I’m pleased to announce the release of The Forrester Wave™: Email Marketing Service Providers, Q3 2024. This marks what I believe is the 15th time I’ve authored the Forrester Wave evaluation of this vendor category! For those of you interested in doing a little “now and then” analysis, you’ll want to find the 2004 version of this report, when I looked like this:
Since 2004, the form and function of email marketing remain practically unchanged. Most promotional emails still pitch products through pictures and links to online shopping pages, even though digital experiences outside of email have become rich, contextual, and immersive. So for this email marketing vendor evaluation, I wanted to focus on innovation. What vendors help marketers do more with the email medium?
This meant evaluating providers that can handle basic and advanced user scenarios. Specifically, we included enterprise-focused firms that demonstrated growth by delivering 11 of the 12 capabilities needed for B2C marketers to create emails, improve email performance, and extend email capabilities, as identified in The Email Marketing Service Providers Landscape, Q1 2024.
Our focus on enabling innovation revealed three big differentiators in the set of firms we evaluated:
- Look for a vendor that captures all user data (such as behaviors, preferences, and intent) and product data, metadata, and analytics (such as models, propensity scores, and predicted response) and can make this data available for use in dynamic queries, segments, or campaign rules. A few vendors also support self-service data transformations, which means you can structure their database how you need to in order to onboard and make usable the data you need.
- Shortlist vendors that: 1) build commerce and interactivity — like shopping carts — into email messages; 2) accomplish marketing outcomes, like automating ways to migrate detractors to promoters; and 3) upskill email teams through in-product guidance and customization.
- Expect more than obvious AI functions. The next level of AI goes beyond content creation, subject line generators, and offer recommendations to create new solutions for previously unsolvable problems.
Our research also observes a shift in vendor dominance. The stalwart players in this market (some of whom repped in that 2004 report!) have ceded ground to newer, faster technologies that show more energy toward what is next than what has been. Since 2023, Oracle has opted out of our marketing technology research, including our request to participate in our email marketing landscape, and longtime strong options Salesforce and Epsilon both declined to participate in this Wave evaluation.
For the specifics on which companies did participate in this evaluation and how their capabilities compare, please access the full study and book a guidance session with me to discuss. I can also help you draft an RFP or narrow down your list of finalists.
