“Email Marketing: Old salt of your toolkit, and still the most cost-effective promotional channel.” So begins the preamble to this year’s Forrester Wave for Email Marketing Solutions, Q218. Other channels and buzzy topics tend to grab the headlines. The industry press seems to annually predict the death of email. Yet, email persists as the work horse of most digital marketing organizations. Why? Well, it’s the highest ROI channel for most organizations. It’s the preferred commercial channel for most consumers. And, email has been able to adapt to changing consumer tastes—becoming more mobile, more interactive, and more intelligent.
While Oracle has done a lot (more than any other vendor in our opinion) to provide marketing organizations with a true cross-channel marketing platform—we’ve never lost sight of where we came from, or how important email is to our customers. That’s why we are the only vendor who has earned the Leader designation in every Forrester Email Wave for the last thirteen years!
What does it take to lead a category for over 13 years?
Well, for one it takes focus. I trust that few readers have actually reviewed all seven Forrester Waves for Email Marketing since 2005. However, the few of us who have can tell you that one trait that is threaded consistently across all nine report is: volatility. Email Marketing is a highly competitive space filled with optimistic venture-backed entrants, competitive technology powerhouses, and opportunistic private equity firms. A Leader one year can quickly lose ground to other vendors, if they take their eye off the ball. In fact, every vendor (or their acquired assets) on this year’s report has been a Leader at some point in the past, except Adobe and IBM.
Thankfully, we have been able to avoid these fluctuations by staying focused on unrivaled customer success and market leading technology.
Not Just Technology
From bringing the first Orchestration Canvas to market in 2009, to introducing email marketers to the first productized Multivariate Testing and Send Time Optimization capabilities in more recent years, Oracle takes pride in being an email technology innovator. However, our many collective years in the email space have taught us that excellent technology is simply not enough to guarantee customer success.
True expertise, proactive customer management, and roadmap guided by marketer needs vs. the latest buzzword feature, are just as, if not more, important than the core technology we provide. After all, marketers and their customers sit in the center of our universe, not the IT department. With this in mind, we thought it appropriate to wrap up with a quote from one of our customers that made it into this report, “The Oracle Platform is more robust [than competitors]. But its creative side is the key to its success.”
If you are a digital marketer looking for a consistent, strategic, and creative leader in Email or Cross Channel Marketing – let us know. We’d be happy to talk to you about all we have to offer.
Oh and also, read the report.