SAS is one of just five included vendors identified as a large established player for customer data platforms (CDP) in Forrester’s Now Tech: Customer Data Platforms, Q1 2022 research report. CDPs collect quality first-party information from customers allowing companies to deliver personalized experiences based on actionable data. Forrester categorizes SAS as an Automation CDP, positioned in the largest market segment (over $75 million in annual revenue)
According to the Forrester report, “Automation-oriented CDPs focus on the development and execution of customer marketing campaigns. They provide a campaign design interface, natively execute campaigns such as email and mobile messaging, and embed a decision engine to automate campaign orchestration. Native execution marks the primary difference between automation and orchestration CDPs.”
Forrester gives automation CDP’s more capabilities with a designation of “high functionality” than any of the other CDP types. The “high functionality” designation is given to all of the following capabilities for Automation CDP’s:
- Single customer view
- Content and offer personalization
- Segmentation
- Testing
- Data Orchestration and Egress for Campaigns
- Data Orchestration and Egress for Triggered Interactions
- Reporting and Dashboards
- Native Execution
“As marketers face a perfect storm of customer demand for personalized interactions across all channels balanced against an increasing focus on privacy, the CDP becomes a critical component of the Martech stack,” said Lisa Loftis, Principal Product Marketer for SAS® Customer Intelligence. “At SAS, we have seen this problem coming for years now. We believe our positioning in the Forrester Now Tech report indicates that our products reflect this. Built around data, focused on analytics, and powered by real-time journey management and decision, SAS Customer Intelligence 360 is the perfect complement to any martech environment.”
The report provides details on companies with CDP offerings organized by revenue, primary functionality segments, geographic presence, vertical market focus and sample customers and serves as a reference for marketers looking for a company to meet their CDP needs.
SAS’ Differentiators
SAS’ unique real-time CDP capabilities help brands derive real intelligence from first-party data and act with the speed and agility necessary to meet customer expectations in a new world of self-guided cooperative experiences. SAS CDP capabilities include:
Data ingestion and identity management. SAS has an extensive data collection technology – one that feeds an open and cloud-based, customer-centric data hub. It is an enterprise-scale solution for collecting 360-degree customer views across digital channels, offline channels and third-party properties. Unlike many web data collection applications, which provide only aggregated information, SAS can provide granular contextualized customer-level information on user behaviour (pages, screens and field interactions), capture and send events in real-time and stitch together online and offline information into a single unified profile that can be updated dynamically in real-time as user behaviour changes. This real-time view of customers enables marketers to pinpoint digital activity and respond immediately with contextually relevant optimized offers.
Segmentation and data provisioning. SAS goes beyond the simple segmentation capabilities found in many CDPs to provide advanced models, clustering and campaign targeting. “Do it for me” options can also provide guided analytics and segment discovery for marketers who are not necessarily data scientists. Segments can be dynamically updated with digital activity in real-time, while algorithmic, multitouch attribution lets marketers understand how customers are journeying across all contact points so that you can use your customer data and insights to shape omnichannel journeys. Predictive models, forecasting, goal-seeking routines, guided analytics, journey analytics and decisions beyond marketing round out the AI and decisioning capabilities in the SAS CDP.
Streaming data and a unique hybrid data architecture. Never miss an opportunity with SAS’ streaming data platform that provides real-time, two-way interaction between digital properties and on-premises applications. This eliminates the digital lag time – when something happens on the web and the CDP doesn’t discover it for hours to days. This also powers the real-time dynamic updates of our customer identities and segments. The hybrid data architecture allows marketers to keep their data where they want it and to join online and offline data. It also provides rigorous digital guardianship as personally identifiable information (PII) data is not stored in the cloud.
