StrongView Leads the Way for Email Marketers

Email marketers take note: StrongView is the leading email marketing vendor, according to global research firm Forrester.

Forrester analyzes vendors in a specific market in periodic research reports called “The Forrester Wave.” This time around, the company released its biennial look at email marketing vendors, focusing on nine worth at least $60 million that offer first-party email deployment platforms and work with enterprise clients.

After surveying 89 email vendors, Forrester narrowed its study down and spent three months analyzing the most significant. They then scored the vendors on 34 criteria based on their current offerings, strategy, and market presence, as well as feedback from their clients.

StrongView edged out Epsilon, Oracle Responsys, and Salesforce ExactTarget, which were all ranked very highly because of their superior operations and international presence, strong security, and versatility, respectively. Yesmail Interactive and Silverpop were middling, though overall strong performers. And Acxiom and Experian Marketing Services lagged behind, though not as much as Zeta Interactive, which had the weakest ranking by far.

“StrongView joins the rank of Leaders this year for its scalable support for high volume, its dynamic messages and its executive vision, which introduces a plan for using email to enable contextual marketing,” says Shar VanBoskirk, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester. “Specifically, it had a strategy focused on utilizing email to play a role beyond driving transactions to establish and enable a series of context-based customer interactions.”

The evaluation of StrongView focused on Message Studio, its cross-channel campaign management platform. Message Studio allows marketers to personalize their messages by leveraging subscriber profile data, online behavior, and lifecycle events.

In the last review of this kind, StrongView was ranked in the Contenders category, where Acxiom and Experian Marketing Services placed this time around. But StrongView has since revamped Message Studio to include contextual marketing capabilities, such as user-defined event data and in-app messaging, which helped the company move up in the rankings, despite its limited global footprint and lack of distributed user module.

“We believe context marketing is the inevitable future of where marketing is going,” says Bill Wagner, chief executive (CEO) of StrongView. “With the data on consumers that’s available, there’s no reason not to engage them in a much more relevant way. Everyone as a consumer has context; the crux of the job for email marketers is to understand that context and act on it quickly.”