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, analytics, segmentation, and workflow tools for designing, executing, and measuring marketing engagement across digital and offline channels.

A successful CCMH implementation supports holistic customer engagement while helping customer-obsessed marketers deliver sustainable long-term business impact. CCMH capabilities go beyond outbound email campaigns and messages that drive acquisition and conversion strategies. They also support inbound personalization for web, e-commerce, and mobile app engagement. And some CCMH solutions connect to human-assisted channels for more personalized sales, service, and operations.

Announcing The Forrester Wave™: Cross-Channel Marketing Hubs, Q4 2024

To help you traverse the CCMH market, The Forrester Wave™: Cross-Channel Marketing Hubs, Q4 2024 is now live. It identifies 14 of the most significant CCMH vendors — Adobe, Bloomreach, Braze, CleverTap, HCLSoftware, Insider, Iterable, MoEngage, Netcore Cloud, Optimove, Salesforce, SAP, SAS, and Zeta Global — and scores them across 28 criteria. You can use this report to identify the CCMH capabilities that matter most when it comes to elevating your approach to personalized customer experiences.

The CCMH market is constantly evolving, with vendors that vary in size, vertical expertise, and geographic focus. Enterprise marketing suites vendors continue to dominate the space, but smaller vendors are investing heavily in AI-based innovation and offer agile alternatives for digital-first environments. Buyers must carefully consider not only CCMH capabilities, but how their chosen solution will integrate with other martech ecosystem investments.

For a deeper dive into our evaluation, please register and join our Forrester CCMH webinar on December 11. Our webinar will also feature insights from CCMH customer references for vendors participating in the study.

If you want a broader view of the CCMH space, The Cross-Channel Marketing Hubs Landscape, Q2 2024 features 36 vendors. It covers four core CCMH use cases: customer data and profile management, segmentation and audience building, customer understanding (analytics and insights), and cross-channel marketing (outbound campaigns). It also identifies six extended CCMH use cases: consent, privacy, and preference management; creative collaboration and project management; individualized personalization and recommendations; contextual marketing (triggered or responsive); moments-based marketing (predictive or real time); and marketing measurement and optimization.

And as always, feel free to schedule an inquiry if you’d like to talk in depth about our research findings or the various vendors in the CCMH space.