I’m pleased to announce “The Forrester Wave™: Cross-Channel Campaign Management (EMSS Modules), Q2 2021.” Forrester published its first evaluation of cross-channel campaign management (CCCM) vendors in 2008, and this critical martech category continues to evolve. Today’s CCCM solutions extend beyond outbound campaigns to power insights-driven marketing strategies and automate personalized customer experiences across digital and offline channels.

Concurrent with the CCCM evaluation, my colleague Joe Stanhope announced publication of “The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Marketing Software Suites, Q2 2021.” Both the CCCM and enterprise marketing software suite (EMSS) evaluations cover the same vendors: Acoustic, Adobe, Cheetah Digital, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, SAS, and Zeta Global. The EMSS evaluation compares the complete martech portfolio offerings of these eight vendors. To complement it, the CCCM evaluation provides a deep dive into each vendor’s CCCM capabilities.

Forrester defines CCCM as:

Enterprise marketing technology that supports customer data management, analytics, segmentation, and workflow tools for designing, executing, and measuring campaigns for digital and offline channels.

What Should CCCM Buyers Prioritize?

The CCCM Wave will help you understand how these eight vendors stack up against 40 current offering, strategy, and market presence criteria. Forrester clients can also customize the Wave scorecard to reflect their own specific priorities. Forrester recommends that marketers focus on CCCM solutions that:

  • Facilitate customer understanding. Look beyond customer data platform (CDP) industry hype to prioritize marketer-friendly tools for managing customer profiles, analyzing customer behavior, building target audiences, and optimizing marketing performance. Half of our evaluation criteria focus on these data, insights, and measurement capabilities.
  • Unify cross-channel orchestration. Don’t let terms like cross-channel, multichannel, and omnichannel distract you from what will matter most to your customers. Review your evolving channel needs with prospective vendors to determine native capabilities versus integration requirements.
  • Innovate for moments-based customer experiences. Product-centric campaigns often miss the mark with customers who expect personalized value exchanges in their moments of need. Make sure your CCCM solution can orchestrate contextually relevant customer interactions, with a roadmap to address more anticipatory customer experiences.

How Can I Learn More About CCCM?

We plan to publish another Wave evaluation focused on CCCM independent platform vendors, scheduled for August 2021. To review the broader CCCM landscape, refer to the Forrester report “Now Tech: Cross-Channel Campaign Management, Q1 2021.” The Now Tech report includes information on 42 CCCM providers (both EMSS and independent platform vendors).

Please feel free to schedule an inquiry if you’d like to talk in depth about our research findings or the various vendors in the CCCM space.