Constellation ShortList™ B2C Marketing Automation for the Enterprise

About This Constellation ShortList™

Engaging with consumers in the fast-moving digital-first world demands new experience strategies based more on the consumer and less on engagement channels. Today’s marketer is looking for modern automation engines to deliver on an age-old marketing promise: delivering the right message, at the right time, to the right customer. Marketing automation solutions must deliver precision at scale, and in this age of AgenticAI, B2C marketers are looking to ramp up a digital workforce of marketing agents to bring new velocity and impact to the marketing mix. 

Business-to-Consumer (B2C) marketing teams expect capabilities to track and predict customer behavior, facilitate product marketing, improve personalization, and build and nurture customer relationships at scale and speed—all while navigating data privacy regulations. Data analytics tools must track and validate the impact of marketing efforts on customer conversion. 

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning capabilities are table steaks, especially when applied to campaign decisioning, segmentation and analytics. Increasingly, marketers are looking for advanced AI tools leveraging large language models (LLMS) to accelerate the work of marketing by addressing everything from data cleansing and curation, content generation, journey optimization, asset iteration and mass personalization at scale. Solutions to power “self-service” AI-driven interactions that better put the customer in the journey driver’s seat are in demand for performance improvement. GenerativeAI capabilities that enable marketers to generate copy, personalized assets and optimize orchestration and operations have proven useful and valued by enterprise marketers. Expect to see even more process identification, automation and iterative optimization as AI shifts from isolated experimentation to operational sidekick, redefining marketing operations along the way. 

The past year has seen the rapid onset and introduction of MCP servers that help bridge the gaps between systems, data repositories and agent-driven workflows that were once interrupted when work attempted to cross platform or tool boundaries. This is especially true of the B2C marketing ecosystem for large enterprises that often have complex enterprise technology stacks. Instead of hoping a developer may know how to connect the latest tools to martech stacks, MCP servers have allowed business users to unlock previously walled gardens and disconnected business applications to empower experiences with cross-business data. For large enterprises.

Threshold Criteria

Constellation considers the following criteria for these offerings:

• Ease of use, user interface with role-based dashboards and views
• Quickly and easily design and deploy cross-channel campaigns
• Intuitive visual journey workflow creation and management
• Robust segmentation capabilities, rules-based offer management
• Integrated customer profiles including customer preference, identity resolution and consent management capabilities
• Workflow and collaboration tools for cross-marketing and cross-CX approvals, review and rapid collaboration for real-time iteration and optimization
• Expansive list of integrations including native integrations out of the box and the flexibility to create custom integrations
• Multimedia asset creation, utilization and robust digital asset management
• Facilitate and track advertising mediums, retargeting
• Social listening and engagement capabilities or integrations
• Expanded messaging capability to include valued channels like WhatsApp, TikTok, Snap, Instagram and SMS
• Integration with display advertising engines to coordinate engagement across media and channels
• Web, mobile and digital campaign personalization
• Marketplace for integrations and connections across the larger CX stack
• Integration and visibility to commerce systems and teams
• Product vision and road map, emphasis on AI and attribution
• Aggregated analytics and role-based reporting
• Integration with commerce, data, and enterprise resource planning systems
• AI-powered solutions including natural language processing, generativeAI and deep learning tools to recognize, process and optimize everything from images to speech
• MCP Server to streamline agentic flows between business and customer touchpoints
• Security and governance controls including AI model governance and agent observability to assure appropriate use and output

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. The enterprise category is defined as companies with a broad geographical reach, multiple lines of business, and/or more than 3,000 employees.

• ADOBE JOURNEY OPTIMIZER
• BRAZE
• HCL UNICA+
• KLAVIYO
• MICROSOFT DYNAMICS 365 MARKETING
• MARIGOLD
• PEGASYSTEMS CUSTOMER DECISION HUB
• SALESFORCE AGENTFORCE MARKETING CLOUD NEXT
• SAP ENGAGEMENT CLOUD
• SAS CUSTOMER INTELLIGENCE 360
• ZETA MARKETING PLATFORM
• ZOHO MARKETING PLUS