About This Constellation ShortList™
The modern business-to-consumer (B2C) relationship is often defined by moments—of creativity, of personalization and of engagement. For the small to midsize (SMB) organization, pulling off these highly personalized engagements can feel impossible without the budgets and the resources larger enterprises often have. This shifts marketing automation from a convenience to a critical growth tool.
Artifical Intelligence (AI) has started to prove it could deliver that level playing field SMBs have been looking for. With generative AI, the power of conversation, data, analytics and content generation are scalable like never before. Small teams want easy-to-use, functional marketing automation solutions with features that can grow with the business and the customer, without the need for large IT, developer or large costly specialized teams to get systems and campaigns up and running. SMB focused tools demand scalability, build to be flexible around features, functions and even licenses as teams can expend and retract quickly.
SMB marketers want business and growth driving analytics, customer segmentations and insights into market opportunities without hiring a team of data scientists. They want recommendations and personalization tips from AI they can deploy, and scale as needed and wanted. Most importantly, SMB B2C marketing teams are looking for creative tools to be quickly and easily integrated into powerful automation workflows and processes that transcend channel and cross global barriers.
Threshold Criteria
Constellation considers the following criteria for these offerings:
- Ease of use, clear and simple user interface
- Quickly and easily design and deploy campaigns
- Intuitive visual workflow creation and management
- Audience identification and segmentation capabilities
- Multimedia asset creation, utilization and robust digital asset management
- Facilitate and track advertising mediums, retargeting
- Social listening and engagement capabilities
- Integrations into major social and digital networks for integrated communications and advertising orchestration including Facebook, Instagram, and Snap
- Web and digital campaign personalization
- Behavioral tracking and testing
- Multichannel campaign attribution
- Application of machine learning (ML) and Augmented Intelligence (AI) for recommendations, data analysis and campaign optimization
- GenerativeAI tools that aid, enhance and assist human teams with copy, headline, advertising and even email options and recommendations to maximize engagement
- Product vision and road map including expansion of AI capabilities, smart assistants
- Aggregated analytics and reporting
- Integration with sales, commerce, data, and enterprise resource planning systems
- Scalable pricing and function packages
- Training programs to upskill and educate teams and talent
- Community for networking, sharing and connections with peers and similar users
The Constellation ShortList™
Constellation evaluates 50 solutions categorized in this market. This Constellation ShortList is determined by client inquiries, partner conversations, customer references, vendor selection projects, market share and internal research. SMBs have goals for explosive growth but limited marketing resources and budget, which is factored into the selection criteria. In alphabetical order:
- ActiveCampaign
- Braze
- Drip
- Freshworks Freshmarketer
- Hubspot
- Intuit Mailchimp
- Iterable
- Keap
- Klaviyo
- Monday
- Salesforce Marketing Cloud
- Zoho Marketing Plus
Frequency of Evaluation
Each Constellation ShortList will be updated at least once per year. There could be an update after six months, should the analyst deem it necessary.
Evaluation Services
Constellation clients may work with the analyst and research team to conduct a more thorough discussion, vendor selection and contract negotiation.
