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Market Guide for Email MarketingPublished: 30 November 2015

Analyst(s): Julie Hopkins, Adam Sarner

Email marketing offers one of the most efficient, effective and measurableways to connect with customers, making it a priority for multichannelmarketers. Gartner's guide discusses current market dynamics, and wheremarketers can go to execute or optimize their email campaigns.

Key Findings■ Email marketing is scalable, cost-effective, spurs demand generation, promotes brand

engagement, drives digital commerce and aids in customer retention.

■ The discipline of email marketing is mature, but the rise in mobile interactions, the increase inmessages sent by marketers, the priority placed on real-time interactions, and increasingexpectations by consumers to receive personalized interactions and content is forcing emailmarketers to evolve their craft in order to get their emails opened.

■ Marketers often decide to change email service providers (ESPs) in hopes that a vendor changewill propel them to the next level of email marketing success.

■ As marketers attempt to rationalize down to fewer tools, independent email marketing providersand multichannel campaign management solution providers are investing in their emailmarketing capabilities, hoping to retain or grow their footprint in the organization.

Recommendations■ Assess how effectively email is being used in the marketing mix. Consider how strategies must

shift based on changes in consumer behavior, or email performance, and which commonlyapplied best-practice techniques (such as responsive design, A/B testing, event triggering,personalization and dynamic content) are, or are not, being used as part of ongoing operations.

■ Look across the organization to see if additional groups are leveraging other providers insupport of different objectives. Consider opportunities to unify email practices under onevendor.

■ What was once deemed to require a change in ESP can often be adequately accomplishedwithin your campaign management tools alone, or with an additional optimization tool. Exploreunused functionality from your current vendor, or bring in an additional partner on top of your

ESP (send-time optimization, predictive content tools) before you decide to part ways with anemail marketing provider.

Market DefinitionEmail marketing is the use of the email channel as a method to deliver marketing messages. Emailcan be used to send brand newsletters, as well as more targeted, contextually relevant, real timeand personalized communications in support of touchpoints throughout the customer life cycle.Transactional email messages can also cross over into email marketing programs to the extent thataccount statements, for example, include promotions or offers based on customer insights.

Market DirectionIn the previous edition of this report, we commented that "batch and blast" messaging were behindus, and that a new generation of email marketing is rising in its place. Email marketing incorporatesmore of what is known behaviorally and demographically about the customer, is more reflective ofthe customer relationship, and more predictive of where the relationship will go, deployed toconnect to specific moments in the customer experience. Despite its sophistication, emailcampaigns can be deployed cost-effectively in a way that drives measurable action.

Email marketers are turning their attention to making this a reality, and are putting additional budgetbehind their email programs. Email budgets remain fixed year over year, with 10% of the marketingbudget being devoted to email in 2014 and 2015 (see "CMO Spend Survey 2015-2016: DigitalMarketing Comes of Age"). But, with marketing budgets overall increasing 10%, this translates toadditional total funding being directed to email programs.

This budget is best deployed in helping marketers facilitate better customer experiences throughemail. In our 2015 survey of multichannel marketers, we learned that multichannel marketers aredoubling their investment priority in event-triggered marketing over the next two years (seeMultichannel Marketing Survey Results 2015: Marketers Double Down on Real-Time Strategies").Event-triggering tactics are likely seen as a baseline methodology for planning and executing real-time, personalized multichannel marketing. And while this includes execution across multipleaddressable channels, we know email is one of the first stops on the road to real-time interactions.

Vendor models reflect the shift toward more real-time, triggered interactions, with more providersoffering database-size pricing to accommodate a marketer's needs for volume flexibility. To theextent that marketers wish to respond to triggers, and to the extent that those triggers areimperfectly estimated, database-size pricing is valuable (and says to the marketer, "Send what youwish to this customer — it's covered"). While vendor adoption of this pricing model is inconsistent,pricing flexibility is certainly more common across vendors, and more pricing models are availableacross the breadth of the category.

Marketers today are thus seeking providers that can help them reach their goal of real-time,targeted, personalized-beyond-segment stream of email communications. This search lends manyto believe that a new provider relationship is in order. Inquiries from clients seeking new providers

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rarely cite functional requirements that cannot be met by many providers (including their existingpartner), nor do they always indicate a failure to deliver (though some do). Rather, a new provider isseen as a way to breathe new life into, or extend, an existing email marketing program. When emailmarketing hits a perceived ceiling, a new provider is often seen as the fix.

While this is certainly one way of moving the needle, it is important for marketers to press onexisting providers to see what is possible — via strategic support, functionality, content providers,agencies, execution partners or optimization tools — before jumping ship. Providers like MovableInk, which offers support for dynamic content in emails, or Return Path, which not only offers fraudprotection and deliverability support, but also subject line and send-time optimization (throughpartner AudiencePoint), can help marketers improve email engagement. Persado, too, uses natural-language processing and advanced statistical algorithms to craft the language most likely to convert(in subject lines or body copy). Investment in these, or other, email tools can accelerate existingprograms in a more cost-effective and efficient manner than selecting a new vendor.

Similarly, as more campaign management providers invest more deeply in email capabilities (forexample, Adobe), the need to look to other ESPs for better email support declines. The functionalinvestments being made by current providers mean that optimizations are "closer than they appear,"and that email programs could be improved without ripping out and replacing a current vendorsolution.

Still, there are reasons to replace an existing email solutions, and so many (if not most) emailmarketing deals are vendor replacements. However, new deals still exist, as every growingorganization, in time, realizes the need for email marketing support. Providers exist for every budget,business model, list size, send requirement, scale and level of individualization. For this reason,marketers are advised to examine closely the kind of support they will need to get up and running,the kind of data they'd like to use to target their campaigns, the requirements they may have for on-premises support, their ambitions for expanding capabilities to support other channels orautomation, and what kind of resources they can devote to their program long term.

The renewed focus on email is likely to bring another wave of consolidation to the market.Campaign management providers deciding to invest in more competitive email capabilities mayorganically grow their capabilities to keep their customers from shopping elsewhere for additionalemail support. They may, alternatively, choose to acquire enhanced capabilities, as we saw withcampaign management vendor's Selligent move to combine forces with email marketing providerStrongView.

Buyers in this market would be wise to remember that, while new tools come with fresh starts, youmay already have capabilities that you aren't taking advantage of. Work with your current provider,and its network of partners, to assess whether there are tactics that could accelerate your program.If your vendor relationship is destined to end, a range of well-equipped providers is available tohelp.

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Market AnalysisEmail marketing providers number well into the triple digits, but generally fall into one of thecategories listed in Table 1. Because providers often support a range of clients, they could logicallyfit into more than one category. For example, one vendor may serve large enterprise clients, but themajority of their revenue may still come from the small and midsize business segment. This high-level look at the market offers a starting point for consideration.

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Table 1. Email Marketing Provider Landscape

Vendor Type Great for Less Great for Trends Sample Vendors

Small andMidsizeBusiness(SMB)

■ Lower-volumeprograms

■ Small andmidsizebusinesses,divisions oflargerorganizations

■ Sendingtemplatedcommunications,often innewsletterformat

■ Email marketerscapable of self-help,comfortable withmanaging lists orsegmentsseparately

■ Getting up andrunning quickly(can start online,pay online)

■ Programsseekingassistancefor ongoingpartnership(for agency-likemanagementor otherstrategic orexecutionneeds)

■ Programsseekingfunctionalityand ongoingdevelopment(supportingautomation,integration,or campaigncreation andexecution)aligned withenterprise-scaledeploymentsandrequirements

■ Increasinglysupportinginteractionsacrosssocial,mobile(SMS)

■ Moreautomationcapabilities

■ Increasedintegrationcapabilities

■ MailChimp

■ ConstantContact

Midtier/Niche/EnterpriseIndependent

■ Organizationsseekingenterprisecapabilities(scale,segmentation,execution), butwith a focus onemail or othermessagingcapabilities

■ Richer analytics,insight

■ Organizationslimited tofreemiumbudgets

■ Organizationswhose needswill quicklyoutscalemidmarketproviders, orwill requirebreadthextending

■ "Fastfollower"execution

■ Movingtowardmore-robustcampaigncapabilities

■ ContactLab

■ dotmailer

■ MarketoDialog Edition

■ Sailthru

■ MessageGears

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Vendor Type Great for Less Great for Trends Sample Vendors

■ More robust andsometimes morespecific, or nichefunctional needs(e.g., supportingcommerce-centric emailprograms,geographicsupport,transactionalmessage)

■ Healthy, but stilllimited budgets

beyond nicheproviderstrengths

Enterprise/MultichannelCampaignManagementVendor/MarketingCloud

■ Organizationswhere effectiveemail is mission-critical forbusiness model

■ High-volumesenders,enabling"segments ofone," throughdata-driven,automated,complex cross-channelcampaignworkflows

■ Mission-criticalservice-levelagreements

■ Organizationsthat require ahigh degree ofcustomization ofthe solution, andsignificant data,systemintegration

■ Clients whereother parts of

■ Smallerorganizationsthat fear theirneeds couldbe lostamong largerclients

■ Organizationsleveragingonly a portionof providercapabilities

■ Small lists,which cantranslate tohigher CPM(thus highercosts)

■ More likelypart ofmultichannelcampaignmanagementsolution, orsupport forcross-channeloptimization

■ Advancedfunctionality,evenoutpacingcustomerneeds

■ More focusonintegrating,activatingdata formore-personalizedcontent

■ Acxiom

■ Epsilon

■ SalesforceMarketingCloud

■ OracleResponsys

■ StrongView

■ SparkPost

■ Experian

■ Adobe

■ IBM (IBMMarketingCloud)

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Vendor Type Great for Less Great for Trends Sample Vendors

the cloudsolution are inplace (presentingpossiblecontract,integrationadvantages)

CPM = cost per mille

Source: Gartner (November 2015)

Organizations seeking email marketing solutions usually gravitate to one or perhaps two categoriesof providers quickly, so it helps to frame your email marketing needs in advance. Table 2 includessome features and dimensions where providers can differ from one another. Understanding yourneeds in these areas and comparing them with provider capabilities can aid in the solution selectionprocess.

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Table 2. Email Marketing Features

Capability Understand

Scalability High-volume message support can differ. At the high end of volume, clients may send more thanone billion emails per year. While many providers can handle high-volume clients (even SMBproviders may send billions of emails a month on behalf of clients), high-volume periods(regardless of total volume), or high-volume personalizations, may impact vendor selection, oreven the preferred cost model (e.g., database-size pricing). Conversely, low message volumes maymake free or very low-cost solutions a possibility.

Mobile EmailSupport

Most vendors featured here offer responsive templates, as well as mobile tools to help emailmarketers monitor or manage campaigns on the go. A smaller set, but still the majority, will helpmarketers see how messages will render on different mobile operating systems or devices. Mobileanalytics capabilities indicate which mobile operating system was used to open/view a message.

Ease of Use,Design Support

Vendors can offer drag-and-drop interfaces for campaign design, as well as easy-to-use editors forcreating messages, surveys, landing pages or other content connected to email interactions.Some vendors offer the ability to build or approve campaigns via a mobile app. If needed, a subsetof vendors offers a full range of professional services (including agency services), from designthrough measurement and optimization.

Testing Vendors vary in the number of variables that can be tested (limited to unlimited), the number oftests on a message that can be run simultaneously, and the automation of the test group andwinner selection process.

DeploymentModel

Understand whether the solution can be deployed on-premises, or only via SaaS. If on-premises isrequired, the list of potential providers will shrink. Some vendors, recognizing the tension, may alsoallow for hybrid rollouts — some data and software is maintained on-premises, while messagedelivery is supported in the cloud.

TransactionalEmail Support

Vendors have a range of experience and capability in supporting transactional emails, or evensome real-time triggered communications.

Data Storage A few vendors offer unlimited data storage for emailers integrating customer data, behavioral data,transactional data and third-party data into their solution for targeted communications.

Pricing Model Email or messaging solutions can be priced on a CPM basis, or alternatively, on database size(usually unlimited messaging against a list of a given size). Message bundle pricing is also offeredby some providers — which resembles CPM pricing — but messages are often able to beallocated across different message formats (e.g., email vs. SMS).Database-size pricing allows for more flexibility in determining how frequently customers will becontacted; event triggers can be more flexibly supported with a clear understanding of costs, but aclear understanding of database size is required.CPM pricing has more historical usage, thus clients may be more comfortable with the prices thatare quoted; they also have likely learned to manage budget overages accordingly. More vendorsincreasingly offer both options.In rare occasions, you may also find performance-based pricing, where compensation is tied tomeeting of performance benchmarks (conversions or similar).

Integrations Email solutions come with prebuilt integrations into certain key systems (e.g., commercesolutions), or are integrated with other cross-channel marketing solutions.

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Capability Understand

Services andSupport

Vendors offer a range of onboarding or execution services (e.g., deliverability optimization) throughto complete agency services (email strategy, design, execution and reporting). Support modelsand costs may vary.

Source: Gartner (November 2015)

Consumer digital distraction is undeniable, especially as email volumes rise. The challenge tomarketers is to find a partner that can offer the features, functions and services necessary to helpthem cut through the noise and connect meaningfully with their target. Consider what will make thedifference for your organization. The providers listed in this report can support marketers seeking arange of capabilities.

Representative VendorsThe vendors listed in this Market Guide do not imply an exhaustive list. This section is intended toprovide more understanding of the market and its offerings.

The following profiles represent providers that digital marketing clients reference or inquire aboutmost frequently and that represent a range of options for customers in the market. Capabilities thatdifferentiate them from one another, and that indicate their areas of focus or upcoming investment,are discussed here.

Acxiom

www.acxiom.com

Background: Publicly traded (Nasdaq: ACXM); headquartered in Little Rock, Arkansas; more than5,000 employees (more than 250 dedicated to email marketing worldwide).

Product: Acxiom Impact

Overview: Acxiom Impact offers email and cross-channel marketing services to enterprisemarketers. Acxiom is known for its data management capabilities, including marketing databaseservices, data integration (recognition), as well as connecting data from offline to online and to themarketing ecosystem. Thus, Acxiom focuses on data-driven marketing techniques that allowmarketers to integrate data for greater insight, personalization and contextualization. Data-centeredcapabilities assist marketers, not only in the creation of more individualized campaigns, but in theinsights that data-enhanced reporting and analysis can generate. Acxiom's 2014 acquisition of dataonboarding provider LiveRamp extends email audience data and performance insights into otherchannel executions (such as sharing of audience data of insight for ad targeting).

Acxiom's focus on data privacy can make it a good fit for clients where this is a concern. Acxiomalso offers full agency support for clients that require these capabilities. For this reason — data

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focus, and the strategy, design and execution support it offers — Acxiom most often competes withother providers whose competitive differentiators surround data and services.

Acxiom Impact competes, but also cooperates with others in this report, notably Salesforce, forwhich it is a reseller, and by which it was named "Salesforce Marketing Cloud Partner of the Year" in2015. To that end, several of Acxiom's leading clients also leverage Salesforce Marketing Cloud toexecute their email programs.

Customer or Industry Focus: Global enterprise clients, primarily in the retail, financial services,telecommunications, media, travel, automotive and publishing verticals.

Sample Customers: L'Oreal, HP Inc. and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (with Salesforce), CenturyLink.

Deployment Options: SaaS

Pricing: CPM-based

Adobe

www.adobe.com

Background: Publicly traded (Nasdaq: ADBE); headquartered in San Jose, California; more than13,000 employees. Profitable.

Product: Adobe Campaign Standard

Overview: Adobe is hardly new to helping marketers create and deliver email as part of theircampaigns. Adobe Campaign is a leader in the campaign management space, thus delivering emailthrough the campaign management tool to Adobe Campaign users. (Approximately 98% of AdobeCampaign customers power email with Adobe Campaign.) Despite this, Adobe has not typicallybeen purchased for stand-alone email programs. Email's maturation, importance, and recent re-emphasis prompted Adobe to turn its focus to the email marketer delivering a solution and servicesfor its specific objectives.

The Adobe Campaign Standard offering was officially launched in March 2015 and is tailored foremail marketers. Adobe is emphasizing its account management and services approach to movemarketers not yet capitalizing on email's sophistication. The Adobe email maturity model helpsmarketers understand where they're underleveraging email capabilities; dedicated account supporthelps them deploy more progressive techniques. Adobe Campaign Standard is designed to appealto the user who may not be leveraging a campaign management tool, or who may be usingsomething else, but wishes to use Adobe's email interface and capabilities for distributing email andpotentially expanding to other channels.

Customer or Industry Focus: Primarily midmarket to enterprise clients, across retail, consumerpackaged goods (CPG), financial services, telecommunications, media and entertainment, hightech, and Travel, and Leisure and the hospitality industries. Clients are based in North America andEMEA, reflecting Adobe Campaign's European heritage.

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Sample Customers: The Container Store, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, L'Occitane, C SpireWireless.

Deployment Options: SaaS

Pricing: Price is based on number of active profiles in the database.

Constant Contact

www.constantcontact.com

Background: Publicly traded (Nasdaq: CTCT); headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts; morethan 1,400 employees. On 2 November 2015, it was announced Constant Contact would beacquired by Endurance International Group, an SMB Web hosting company, for $1.1 billion. Thedeal is expected to close in 1Q16.

Product: Constant Contact email marketing

Overview: Constant Contact offers its do-it-yourself email marketing tool (available also as part ofan all-in-one digital marketing platform) to SMB clients. It is designed to be accessible enough thatbusy business owners can get up and running and communicating with their customers or clientsquickly. Constant Contact email marketing can also be found supporting larger organizations,divisions of larger organizations, as well as franchise operations, though deployment in theseinstances is more likely to resemble a small business deployment (newsletter-based sent to smallerlists using limited automation).

While small businesses and nonprofits may not require all functionality of a larger enterprise, emailtrends affect all of its customers in the same way. Therefore, Constant Contact has adopted amobile-first approach, giving its customers mobile-responsive templates, ensuring that SMB emailsare as mobile-friendly as enterprise brand emails. A new app that allows Constant Contactcustomers to create, edit, send and track email campaigns from their mobile device supports theon-the-go business manager. And using Constant Contact's access to data gathered across thecompany's more than 650,000 customers, Constant Contact is now offering insights into how tooptimize its emails (such as when to send based on engagement attributes).

Customer or Industry Focus: Constant Contact targets SMBs and nonprofits, primarily in NorthAmerica and the U.K. Customers are spread across the B2C, B2B and nonprofit sectors, and arefrom the retail, education, sports and recreation, manufacturing and distribution, and professionalservices industries, among others. A 60-day free trial is available.

Sample Customers: Currier Museum of Art, Dudley & Nunez Communications, Ground Round Grill &Bar, Servpro, Treetop Yoga Studio.

Deployment Options: SaaS

Pricing: Based on customer list size

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ContactLab

www.contactlab.com

Background: Privately held; headquartered in Milan, Italy; over 140 employees.

Product: ContactLab

Overview: ContactLab is an integrated managed marketing services provider, serving global clientsas they work to tailor messages to their local audiences. ContactLab offers a multichannel digitaldirect engagement platform, integrating email, text messaging and push notification support, alongwith marketing and data discovery services, packaged with industry-specific messagingmethodologies as part of its communications suite.

In the past 12 months, ContactLab has introduced a new user interface, configurable dashboards,responsive preview capabilities, and connections to Facebook custom audiences, allowingcustomers to extend email audience insights to other channels. ContactHub is the company's newsolution that enriches audience profiles with customer attributes, including behavioral, professionaland preference data, allowing for better targeting and personalization. A key differentiator wasContactLab's introduction of its retail clienteling message system, enabling store managers andshopping assistants direct messaging to customers with corporate branded/permissioned workflow.

ContactLab's roadmap reflects its focus on the retail user base, as investment will concentrate onextending customer insights and capabilities that further connect online and offline channel activity.ContactLab is also investing in campaign management features that will allow it to support theentire customer experience, across online channels and into offline support.

Customer or Industry Focus: ContactLab serves all sizes of global clients, with increased traction inAsia. It has expertise within the fashion/retail (specifically the luxury goods segment) and consumergoods segments, but also serves clients in the travel, leisure and hospitality, financial services, not-for-profit, and media and telecommunications categories.

Sample Customers: Bally (JAB Holding Company), Costa Crociere, Nestlé Italia, Original Marines.

Deployment Options: Platform as a service

Pricing: ContactLab is sold on a CPM basis. Free trials are available for prospects.

dotmailer

www.dotmailer.com

Background: Dotmailer is part of dotDigital Group, which is publicly traded (LON: DOTD);headquartered in London; more than 100 employees.

Product: dotmailer

Overview: Established in the U.K. in 1999, dotmailer initially emphasized full-service digital agencycapabilities. In recent years, however, dotmailer has wound down its agency's offerings, keeping

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much of dotmailer's same talent, but focusing on offering email marketing capabilities to clients.Dotmailer describes its most recent progress in the email market as taking the organization "fromstartup to grownup," commensurate with its development of more advanced email marketingfeatures.

Dotmailer offers a core email marketing automation platform that then can be extended to supportadditional digital activity such as lead scoring, form creation, or landing page development,leveraging the style of an existing piece of digital content. In the past year, dotmailer has alsoexpanded its ability to help clients — often midtier commerce organizations — send morepersonalized communications. Dotmailer's new Insight feature allows clients to connect to more oftheir dataset (behavioral, supply chain, and digital engagement data, as well as offline and onlinetransaction history), to support more robust segmentation and content personalization. The samedata feeds also enable improved lead scoring capabilities.

Dotmailer's new Channel Extensions technology allows clients to extend automation to call externalsystems during the email automation process, extending their event-triggering capabilities(triggering of emails, creation of lead records or sales tasks). These capabilities also enableadditional transactional message support, which is new to the platform this year (email has beenlargely marketing email to date).

Customer or Industry Focus: Strong presence with small and midsize businesses in the U.K. andU.S., with traction primarily in the retail, travel and tourism, and fashion sectors.

Sample Customers: TUI Group, Odeon, DHL Express Americas, Danone Nutricia, Cabbages &Roses.

Deployment Options: SaaS

Pricing: Initial license fee, with messages charged based on monthly bundles of messages sent(essentially CPM).

Epsilon

www.epsilon.com and www.agilityharmony.com

Background: Epsilon is part of Alliance Data (NYSE: ADS), which is publicly traded; headquarteredin Irving, Texas; email marketing team has more than 500 employees.

Product: Epsilon Agility Harmony

Overview: Epsilon, a global marketing services organization, provides marketing solutions thatintegrate creative data and technology to provide engaging customer experiences. Epsilon's role asservice provider means it often partners with, or resells, other products in this report. Epsiloncompetes directly, however, through Agility Harmony. Agility Harmony (Harmony) remains a relativelynew cloud-based solution that was created with a multichannel, data-driven strategy in mind, withcapabilities for social, mobile and big data marketing. Clients typically seek Epsilon for marketing-related emails, though the company also supports a strong base of transactional emailers.

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In the past 12 months, Epsilon's notable changes include the launch of Harmony Live, whichprovides dynamic content based on time, place, device and behavior each time an email is opened.Customizable widgets allow marketers to drop in changing content, including live video,geotargeted weather in real time, and animated GIFs with lighting, fade and zoom effects to improvecall to action. Epsilon SocialEffect gives cross-channel learnings, identification and scoring of socialinfluential consumers through a partnership with Klout and its own Epsilon Response network.Finally, Epsilon's acquisition of Conversant scales its ad management capabilities like displayadvertising, and brings its own mobile ad network.

The Agility Harmony roadmap includes capabilities around real-time customer data discovery,bringing in areas like response, engagement and demographic data to identify segments of interestfor the development of remarketing programs.

Customer or Industry Focus: Epsilon targets enterprise clients across several vertical markets,including retail, consumer packaged goods, travel and hospitality, financial services,pharmaceuticals/healthcare, telecommunications, technology/B2B, publishing and automotive.

Sample Customers: Envision, Toys "R" Us, Aspen Dental.

Deployment Options: SaaS

Pricing: CPM based on volume and services required. Clients typically sign five-year agreementswith Epsilon; contracts can roll up into broader service agreements for other Epsilon services/solutions.

Experian

www.experian.com

Background: Public company (LON: EXPN); headquartered in Dublin, Ireland; more than 17,000employees in 40 countries worldwide.

Product: Experian Marketing Suite

Overview: The Experian Marketing Suite was launched in its current form in 2014; it was previouslyin market as the Experian cross-channel marketing platform (CCMP), built from the combination ofthe Conversen (acquired in 2012), and CheetahMail (acquired in 2004, and still well-recognized inthe market, despite the length of time since the acquisition). The Experian Marketing Suite offersthree separate, integrated components: the Identity Manager, the Intelligence Manager and theInteractions Manager. The components can be delivered as stand-alone offerings, or together aspart of a suite; email marketing requires investment in the Interactions Manager and the IntelligenceManager. The Identity Manager is not mandatory, but for data quality and data linkage, it isbeneficial.

The Experian Marketing Suite's 2015 evolution is marked not only by renewed product marketingand positioning, but by product enhancements as well, though much of it will benefit customersinvesting in broader campaign management capabilities (for example, investments in socialaudience retargeting). Email marketers partnering with Experian will benefit from investments in UI/

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user experience (UX) enhancements and in distributed marketing templates (to supportdecentralized or franchise marketers looking to simplify and distribute email capabilities, butcentrally manage calendaring and brand representation). Investment in data and analyticscapabilities — improving marketing and audience analytics related to email campaigns — alsobenefit the email marketer.

Customer or Industry Focus: Experian Marketing Services targets midmarket and enterprisecustomers globally, especially those described as "data-centric," which likely leverage Experiandata products in support of their marketing emails. Industry strength is in retail, financial services,media/entertainment/publishing, travel and hospitality, and healthcare verticals.

Sample Customers: Delta Airlines, Williams-Sonoma, Citibank, SiriusXM Partners.

Deployment Options: SaaS

Pricing: Annual license, with messaging fees. CPM rates vary by volume tiers.

IBM (IBM Marketing Cloud)

www.ibmmarketingcloud.com

Background: Acquired by IBM (NYSE: IBM) in April 2014; IBM is headquartered in Armonk, NewYork; about 400,000 employees.

Product: IBM Marketing Cloud

Overview: IBM acquired Silverpop in 2Q14. The acquisition gave IBM a SaaS offering for campaignmanagement, focusing largely on email marketing and other digital-focused channels. Silverpopgained access to existing IBM marketing customers, increased deal presence, thanks to the IBMsalesforce, and renewed investment in R&D as IBM looked to build out its messaging and SaaScampaign management capabilities. The product now goes to market as IBM Marketing Cloud.

Over the past 12 months, IBM released three new capabilities that demonstrate the company'sfocus on supporting a connected, cross-channel customer journey. IBM Journey Designer is avirtual whiteboard where practitioners on multiple teams within an organization can collaborate witha single view of a customer's journey. Drag-and-drop design helps plan and design campaignsbased on insights learned over time to deliver more relevant engagement. Journey Designer isavailable free of charge to any client (even non-IBM ones).

IBM's Universal Behavior Exchange provides a flow of customer behavior, profile and segment datain real time between any two applications, from IBM or certified partners. Content Builder in the IBMMarketing Cloud allows marketers to build, test and view email communications. Marketers canbuild dynamic and responsive communications with configurable canvas, view real-time side-by-side previews in multiple devices, and use the hyperlink manager to get real-time hyperlinkvalidation services directly within the content building process.

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Customer or Industry Focus: IBM Marketing Cloud clients are midmarket and enterprise; themajority are based in North America, although they also have the ability to serve small business andenterprise clients. Experience has clustered in advertising and marketing services (for example,agencies), retail, business services, media, financial services, and technology.

Sample Customers: Moosejaw, LifeShield, 1-800-Got-Junk.

Deployment Options: SaaS

Pricing: Multiple editions offered, based on marketing interaction volumes or contacts.

MailChimp

www.mailchimp.com

Background: Privately held; headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia; more than 450 employees.

Product: MailChimp

Overview: MailChimp targets small businesses with their email marketing services, offering do-it-yourself email capabilities that marketers can leverage the same day they create an account.However, MailChimp's DIY capabilities should not be translated as "light," as MailChimp offersautomation capabilities for email marketers, as well as the ability to leverage custom integrations,which can support, for example, commerce clients seeking support for transactional emailstriggered based on purchase data. Other capabilities often found in enterprise solutions, such as theability to select an audience based on email engagement and share them with a social network forad targeting, are also supported by MailChimp.

MailChimp's recent investments have focused on improvements to its automation capabilities, aswell as the build-out of MailChimp Pro features (such as multivariate testing and comparative reportenhancements for content and program optimization), and the launch of a new version of its API.With these improvements, and the insights MailChimp can offer based on the volume of emails itsends — for example, MailChimp's send optimization feature takes into account email engagementhistory from nine million customers' send data — MailChimp has the ability to compete feature-wisewith some midtier or enterprise vendor capabilities. MailChimp is focused on the needs of the smallbusiness; however, making sure that individuals who seek to build their own solution have all thefunctionality needed to create rich programs.

Customer or Industry Focus: MailChimp targets small businesses — many in e-commerce — acrossthe globe (more than half of MailChimp's revenue comes from outside the U.S., with strength inEurope, Asia and South America).

Sample Customers: New York Times Store, Hootsuite, Need Supply, Yeti.

Deployment Options: SaaS

Pricing: CPM model (based on emails sent), monthly as well as "pay as you go."

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Marketo

www.marketo.com

Background: Publicly traded (Nasdaq: MKTO); headquartered in San Mateo, California; more than500 employees.

Product: Marketo Consumer Engagement Marketing

Overview: Marketo is recognized as a leader in multichannel lead management with applicationsdesigned for the B2B marketer. In late 2013, Marketo entered the multichannel campaignmanagement space with the launch of Marketo's Consumer Engagement Marketing suite. As part ofthe suite, Dialog Edition was introduced as its B2C-focused email solution, designed to meet theneeds of marketers who need support for more behaviorally driven, context-appropriate emailcampaigns.

Notable additions in the past 12 months included the product launch of Marketo Moments, aMarketo app enabling marketers to see marketing performance in real time on iOS or Android. Anod to Marketo's cross-channel focus, and the need to support campaigns that span email andmobile, Mobile Marketing Engagement natively adds mobile applications to Marketo ConsumerEngagement Marketing. In addition, Ad Bridge introduces ad continuity across Facebook, Twitter,LinkedIn and Google, based on audience and engagement insight from email and other channels.The product roadmap reflects Marketo's cross-channel focus; content analytics will help predictcontent performance in one channel, based on content success in other channels.

Customer or Industry Focus: Primarily midsize and large companies across the B2B and B2Cspace, serving the technology, business services, financial services and education sectors.

Sample Customers: MyFitnessPal, Auction.com, James Hardie.

Deployment Options: SaaS

Pricing Information: Database-size pricing

MessageGears

www.messagegears.com

Background: Privately held; headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia; less than 50 employees.

Product: MessageGears

Overview: MessageGears is one of a small number of providers that offers a hybrid platform in thatthe solution is built on a mix of hosted and on-premises delivery. In the MessageGears' hybridmodel, the marketing application is installed on-premises, and the message rendering and deliveryis handled in the MessageGears cloud, offering a deliverability advantage akin to SaaS providers. Allcustomer data remains on-premises. MessageGears believes that this allows marketers to use all of

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their data in the systems where the data resides (and is thus most current and up-to-date), alsosaving storage costs that would otherwise be passed on to its customers.

MessageGears is a newer offering, and therefore some enterprise functionality is still evolving (suchas the ability to modify campaigns in flight, enhanced analytics capabilities, and an SMS offering[new, but under enhancement]). However, for organizations that may begin their shopping by lookingfor on-premises solutions, and for which data security concerns are at the forefront (for example,financial services organizations), but recognize that certain functionality can live in the cloud, thehybrid model offers a compelling alternative.

Customer or Industry Focus: Customers are evenly distributed between midtier and enterpriseclients.

Sample Customers: Expedia, ClickDimensions, GEICO, Runkeeper, Musictoday.

Deployment Options: Hybrid (SaaS and on-premises)

Pricing: CPM model. MessageGears also offers an "all you can eat" unlimited email volume modelfor a fixed monthly fee, based on a specific hourly throughput.

Oracle (Responsys)

www.responsys.com

Background: Publicly held (Nasdaq: ORCL); headquartered in Redwood Shores, California; morethan 100,000 employees worldwide.

Product: Oracle Responsys

Overview: Responsys was founded in 1998, and until 2013, was an independent provider of emailmarketing, mobile messaging, display retargeting, and social marketing solutions for orchestratedmarketing and relationship management on the Web. Responsys offered one of the missing piecesin the Oracle Marketing Cloud strategy — support for complex, high-volume B2C marketing andemail campaigns — and was acquired in December of that year.

Emailers will benefit from recent multivariate testing enhancements. A/B and multivariate tests canbe configured to evaluate creative designs, subject line, message content, message cadence,message frequency, message sequence, and/or channel. Tests not only can be within a campaign(for example, Subject Line A versus B), but also be among branches of an orchestration (forexample, sequence of Messages A versus B). Finally, send-time optimization is added to theproduct with techniques for learning the best time to deliver email messages to individualcustomers on each day, down to the hour.

Emailers invested — or those planning to invest — in other Oracle assets will also benefit fromintegrations completed in the past 12 months: Oracle Data Management Platform (for look-aliketargeting), Oracle Content Marketing, Oracle Commerce, Oracle Social Relationship Management,Oracle Datalogix and Siebel. Additional investment surrounded the packaging of retargeting

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capabilities. For example, Rapid Retargeter enables marketers to re-engage clients/customers/prospects in near real time from website, cart and transaction abandonment.

Customer or Industry Focus: Responsys has experience across industries and geographies; clientsare mostly large enterprises, but also include small enterprises, where an emphasis is placed ondirect-to-consumer communications.

Sample Customers: L.L. Bean, J.Crew, Nordstrom, JetBlue, E*Trade.

Deployment Options: SaaS

Pricing: CPM, per user pricing available.

Salesforce (ExactTarget)

www.salesforce.com

Background: Publicly traded (NYSE: CRM); headquartered in San Francisco; more than 16,000employees.

Product: Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Overview: Salesforce Marketing Cloud's email capabilities were built from the acquisition ofExactTarget in 2013; email-specific features have continued to evolve since the acquisition. TheSalesforce Marketing Cloud offers robust capabilities that are leveraged by marketers who aresupporting time-sensitive, high-volume, email-centric marketing campaigns. Based on the clientsserved, and the volume of emails sent, Salesforce is among the leaders of total marketing emailssent annually. Recognizing the way these volumes can flex during busy periods, Salesforcemaintains excess server capacity to support significant communication bursts.

Functionally, Salesforce Marketing Cloud offers advanced features sought by advanced marketerswho are working to personalize content across large customer databases, referencing vast contentoptions (such as a retail client supporting a high volume of SKUs) that are customized based on anumber of transactional and behavioral factors. Salesforce has invested in its Predictive Intelligenceproduct (including A/B message testing products and predictive audience tools), and its JourneyBuilder product that will make it easier for marketers to target the right audience, with the rightcontent, and to optimize performance prior to send. Risk of mistargeting or incorrectly displayingcontent is managed through subscriber level preview.

Streamlined workflow tools and recent investment in the UI and the email creation process makeemail design easier and more efficient. Speed of the interface has also improved, meaningcampaigns can be developed more quickly.

Customer or Industry Focus: Primarily enterprise clients across all vertical industries andgeographies. Salesforce does support small and midsize clients, though these buyers should takecare not to overinvest for their needs. Clients use Salesforce largely for marketing email, although itis able to support transactional email service-level agreements as well.

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Sample Customers: Mattel, Room & Board, DonorsChoose.org.

Deployment Options: SaaS

Pricing: Edition pricing, which includes fixed volume of messages.

Sailthru

www.sailthru.com

Background: Privately held; headquartered in New York; more than 100 employees.

Product: Sailthru

Overview: Sailthru offers email marketing support, largely to e-commerce and media and publishingclients. Sailthru touts its approach to personalization — done via algorithm, not via rules, andapplicable to every element of the message — as offering email marketers a unique approach todelivering messages to a "segment of one." With personalization, Sailthru proposes, comesimproved campaign performance; to that end, Sailthru is willing to "put its money where itsmessage is" via performance-based pricing.

The launch of Sailthru Sightlines in 2015 adds predictive analytics capabilities to the Sailthruproduct set; clients can now benefit from out-of-the-box predictions such as probable open, click,opt-out rate and page view. Commerce clients will benefit from probability of purchase andexpected purchase value indicators.

Sailthru's focus on the "stalled" email marketer in their target categories is compelling for clientscoming from other enterprise or midmarket providers. Sailthru notes the gap between the goals thathigh-volume emailers state — more automation, personalization, use of dynamic content, predictiveanalytics — and the roadmaps they have in place (which frequently lack the intent to bring thesecapabilities to life). Sailthru measures the percentage of clients currently underusing thesecapabilities (approximately one-third), and are working with these customers to incorporate featureslike dynamic content into their programs, as this can increase email-driven purchase conversions.

Customer or Industry Focus: Primarily enterprise clients across e-commerce and media andpublishing. Clients are largely midmarket, and are based in North America and Europe.

Sample Customers: Business Insider, The Clymb, JustFab, The Economist.

Deployment Options: SaaS

Pricing: CPM-based, as well as by module. Performance-based pricing (for example, based on lift incustomer lifetime value or email attributable revenue) is also available.

SparkPost

www.sparkpost.com

Background: Privately held; headquartered in Columbia, Maryland; more than 150 employees.

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Products: SparkPost, SparkPost Elite

Overview: SparkPost may not be as widely known to marketers as the other providers in thisdocument, but email powered by SparkPost is likely present in most marketers' inboxes.

SparkPost's SaaS and on-premises software sends over three trillion messages annually,accounting for more than 25% of the world's legitimate email. Much of what it sends, however,would be considered transactional or triggered messaging by many marketers. For example,SparkPost is responsible for sending notifications from platforms like Facebook, Pinterest orLinkedIn, or search updates from Zillow. SparkPost is able to deliver messages at a cost-effectiverate, with high deliverability, even into geographies where message delivery can be unpredictablethrough its Adaptive Email Network (for example, China and Russia), making it appealing for manymarketers.

SparkPost is addressing marketers' needs based on its high-volume delivery expertise, and is abest fit for marketers wishing to create an "in-house ESP." SparkPost was built as an on-premisesprovider, but has moved to add a SaaS delivery model over the past year, reflecting demand fromclients, and prompting the rebranding (from Message Systems) and repackaging of its offering.

SparkPost is almost best thought of as a messaging company — clients can send integratedmessages via any protocol — email, SMS, push — even set-top box (TV) messages in addition tosending messages to social networks. As such, SparkPost is quick to distinguish itself from otherESPs. To that end, some of the out-of-the-box tools typically associated with ESPs (drag-and-dropinterfaces, mobile design tools, creative and design services) are not part of the SparkPost offering,nor the focus of its ongoing development. SparkPost does, however, offer front-end campaignmanagement, segmentation, and targeting GUI in its SparkPost Elite for Marketers edition thatallows marketers to plan and send communications in a more traditional sense. Metrics aredelivered native in the SparkPost UI and also available in real time via Web hooks or API calls.

Customer or Industry Focus: Enterprise clients in North America and Europe, across travel andhospitality, online retail, publishing, service providers, financial services, in support of marketing, aswell as transactional email.

Sample Customers: Zillow; CareerBuilder; Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter, Guardian Life, PayPal, Oracle,Salesforce.

Deployment Options: On-premises, as well as SaaS

Pricing: CPM (by volume of messages)

StrongView, A Selligent Company

www.strongview.com

Background: Privately held; Merged with Selligent in October 2015; U.S. headquarters are inRedwood City, California; more than 400 employees worldwide.

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Products: StrongView Message Studio, StrongView Lifecycle Marketing

Overview: StrongView offers enterprise email marketing support as part of its cross-channelcampaign management capabilities. These capabilities are destined to expand, however, based onthe October 2015 merger of StrongView with Selligent, a European-based omnichannel campaignmanagement provider. The merger expands the footprint of both providers and is a signal of whatwe are seeing in the market: campaign management tool vendors, in this case Selligent, investing inrobust email marketing capabilities as a way of protecting their turf. Doing so prevents other ESPsfrom biting off email execution, and using those inroads as a path to unseating the existingcampaign management tool. Selligent and StrongView thus both gain competitive buffering, inaddition to the geographic and feature expansion mentioned above.

StrongView's focus is on contextual marketing. Product enhancements in 2015 included the releaseof StrongView LiveContent, which makes sure that at the time of opening, the content rendered inthe message is contextually relevant to the user, based on a range of factors (location, time of day,device, product/inventory information, and so on). StrongView's roadmap reflects this focus;continued investment in its unlimited interaction data store, and real-time event processing, meanthat a user can receive a message that is optimized for them and for performance.

As noted in the prior version of this Market Guide, StrongView offers a hosted cloud solution, whichis used by the majority of its clients, as well as an on-premises deployment option; a differentiator inthe market, especially for companies that require this option.

Customer or Industry Focus: StrongView clients are high-volume senders, which are thus largelyenterprise-size clients, frequently in the retail, travel and hospitality; media, entertainment andpublishing; and financial services categories. Clients are primarily located in the U.S. and WesternEurope.

Sample Customers: Walmart, Yahoo, InterContinental Hotels Group, T. Rowe Price, Intel Security(McAfee).

Deployment Options: SaaS and on-premises

Pricing: CPM pricing, as well as profile-based pricing. Unlimited volume sending is also available.

Market Recommendations■ Evaluate your current email marketing solution to determine whether your solution aligns with

your overall email marketing and digital marketing strategy, or if you have outgrown currentdesign, execution, delivery and reporting capabilities. Explore whether there are improvementsto be made with what you send, to whom, and when, before exploring system replacement.

■ Determine whether there are other email solutions in your company or organizations that, ifbrought together into one comprehensive solution, may support all messaging and connectionneeds.

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■ Consider whether your email marketing needs will remain focused on supporting the emailchannel only, or whether you are seeking a more comprehensive campaign managementsolution, supporting engagement across more channels.

■ Explore which integrations are necessary with your email program. Integration to a givencommerce platform and enablement of common commerce communications through your emailplatform may dictate the choice of one email provider over another. Similarly, support forspecific processes, such as lead management, may indicate a vendor that could be a good orbetter fit for the organization. When selecting among identified vendors, be sure to understandemail volume and frequency requirements, because this will not only inform the functionalityneeded, but also the impact of different pricing models.

Gartner Recommended ReadingSome documents may not be available as part of your current Gartner subscription.

"Magic Quadrant for Multichannel Campaign Management"

"How to Evaluate Multichannel Campaign Management Applications"

"Guide to the Marketing Ops Neighborhood on Gartner's Marketing Transit Map"

Evidence

We based this report on briefings from and questionnaires sent to email marketing providers in 2015and on ongoing discussions with Gartner clients.

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