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 with their customers. 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.

CCMH solutions enable marketers to create and deliver experiences across the entire customer lifecycle. 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.

Such holistic engagement is critical, especially in difficult economic times when many firms overindex on performance marketing to drive short-term revenue. Instead, you should focus your attention on building relationships. A successful CCMH implementation can help you do just that, helping marketing deliver sustainable long-term business impact.

Announcing The Forrester Wave™: Cross-Channel Marketing Hubs, Q1 2023

To help you traverse the CCMH market, The Forrester Wave™: Cross-Channel Marketing Hubs, Q1 2023 is now live. It identifies the 15 most significant CCMH vendors — Adobe, Bloomreach, Braze, Capillary Technologies, CleverTap, CM Group, HCLSoftware, Insider, Microsoft, MoEngage, Netcore Cloud, Optimove, Salesforce, SAP, and SAS — and scores them across 26 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.

Forrester previously called this category cross-channel campaign management, but we updated it to reflect the evolution from scheduled promotional campaigns to personalized experiences triggered by customer behavior. CCMH vendors are evolving, too. Enterprise marketing suite vendors are in transition, with new platform architectures and customer data platforms. Mobile-oriented vendors have grown dramatically in Asia and are poised to disrupt the market as they expand in North America. Others address specific e-commerce or midmarket requirements.

For a deeper dive into our evaluation, please register and join our Forrester CCMH webinar on April 18. Our webinar will also feature insights from CCMH users — real-world customer references for vendors participating in the study.

If you want a broader view of the CCMH space, The Cross-Channel Marketing Hubs Landscape, Q1 2023 features 42 vendors. It covers five core CCMH use cases: customer profile management, customer segmentation and audiences, customer understanding (analytics and insights), marketing automation workflows, and cross-channel marketing (campaigns and segments). It also identifies five extended CCMH use cases: consent and preference management, personalized offers and recommendations, contextual marketing (triggered or reactive), 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.