The year of the bounce back? More like a year of adjustments. As new marketing challenges reverberated through industries, smart CRM teams, like many of our clients and partners, were better equipped to meet them and pole-position themselves for a strong 2022. Here is what 2021 looks like from here, and in hindsight
2021 was supposed to be “the year after”, The one in which returned to our “old normal”. Well, when it comes to shopping habits and consumer behavior that’s a no-go. As we move forward, new, unfamiliar marketing variants make themselves known and say, “deal with us.”
2021 wasn’t short on those marketing challenges: rising costs, diminishing stock, severe delivery chain issues, and that virus still wreaked havoc on our daily lives, the way we shop, our work habits, and social life. And “Old” challenges, those of 2020, are still here: Travel, hospitality, entertainment, and others still endure hard times; political and social unrest still change behaviors. Lockdowns are still here.
So brands accelerated some projects, like digitization, and ditched others altogether. Marketing teams increasingly came to terms with their bottom-line depending less on new, costly acquisitions and more on existing clientele, investing in Customer Lifetime Value through sophisticated CRM Relationship Marketing. You know, the things that help you make the best of a bad situation.
Some of those challenges, and their remedies, fall right into what we’ve been preaching for years: Invest in existing customers, understand their habits, find the right communication channel, orchestrate campaigns, segment, segment, segment. Regardless of our strange present, and looming future challenges, that’s just savvy marketing.
This is how 2021 looked from where we sit.
Timeline: what the anecdotes tell us
January: Visual Stream Builder
The importance of campaign measurement cannot be overstated, and it’s something we all can get better at. In January, we released Visual Stream Builder, which allows marketers to measure a set of campaigns as a group and compare them either to a second set of campaigns or to a super control group.
February: The Heptagon Award
We launched the inaugural Heptagon Awards which celebrate CRM excellence and recognize outstanding achievements of individual marketers, marketing teams, and marketing campaigns across industries. This one, handing out nine team and individual awards over three categories exhibited how crucial customer relationships are and we saw more brilliant CRM work than ever before.
March: Realtime, Predictive and Historical data meet
Customer segmentation and realtime capabilities are two of the most mission-critical aspects of CRM marketing. In March of 2021, we happily announced the ability to put these two together – with our new realtime segmentation capabilities. Combined with our existing next-gen technology of AI-mapped CRM journeys, it provides brands with unmatched customer analysis, segmentation, and communication power.
April: Mission Control changes the game
In April, we released the all-new Mission Control, a completely fresh approach to campaign management. The Mission Control complements our existing suite of data explorers AND the innovative Self-Optimizing Journey by allowing the entire marketing organization to efficiently understand how campaigns are performing at any level.
Calculated Customer Attributes allows Optimove users to create customer attributes based on existing Activity History data.
This is an easy solution that allows brands to independently add more attributes to their site and improve the granularity of their target groups, add personalization tags, or deepen their analysis.
July: won EGR B2B
Optimove won the Data Analytics Partner category in the EGR B2B Awards for the second year in a row. The EGR B2B Awards reward the very best service providers in the online gaming industry. EGR (eGaming Review) sets the industry standard for how operators and suppliers are thought of and looked at in the industry.
August: Recognized as a “Leader” by Forrester
Optimove was recognized as a Leader in “The Forrester Wave™: Cross-Channel Campaign Management (Independent Platforms), Q3 2021″ (CCCM). This is our second straight appearance in this report, after being named a “Strong Performer” back in Q4 2019.
Forrester’s report evaluated 13 of the most significant independent cross-channel campaign management platform providers across 30-criteria.
September: Announced $75M investment
September brought big news: a $75 million investment led by global growth investor Summit Partners. This was and still is especially exciting because Optimove has been a profitable company since its inception. After bootstrapping for our first five years, we’ve only raised $20 million in the last decade.
October: Partnering up with Criteo
We announced a new partnership with Criteo, the global technology company powering the world’s marketers with trusted and impactful advertising. And, a CRM Marketing hub such as Optimove, partnering with an advertising powerhouse such as Criteo, is our way of offering brands some next-level dot-connecting.The integration empowers marketers to leverage Optimove’s hyper-segmentation and multichannel orchestration capabilities with Criteo’s advanced advertising platform.
To end a year filled with recognition and awards came “Gartner Peer Insights”, a free peer-review and rating platform designed for enterprise software and services decision makers. We scored a 4.5/5.0 “Overall Score” and 95% “Willingness to Recommend” – thus becoming one of only two vendors among the 17 analyzed to finish in the top 5 for both the documents’ main sections.
December: SBC Win
We picked up the Retention & Acquisition Partner of the Year award at the European SBC Awards in December. You might have noticed reading this post that this was not the first prize we brought home in 2021. We’re talking about winning EGR B2B Acquisition and Retention Partner, SBC North America Acquisition & Retention Partner, and the global SBC Acquisition & Retention Partner awards. That’s a clean sweep!
There’s nothing like wrapping up a year on a high note.
Rony Vexelman is Optimove’s VP of Marketing. Rony leads Optimove’s marketing strategy across regions and industries. Previously, Rony was Optimove's Director of Product Marketing leading product releases, customer marketing efforts and analyst relations. Rony holds a BA in Business Administration and Sociology from Tel Aviv University and an MBA from UCLA Anderson School of Management.
