresses, marketing opt-ins and other consent, or more granular data about who a customer is and what they’re interested in. But consumers have more power to be selective about who they share data with and when and have become wary […]

Empowered customers expect seamless cross-channel experiences. B2C marketers must understand customers and create value exchanges in their individual moments of need. That’s a tough job if your martech ecosystem is overly complex or badly integrated — or both. A cross-channel marketing hub (CCMH) can help marketers overcome data and channel integration complexity to consistently engage […]

It is critical for marketers and customer experience pros to align their respective metrics with shared business metrics. Use customer lifetime value alignment to achieve this.

We all know that there is a big difference between working hard and working smart. And specifically for marketers, the status quo often makes working smart impossible — functional silos inhibit internal efficiencies and negatively impact the overall customer experience. Some of today’s biggest marketing silos are technology-based — different platforms for different functions. Let’s […]

It’s easy to conflate real-time interaction management (RTIM) with personalization tactics, but it goes far deeper. Forrester defines RTIM as: Enterprise marketing technology that delivers contextually relevant experiences, value, and utility at the appropriate moment in the customer lifecycle via preferred customer touchpoints. RTIM enables next best experience (NBX) decision-making in the face of changing […]

Customer feedback management (CFM) vendor Medallia’s announcement of its intention to acquire customer journey orchestration (CJO) vendor Thunderhead is an expected response to the Qualtrics acquisition of Usermind last year. As my colleague Joana de Quintanilha writes in her blog, customer journey orchestration platforms have been a hot commodity of late. The acquisitions of Usermind […]

Discover the questions to ask when considering customer journey orchestration (CJO) vendors, as acquisitions shake the space up.

Customer feedback management vendor Medallia’s announcement of its intention to acquire customer journey orchestration (CJO) vendor Thunderhead is the fourth acquisition in the customer journey orchestration space in six months. First, CSG acquired Kitewheel, followed less than a week later by Qualtrics’ acquisition of both Usermind and Clarabridge. And in October, Genesys announced its acquisition […]

Banks need a customer-led strategy to govern cross-functional personalization efforts and to determine the right technology investments.

The CCCM market is growing as independent players deliver innovation that outshines many of their more established competitors.

Learn about Forrester's martech reference model to help marketers and their technology cohorts define their unique martech reference architecture.

Done right, CCCM delivers more than outbound campaigns. In this Forrester Wave™, we compare CCCM solutions from enterprise marketing software suite vendors.

My colleague Joe Stanhope and I have previously written about “The Future Of Enterprise Marketing Technology” and how it hinges on marketing alignment with customer experience (CX) strategies. To be successful, marketers must orchestrate personalized experiences that deliver value in their customers’ moments of need. But brands must “Align Strategy And Technology To Deliver Next-Gen […]

The spike in online commerce, the importance of experiences (and data to power them), and the need for organizations of all types to accelerate their digital transformation were themes that were front and center at last week’s Adobe Summit 2020. Presented as a series of video keynotes and live BlueJeans-based panels and breakout sessions, this […]

Measuring marketing performance is not just a tongue twister; it’s hard work. Channel-specific metrics cause headaches, and reporting is a hodgepodge of data sources and dashboards from multiple martech and measurement tools. It’s even harder to align marketing performance metrics with customer-focused business objectives, but marketers can no longer pat themselves on the back for […]