Email continues to grow because it delivers consistent and impressive results. For every dollar marketers spend on email marketing, they generate $36 in revenue, a Litmus survey of 2,000 email marketers found in 2020, the latest year for which data is available.

Depending on what industry you’re in, your company’s ROI could be even higher. Agencies in marketing, PR and advertising see a return of $42 for every $1 they spend on email, and businesses in retail, ecommerce and consumer goods are rewarded with $45 in revenue for each dollar spent.

The centrality of data and the need for updated technology

Email may have been around since the dawn of the internet, but the space doesn’t stand still. Email marketing, and the technology that enables it, have evolved to deal with challenges like spam and deliverability and also to take advantage of opportunities, such as the ever-increasing sophistication of data usage for hyper-personalization.

When MarTech surveyed marketers for the 2022 MarTech Replacement Survey, they said technologies for email distribution and for marketing automation (a chief component of which is email), were both in the top four software types replaced over the previous 18 months.

Dig deeper MarTech’s email marketing experts to follow

Marketing automation was the most replaced application, with 23% of respondents in 2022 saying they’d replaced it, versus 24% in 2021. Email distribution technologies were replaced by 21% of those surveyed in 2022, compared to 24% in 2021.

Most of the respondents who replaced email distribution systems were moving to a commercial application, either from another commercial vendor or a homegrown solution. The primary reason: to take advantage of new and better features.

Email marketing helps organizations acquire and retain customers, build businesses and make more money. Explore the platforms essential to email marketing in the latest edition of this MarTech Intelligence Report.

Click here to download!

The latest generation of email technology

When it comes to technology, maturity can be a disadvantage. New businesses can more easily leverage the latest capabilities of software development, while established firms may be saddled with legacy technologies and architectures.

Of course, technology players often introduce new features – some at a higher rate than others. But doing that on top of an aging infrastructure, while also keeping things running for an existing customer base, can be challenging.

While the COVID-19 pandemic may have driven communications between business and customers to digital channels like email, that preference seems to hold up even now that the pandemic is waning. Fifty-seven percent of customers said they preferred to engage with businesses via email in 2022, down from 65% in 2020, according to Salesforce’s State of the Connected Customer report.

Despite this preference, lots of emails land in inboxes without getting an open, much less a read or a click. Meanwhile, recipients spent an average of only 10 seconds reading brand emails in the first three quarters of 2021, a Litmus analysis of eight billion email opens found. That was down from 11.8 seconds in 2020 and 13.4 seconds in 2018.

These statistics explain why marketers, and the email marketing platform vendors serving them, are focusing on technologies to create more personalized, relevant and engaging messages that improve the odds of their content being read and acted on.

The personalization imperative amid data pressures

Meanwhile, other developments are changing the data landscape, making it harder to even gather statistics like these about users’ interactions with emails. Because of efforts to safeguard customer privacy, tech companies are making it harder for marketers to collect data about individual users.

In addition to the pending demise of third-party cookies, both Apple and Google are reducing the utility of mobile ad identifiers in an effort to safeguard customer privacy. Another change affecting email marketing, in particular, arose in mid-2021 when Apple announced Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) features in iOS, Mac OS and Watch OS that can limit the data available to marketers by concealing opens and IP addresses.

Another Apple feature, Hide My Email, lets users create their own unique random email addresses that forward to their inboxes. This means that a person could use a unique email address for every business with whom they have a relationship, foiling technologies that seek to tie together behavior from different sources to get a holistic view of a customer’s interests and needs.

These changes are spurring a dramatic shift to first-party data in all digital marketing disciplines, and they have led to the decline of the open rate as a meaningful email marketing metric, since MPP obscures whether, or when, emails are opened by using a cache.

Both the increased emphasis on data-driven personalization and the shifts in the data landscape have spurred vendors of email marketing platforms to augment the data available within their platforms and change the emphasis to metrics other than open rate.

Everything you need to know about email marketing deliverability that your customers want and that inboxes won’t block. Get MarTech’s Email Marketing Periodic Table.

Click here to check it out!

Enterprise email marketing platform capabilities

Email marketing platforms usually offer features for email creation and sending, but consolidation and integrations have added to what one might have once expected. Common capabilities of these platforms include:

• Message design and creation
• Workflow automation and collaboration
• Message previewing
• Email sending
• Deliverability management
• Data management
• Ecommerce capabilities
• Analytics and reporting
• Third-party integrations
• Automation and landing pages

Some providers may offer more advanced capabilities, such as:

• More full-featured customer data platform functionality
• Artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities leveraged through different parts of the platform

The benefits of email marketing platforms

While any but the most nascent of businesses will likely have adopted some approach to email, given its centrality to business in general, adopting an enterprise solution offers many benefits. These may include:

• Data unification across channels. Some email marketing platforms include full-fledged customer data platforms, but, even if they don’t, the customer databases associated with these systems can serve as a single source of truth across an organization. Such unification can provide businesses with a complete portrait of their customers, permitting them to leverage data for marketing, customer service and product development purposes. Platforms can also assist with compliance with CAN-SPAM and other privacy regulations.
• A more unified technology stack overall. Most email marketing platforms offer extensive integrations with other business technologies, allowing companies to more easily work across silos.
• Ability to identify more profitable audiences and segmentation strategies. The unified data trove gives marketers the opportunity to get to know their customers better, and also to identify lookalike audiences by connecting to additional data sources. Artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities can surface useful insights that marketers may not know to look for.
• More efficient workflows. Every email message that’s meant to be delivered to an audience or segment typically goes through an internal review and approval process. Some email marketing platforms feature the ability to collaborate and obtain approvals within the platform, which is especially helpful for larger more-distributed organizations and those in more regulated industries. Franchises and other multilocation businesses benefit from even more complex systems aimed at sharing useful assets and establishing guidelines, while also allowing those closest to the customers to add valuable customization.
• More personal and efficient communication with customers. Template design combined with data insights and segmentation can allow businesses to deliver more personalized, relevant and timely messaging. Automation and triggered-messaging features allow for more efficiency, as well. When systems include SMS or mobile notification options, this allows businesses to extend communications to those channels.
• Improved deliverability and design of email messages. Email marketing platforms’ deliverability systems – both technological and relationship-oriented – can help businesses ensure their messages make it to the inbox. Once they arrive, design and preview features give marketers more control over how their messages appear, no matter where they are viewed.
• Access to more advanced templating and interactivity. Interactive capabilities via AMP for email or CSS are more easily accessible with the help of email marketing platforms, allowing businesses to create more engaging messages with better return.
• Better ability to measure return on investment (ROI) and more. Data and reporting capabilities can tie email messages to specific business goals, allowing marketers to optimize content and targeting to achieve the best possible results.

Email marketing helps organizations acquire and retain customers, build businesses and make more money. Explore the platforms essential to email marketing in the latest edition of this MarTech Intelligence Report.

Click here to download!

The post A guide to how email marketing platforms help brands succeed appeared first on MarTech.

B2B marketers have employed account-based marketing (ABM) for well over a decade, but the approach has quickly begun gaining currency over the past few years and that growth is expected to continue. Forrester predicts that, by 2025, account-based marketing will become the main way most B2B companies identify, plan, manage, and measure buying and post-sale activity.

What goes into a successful ABM strategy? Best practices that have emerged focus on these five core areas:

• Data enrichment
• Account targeting.
• Personalization and/or predictive recommendations.
• Interaction management.
• Performance measurement.

MarTech’s Account-Based Marketing Tools: A Marketer’s Guide discusses each of these ABM strategy elements in more detail and shows how ABM platforms help marketers achieve these strategic objectives.

Also included in this free 56-page report are profiles of ABM tools vendors, capabilities comparisons and recommended steps for evaluating and purchasing. Visit Digital Marketing Depot to get your copy now.

The post 5 key elements of successful ABM strategies appeared first on MarTech.

Researching identity resolution vendors

Once you determine an enterprise identity resolution platform makes sense for your business, spend time researching individual vendors and their capabilities by doing the following: 

• Create and prioritize a list of identity resolution use cases, from essential to not necessary. 
• Use that list as a basis for your research — many of the vendors profiled in this report also provide blogs, ebooks and interactive tools that can help. 
• Make a list of the vendors meeting your criteria, reach out to them and set a deadline for replies. 
• Decide whether or not you need to engage in a formal RFI/RFP process.

Identity resolution is not only critical to marketing success but is essential for compliance with consumer privacy laws such as CCPA and GDPR. Explore the platforms essential to identity resolution in the latest edition of this MarTech Intelligence Report.

Click here to download!

RFI/RFP process

The RFI/RFP process is an individual preference, however be sure to give the same criteria to each vendor to facilitate comparison. The most effective RFPs only request relevant information and provide ample information about your brand and its identity resolution needs. It should reflect high-level strategic goals and KPIs. For example, mention your company’s most important KPIs and how you will evaluate the success of your efforts. Include details about timelines and the platforms in your existing martech stack. 

When written properly, an RFP will facilitate the sales process and ensure everyone involved comes to a shared understanding of the purpose, requirements, scope and structure of the intended purchase. From the RFP responses, you should be able to narrow your list down to three or four platforms to demo.

Demo the platforms

Schedule demos as close together as possible for the best comparisons. Make sure all potential users are on the demo call and pay attention to the following: 

• How easy is it to use? 
• Does the vendor understand our business and marketing needs? 
• Are they showing us our “must-have” features?

Questions for vendors

Here are some questions to ask vendors that touch on important considerations in your identity resolution search:

Data onboarding and privacy 

• Does the platform support first-party data onboarding? 
• Can we incorporate any of our private customer IDs into the platform? 
• Do you use probabilistic, deterministic or a hybrid approach to matching? 
• How do you validate the accuracy of your deterministic matches? 
• What match rate can we expect, given our vertical market and database size? 
• How do you comply with privacy regulations and consumer choice? 

Identity graph 

• Do you own or license your referential identity data? 
• What are your identity data sources? 
• How do you validate the quality of your identity graph? 
• How much of your data is addressable? 
• How is your identity graph linked to offline PII? 
• Do your identity capabilities apply to non-U.S. markets? 

Martech and adtech integration 

• How does the platform integrate with martech platforms (i.e., CRMs, DSPs, CDPs)? 
• Does the platform feature any built-in data activation capabilities (i.e., personalized email or ad campaign execution)? 
• Do you have APIs available for data import/export? 
• What reporting do you provide that will document the ROI from our identity efforts? 

Customer support 

The post 24 questions to ask identity resolution vendors during a demo appeared first on MarTech.

Does our customer data reside in disconnected silos throughout the organization?

Organizational silos between departments such as sales, marketing, procurement or customer support can lead to inconsistent customer experiences with a brand. An identity resolution platform can connect these systems. It will integrate consumer identifiers across channels and devices in a way that is accurate, scalable and privacy compliant to create a persistent and addressable individual profile.

Do we have customer knowledge gaps that could be filled with trusted second- and third-party data?

First-party data is essential for building a strong relationship between your brand and customers. However, identity graphs using anonymized second- and third-party data can provide valuable demographic, location, financial and other information that can fill gaps in customer insights. As data collection and matching techniques improve, creating a 360-degree view of customers through identity resolution platforms may make sense.

Are we in compliance with CCPA, GDPR and other data privacy regulations?

Data breaches and misuse of consumer data continue to make headlines, leading to an increase in privacy regulations. It’s crucial to ensure your data governance practices comply with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and/or the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). While collecting and using consumer data is an essential part of marketing, it also escalates the risk of damaging your brand and incurring legal consequences.

Can we successfully integrate our existing customer data systems with an identity resolution platform?

Your various martech and ad tech systems absolutely must be able to communicate with each other. If they can’t, your organization likely would benefit from an identity resolution platform. This platform can incorporate identifiers and profiles between and within these systems for consistency and accuracy, creating a persistent and addressable individual profile

Does our C-suite support identity resolution initiatives?

Most C-level executives overestimate their marketing organization’s customer identity accuracy and persistence, according to a Forrester study. This can lead to inadequate budgeting, campaign measurement and performance, and broken customer experiences. Therefore, it is critical to secure C-suite support for identity resolution initiatives across the organization.

Identity resolution is not only critical to marketing success but is essential for compliance with consumer privacy laws such as CCPA and GDPR. Explore the platforms essential to identity resolution in the latest edition of this MarTech Intelligence Report.

Click here to download!

How would we use identity resolution?

Identity resolution has many marketing use cases, from complying with data privacy regulations to developing more accurate lookalike audiences to improved marketing segmentation and targeting. Identifying the use cases that would most benefit your organization is fundamental for establishing and prioritizing the capabilities you’ll need.

What KPIs do we want to measure and what decisions will we make based on the data?

It’s critical to measure the impact of an identity resolution platform on your marketing ROI. Resolving customer identities will provide new cross-sell and upsell opportunities because your marketing team knows more about your customers. Although KPIs vary by organization and/or industry, you should be able to measure incremental lift in metrics such as average order value, average revenue per user, basket size, response rates or customer retention.

What is the total cost of ownership?

Most of these platforms use on-demand pricing, meaning customers pay a monthly subscription price that will vary by usage. Pricing is typically based on the number of data records or customer profiles under management or the number of matches or API calls. Some also have add-on customer support options.

The post Does your organization need an identity resolution platform? appeared first on MarTech.

Identity resolution platforms enable marketers to “close the loop” on customer marketing, analytics and compliance with a comprehensive holistic view of activity across all of an organization’s customer touchpoints and channels. Such identifiers can and should encompass both online (device, email, cookie or mobile ad ID) and offline (name, address, phone number) data signals and attributes.

Why are these platforms important?

A number of key factors have promoted the importance of these platforms over the last couple of years.

Goodbye to third-party cookies

The ongoing deprecation of third-party cookies and mobile identifiers, which tech companies are phasing out due to concerns about consumer privacy, are fueling interest in identity resolution platforms.

Marketers have long depended on third-party cookies and mobile IDs to target ads based
on data associated with these identifiers. As recently as mid-2021, 83% of marketers surveyed by Innovid were still using third-party cookies, and, for many marketers, their strategy was very reliant on this technology.

The walled gardens challenge

Marketers are also losing access to large pools of potential customer data due to the creation of “walled gardens” by Google, Facebook and Amazon. These closed ecosystems enable the marketplace providers to maintain control of user data.

All of these developments are driving marketers to step up their efforts to collect more first-party data about their customers and prospects, and also enhance their profiles in a privacy compliant manner.

The CTV opportunity

Advertising spending on connected TV (CTV) – which includes display ads on home screens as well as in-stream video ads on platforms like Hulu, Roku and YouTube – is the fastest-growing segment in digital advertising. Meanwhile, with Netflix and Disney Plus investing in ad-supported versions of their services, inventory is expanding to meet the demand.

Though advanced and connected TV aren’t hampered by a dependence on third-party cookies or mobile ad identifiers, the fragmentation of the sector means identity solutions are key to enabling the more advanced audience targeting sought by digital advertisers.

Let’s look at how identity resolution platforms can help marketers address all these challenges and opportunities.

Dig deeper: What is identity resolution and how are platforms adapting to privacy changes?

Main capabilities of identity resolutions platforms

Identity resolution platforms support marketing processes around targeting, measurement and
personalization for both known and anonymous audiences across digital and offline channels.
Virtually all enterprise identity resolution platform vendors offer the following core features and capabilities:

• Data onboarding (including online/offline matching).
• Proprietary identity graph.
• Client ownership of first-party data.
• Persistent individual and/or household ID.
• Compliance with data privacy regulations.
• APIs for third-party system integration.
• Pre-built connections to martech/adtech platforms.

Let’s look at the first two of those in more detail.

Data onboarding

Client data is typically onboarded via secure file transfer protocol (SFTP), although some vendors also provide direct API transfer or pixel syncs. Data is processed with the goal of establishing a universal view of the customer.

The aim is to support persistent customer IDs during the identity resolution process, which means the ID follows the individual (or household) even as identifiers change, which they inevitably do. For example, when browser cookies expire or are deleted, or customers buy and use new devices, the customer ID will remain the same.

Identity graphs

Most identity resolution vendors maintain a proprietary identity graph or database that houses all the known identifiers that correlate with individual consumers. There is no standard model for an identity graph.

Identity graphs may also incorporate demographic, behavioral, financial, lifestyle, purchase and other data compiled or licensed from third-party sources, such as online news sites, purchase transactions, surveys, email service providers (ESPs), motor vehicle records, voter registration and other public records.

Dig deeper: Marketers make identity solutions an urgent priority

The benefits of using identity resolution platforms

Connecting consumer identifiers has become a mandate for enterprise marketers trying to
meet or exceed customer expectations for a personalized brand experience. Automating the
process with an identity resolution platform can provide the following benefits:

• Deeper customer insights.
• Accurate personalization.
• More seamless customer experiences.
• Stronger privacy governance, risk and compliance.
• Enhanced cross-channel attribution and campaign tracking.
• Increased marketing ROI.

Learn more about the capabilities and benefits of this critical technology by downloading our free report.

Identity resolution is not only critical to marketing success but is essential for compliance with consumer privacy laws such as CCPA and GDPR. Explore the platforms essential to identity resolution in the latest edition of this MarTech Intelligence Report.

Click here to download!

The post What is an identity resolution platform? appeared first on MarTech.

Given all of that promise, marketers are certainly evaluating these technologies and one crucial part of that process is the demo.

It’s important to set up demos within a relatively short timeframe of each other to help make relevant comparisons. Make sure that all potential internal users are on the demo call and pay attention to the following:

• How easy is the platform to use for the day-to-day tasks handled by each department that will be using it?
• Does the vendor seem to understand our business and marketing needs?
• Are they showing us our “must-have” features?

Explore platform capabilities from vendors like Sitecore, Optimizely, Pantheon, WordPressVIP and more in the full MarTech Intelligence Report on digital experience platforms.

Click here to download!

Here are 13 questions to ask each vendor that will help you narrow the field:

• What kind of content delivery speed improvements do you typically see with your clients?
• Why have you adopted the approach you recommend (fully headless or hybrid content delivery) and what does that specifically mean in terms of how the whole system comes together?
• How is the DXP hosted? PaaS? SaaS? Private cloud? On-premise software installation? Or some combination of these?
• How does the platform integrate with other martech platforms (i.e., CDPs, marketing automation platforms, CRMs, DSPs, DAMs)? What capabilities are native to the new platform and how is it modularized?
• Do you have pre-built connections to solutions we already use or sources of content or functionality that we need?
• What reporting do you provide that will document the ROI from our efforts?
• What kind of customer support is included? Can we pick up the phone to report problems?
• Will we have a dedicated Account Manager and technical support, especially with the initial migration?
• Do you have other clients in our vertical?
• What kind of professional services are available? And how much do they cost?
• How does the company handle requests for product modifications?
• What new features are the vendor considering?
• What’s the long-term roadmap and launch dates?

Good luck!

The post 13 questions to ask digital experience platform vendors during the demo appeared first on MarTech.

Your organization should start with a comprehensive self-assessment of its business needs, staff capabilities, management support and financial resources.

The following questions should help your team decide whether purchasing a DXP is the right call:

Explore platform capabilities from vendors like Sitecore, Optimizely, Pantheon, WordPressVIP and more in the full MarTech Intelligence Report on digital experience platforms.

Click here to download!

The post Does your marketing team need a digital experience platform (DXP)? appeared first on MarTech.

The core capability of the digital experience platform is managing and delivering the digital user experience — primarily web pages, but also mobile apps and other types of content — a need that has long been served by content management systems.

While the growth of content management systems (CMSs) has allowed marketers to wrest control of websites from the IT department, which was largely in charge of the early web, marketers’ needs have grown beyond CMSs’ abilities to meet them in recent years. 

Digital transformation drives tool adoption

Over time, businesses have undergone digital transformations to drive efficiencies, remain competitive in the marketplace and respond to changes in customer behavior. To perform everything expected of a modern marketing operation, marketers adopted adjacent technologies to enhance what their CMS was able to do.

• Web analytics helped marketers gather data about user behavior and the conversion funnel, with more sophisticated optimization systems allowing for A/B and multivariate testing. 
• Customer journey analytics (CJA) gave marketers a more sophisticated sense of the path users take on the route to purchase. 
• For many businesses, ecommerce capabilities became essential to their digital operations.
• Connecting all the data in these systems to the right customer or prospect and keeping track of it all required a customer relationship management (CRM) tool or even a customer data platform (CDP).

Though each of these technologies provides a way to improve the user experience and helps modern marketers meet the demands now placed on them, this hodgepodge of systems has increasingly become a liability. In some cases, marketers are weighed down by the costs of licensing all of these disparate systems. 

Enter the DXP

These challenges, along with developments like the increased digitization of business brought about by the COVID pandemic and ever-heightened customer expectations, are some of the factors that have led to the rise of the digital experience platform (DXP).

Customers increasingly expect marketers to deliver consistent, personalized experiences to all of their devices, and they often use multiple devices to interact with brands and complete transactions.

Just delivering appropriate content to all of these channels and devices is a challenge in itself, because each of them requires its own interface and mix of content to perform ideally. More importantly, though, both consumers and business buyers expect to be known and understood in digital contexts, and delivering that personalization requires data and a means to act on those insights. 

Speed and modularity

Another significant aspect of the modern user experience is that it is fast. Besides the desire to please users, marketers focus on speeding content delivery because Google penalizes websites with poor landing page experiences — which includes slow loading — by ranking them lower in its search results.

At the same time, many front-end web developers have been chafing at the limitations of programming in PHP, seeking to take advantage of more modern methods and craft the slicker and more flexible user experiences they’re able to deliver with those technologies. 

Both of these developments have led businesses to seek alternatives to traditional content management approaches. Examples include headless or hybrid CMSs, often within DXPs. In these types of deployments, the CMS disconnects the underlying content from the means and manner of displaying it. Because of this, developers can employ modern frameworks to create the user experience, and it’s easier to leverage the same database of content assets across multiple platforms, devices and formats. 

Also, the pandemic and recent worldwide volatility have taught marketers an important lesson about being responsive and agile. Businesses that were quickly able to identify and adjust to shifting societal conditions and consumer sentiments have been the most successful at riding out the storm. One approach that’s gaining currency in this environment is the “composable DXP.”

A composable or modular DXP approach lets marketers pick and choose the modules that meet their business needs — or even connect modules from other providers — rather than being stuck with an all-in-one solution.

Core capabilities

A DXP enables the creation, management, delivery and optimization of digital experiences in a variety of channels and contexts. It serves as the hub that brings together capabilities from multiple applications or modules to deliver a seamless digital experience. Marketers considering the adoption of a DXP should understand that the way these platforms have come together — through acquisitions and integrations, for the most part — means that native capabilities differ from one offering to another. 

Additionally, the modularity of these offerings is a point of differentiation — some vendors offer more composable configurations than others. However, all should feature either native functionality or connections that enable the full range of capabilities explored here. The core capabilities of DXPs, provided either natively within the platform or via an integration include:

• Content management, which may include digital asset management and/or product information management (PIM).
• Support for multiple platforms and types of experiences.
• Delivery, presentation and orchestration of content and experiences.
• Personalization.
• Analytics and optimization.
• Search and navigation.
• Customer data management. 
• Strong functionality for integration and extensibility.

A number of additional capabilities may be included in some specific DXP offerings.

Today, strong functionality for integration and extensibility is probably the most important capability offered by DXPs, because it is fundamental to their role of bringing together all of the technologies that contribute to a customer-centric experience.

Is your marketing team ready for the future of content and experience management? Explore top digital experience management platforms in the first edition of this MarTech Intelligence Report.

Click here to download!

The post What is a digital experience platform or DXP and is it the future of content management? appeared first on MarTech.

Digital asset management (DAM) stores and organizes all of an organization’s digital assets — images, PDFs, photographs, audio, video and even virtual reality or other cutting-edge formats.

It is the “single source of truth,” where marketers can find every relevant version of media assets created for the brand. A DAM also adds metadata that can provide information on anything the marketer might want to know before using it. These include things like does the company have perpetual rights to use a photograph, whether the legal team has approved a video, and if an infographic or whitepaper was checked for brand design standard compliance.

How do companies use DAM?

Marketing agencies might leverage DAM technology to maintain consistency across in-house content and creatives developed by partners. B2B businesses might draw on the benefits of a centralized hub for sales collateral and event marketing materials. DAMs are being integrated with other technologies, especially content management systems and digital experience platforms, to unify marketing asset management and distribute digital content directly to the channels where they’re consumed.

Why are so many organizations using DAMs?

First is consumer expectations.

Nearly three quarters of customers expect companies to understand their unique wants and needs — up from two-thirds in 2020, according to the fifth edition of Salesforce’s The State of the Connected Customer. The benefits of this personalization are clear. Companies using more granular personalization experience significant gains in conversions, revenue per visitor and average order value, according to an Incisiv Adobe study.

Second is the expanding number of channels and devices consumers are using.

DAMs make it easier to create and repurpose marketing content according to the different needs of the medium and format. They also support the entire content lifecycle – from upstream creative to downstream delivery. They support work-in-progress for content, speeding asset workflows, reviews and approvals, as well as connecting with tools like Adobe Creative Cloud, Canva and Microsoft Office.

This guide is for marketers who are looking to enhance their campaigns with digital assessment management technologies. Here’s what’s inside:

• Capabilities of digital asset management platforms
  • Workflow management
  • File formats and handling
  • Asset conversion, editing and customization
  • Distribution and user permissions management
  • Search and metadata
  • Digital rights and corporate governance management
  • Reports and analytics
  • Data storage and security
  • Integrations

• What are the benefits of using a digital asset management (DAM) system?

Capabilities of digital asset management platforms

Digital asset management platforms have everything from legacy features, like file management, to emerging capabilities due to the advent of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Here is a detailed look.

Workflow management

DAM systems differ in the extent of their workflow management capabilities. Some allow collaboration through @ tagging, while others have more full-fledged project management offerings. This can help marketing teams, along with outside creative resources, communicate about changes while an asset is in development or being updated.

Later, they can allow for approvals to be obtained from brand managers, execs and the legal team, while some systems also facilitate asset distribution. These capabilities may be built into the core platform or offered as an add-on or integration. Most DAMs are SaaS and can be accessed from browsers, but some have developed native apps.

File formats and handling

One area of differentiation is the ability to manage a variety of file formats. Most support common popular video, image and audio formats. However, if your workflow requires the use of a specialized format you need to ensure any system you’re considering can handle it.

Asset conversion, editing and customization

Some platforms allow an asset uploaded in one format to be downloaded or distributed in another — with conversions happening on the fly. Also, some have lightweight editing capabilities within the platform. To be clear, connections with common image editing software (Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, etc.) are typically more useful.

Distribution and user permissions management

The content production supply chain can involve many departments, agencies, freelancers and more. The ability to provide flexible permissions, so the right people have access to the right assets –– and only the right assets –– is very valuable.

Within agencies, in particular, these capabilities can give clients/customers convenient self-service capabilities. It also lets large enterprises maintain a consistent brand message across geographies and verticals, while still letting marketers and salespeople can help themselves to the materials they need.

Search and metadata

One of the most important benefits of a DAM is the ability to find assets after they’ve been created and filed away. Most providers now use artificial intelligence, either proprietary or through a partnership, for image and video recognition and tagging. Vendors are also exploring ways to use AI and machine learning to find insights and automate content transformations based on usage patterns.

Digital rights and corporate governance management

Most marketers license content from individual creators or stock libraries. DAMs can keep track of the specific license terms governing each piece of content, ensuring they’re not used in the wrong market, an unapproved context or after license expiration.

Corporate brand guidelines, as well as timelines associated with particular marketing campaigns, can also typically be managed with DAM functionality.

Reports and analytics

Analytics capabilities allow marketers to trace the return on the investment made in the development of digital media. They can also determine which assets are used most often and in what ways, proividing insights for planning future content creation.

Data storage and security

The majority of DAM providers partner with Amazon Web Services or Google to host their software and their clients’ assets. This means following those companies’ policies for geographical distribution, backups and security protocols. However, some players offer clients a variety of options for data hosting. This is useful for enterprises working with strict data governance regulations.

Integrations

Since a DAM is meant to be the central “single source of truth” repository for all of a brand’s assets, it must integrate well with the rest of your martech stack. Vendors differ greatly in terms of the number and types of integrations they offer. Some are beginning to specialize in serving a specific sector with unique integration needs, such as online retailers using product information management systems.

Explore DAM solutions from vendors like Acquia, Widen, Cloudinary, MediaValet and more in the full MarTech Intelligence Report on digital asset management platforms.

Click here to download!

What are the benefits of using a digital asset management system?

Digital asset management systems can play a vital role in your marketing organization, unifying online and offline marketing channels and leading to more efficient marketing resource allocation.

The specific benefits of using a digital asset management platform include – but are not limited to – the following:

• Improved communication between in-house and freelance/contract workers.
• Improved distribution of assets to clients, partners or other outsiders.
• More efficient utilization of existing resources.
• Increased efficiency in the workflow for internal approvals.
• Speed the conversion of assets into different sizes, aspect ratios and file types.
• More efficient creation and distribution of assets to martech and adtech systems.
• Easier compliance with changing brand standards and licensing terms.
• Ease of presenting a more consistent brand face to the customer.
• Ability to quantify the usage of each individual digital asset, and therefore track ROI on the cost of creation and distribution.

Read next: Does your organization need a digital asset management platform?

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Given all of that promise, marketers are certainly evaluating these technologies and one crucial part of that process is the demo.

Things to think about before your DAM demo

It’s important to set up demos as close to each other as possible to help make relevant comparisons. Also, make sure all potential internal users are on the demo call, and pay attention to the following:

• How easy is the platform to use?
• Does the vendor seem to understand our business and our marketing needs?
• Are they showing us our “must-have” features?

Explore DAM solutions from vendors like Acquia, Widen, Cloudinary, MediaValet and more in the full MarTech Intelligence Report on digital asset management platforms.

Click here to download!

Questions to ask during your DAM vendor demo

The following 20 questions will help gauge if these platforms are right for your organizations.

File types

• What file types do you support, meaning users can view thumbnails and also convert those files into other formats as needed?
• What file types can be uploaded and downloaded, but aren’t officially supported?

Integrations

• Do you offer native, off-the-shelf integrations with third-party systems such as web content management, mobile apps, marketing automation platforms, etc.? If so, which ones?
• Are APIs available? Is access included in the pricing?

Infrastructure and onboarding

• What makes this platform technically unique from all the others?
• How difficult is the platform set up and implementation? How long will it take for us to be up and running on the system?
• How intuitive is the platform user interface? How easy is it for business users to customize the machine learning-based models or settings?
• What is your service reliability guarantee?
• Do you host the content yourself or who do you work with for hosting capabilities?
• How scalable is the platform? How much data can it handle in terms of file size and simultaneous interactions across a wide geographic area?

Pricing and support

• What is pricing based on? What features are included? Are there additional fees (consulting, add-on features, APIs, quotas)?
• What is the minimum contract length? Is there a short-term contract or an “out” clause if things don’t work out?
• Is a free trial or pilot program available?
• Can your platform be white-labeled for agencies or multi-location marketers?
• Who will be the day-to-day contact?
• Who pays if your system/team makes an error?
• What kind of customer support is available? Can I pick up the phone to report problems?

Strategy and product roadmap

• Do you have other clients in my vertical?
• How does the company handle requests for product modifications?
• What new features are you considering? What’s the long-term roadmap and launch dates?

The post 20 questions to ask digital asset management platform vendors during the demo appeared first on MarTech.