Crownpeak's New Release, Salesforce Platform Updates, More News

Catch up on the latest news in the customer experience arena with our quick news wrap up.

Crownpeak Releases Critical Path Monitoring

Denver-based digital experience software provider Crownpeak has released a Critical Path Monitoring solution that is designed to analyze issues in organizations' marketing technology stacks that affect site conversion rates or and other marketing initiatives.

J.J. Gorsuch, vice president of product at Crownpeak, said providing better analytics and data can help organizations learn how to maximize on-site and ad campaign performance.

Critical Path Monitoring aims to help online retailers identify customer journey paths. Crownpeak's monitoring simulates real users and reveals issues along that journey, according to Crownpeak officials. It scans a site or mobile app for third-party-based performance issues.

The product marks the first joint product launch between Evidon and Crownpeak following their acquisition of Evidon in August.

Salesforce Introduces Distributed Marketing 

Salesforce today released a tool called Distributed Marketing that is designed to help marketers create personalized customer journeys with Salesforce Marketing Cloud and deploy them to their partner networks. Partners will be able to leverage Salesforce Sales Cloud, Service Cloud or Community Cloud to manage and personalize experiences as they onboard new clients, create holiday promotions and manage renewals.

"Partners such as financial advisors, insurance agents and dealership owners are not always marketers by trade, so understanding the importance of seamless marketing and executing on-brand messages can be complex," Joanna Milliken, SVP of product management for Salesforce Marketing Cloud, said in a statement. "At the partner level, advisors, franchise owners and dealers can now see how each individual consumer is interacting with the messages they’ve delivered, while corporate marketers can see how the journeys they’ve developed for partners have performed in an aggregate view.

Salesforce officials said Distributed Marketing from Salesforce is available as Salesforce Lightning components in Sales Cloud, Service Cloud or Community Cloud in limited pilot now and will be generally available in February 2018. Pricing will be announced during general availability. 

Survey: Email Marketing Still Rules

ActiveCampaign released a report — “SMB Martech Report: Beyond Email Marketing” — that found 64 percent of small-to-medium-businesses plan to adopt marketing automation technology within the next two years. ActiveCampaign is a Chicago-based marketing automation provider.

About 40 percent of respondents said marketing automation is currently out of reach, and 26 percent of current users stated their software is too complex.

Other key findings from the report include:

• Only 30 percent of SMBs that use email marketing software also have marketing automation software in place
• Only 7 percent of SMBs adopted email marketing and marketing automation at the same time
• More than half of SMBs (56 percent) with marketing automation software in place used email for three years or more before moving onto marketing automation software
• Among SMBs with email marketing software in place, more than half (54 percent) say it’s the only martech tool they use or it serves as the foundation of their marketing program

According to the survey, more than 84 of marketers use email marketing, and of those email marketers, only 30 percent also have marketing automation software in place. The study is based on a survey of 310 US small business employees who oversee their company’s marketing strategy or activities. Respondents were limited to professionals working at companies with less than 1,000 employees that have an email marketing solution in place.

Coveo Teams with Elasticsearch

Coveo, a predictive insights platform, has integrated with open source search and analytics provider Elasticsearch.

Coveo officials report Coveo can sit on top of a self-hosted or cloud-based instance of Elasticsearch. The combined technologies allow users to leverage to help streamline content connectivity, UI configuration, search analytics and reporting and centralized administration. 

The search capabilities automatically tune results over time, learning from search and navigation activities. Users can add content to elasticsearch indexes with more than 30 pre-built connectors.

OrderGroove Appoints Two Marketing Executives

New York City-based OrderGroove, which provides relationship commerce, named Adam Weinroth its new chief marketing officer and Stephanie Chan its vice president of consumer marketing. 

Weinroth most recently held CMO positions at eRelevance and OneSpot. Earlier in his career, Weinroth started his own venture, Easyjournal, a community blogging platform, which was acquired by Pluck. He later became vice president of marketing.

Chan most recently served as vice president of marketing for Ladders and CMO/co-founder of Please and Carrots, an early learning subscription service. Chan spent several years as part of the Time Inc. organization where she was vice president of consumer marketing for InStyle, driving both consumer revenue and customer engagement.