Marketing automation has a way of growing more complicated without anyone noticing.  A welcome series becomes a multi-step nurture campaign. New audience segments are added. CRM fields change. Someone builds a workflow for a specific promotion, and two years later, it’s still running in the background.  Individually, these changes might seem minor. Together, they can create outdated messaging, disconnected data, overlapping campaigns, and missed opportunities.  As you prepare your marketing strategy for 2027, it’s worth asking: Is your marketing automation still working as effectively as it should?  A marketing automation […]

When a major marketing technology acquisition makes headlines, the announcement usually centers on what the combined companies could build. For the marketing teams using those platforms, the questions are more immediate: Will this affect our tools? Should we reconsider an upcoming renewal? Could it change what we need to budget or manage?  On October 20, 2026, Salesforce announced a definitive agreement to acquire Braze for approximately $5.66 billion in enterprise value. Salesforce expects the transaction to close during its fiscal 2028, subject to shareholder and regulatory approvals.  The proposed acquisition […]

Opening a new account is an important conversion for a bank or credit union.  But it doesn’t necessarily mean the customer is fully onboarded.  They may still need to enroll in online banking, download the mobile app, set up account alerts, activate mobile deposit, switch to paperless statements, connect external accounts, or learn about digital features that make the account easier to use.  If those steps don’t happen, the institution has acquired a customer without necessarily helping that customer build the habits that can make the relationship more convenient and […]

Your CRM data can be clean, complete, and technically accurate and still be difficult for marketing to use.  That’s because data quality is only part of the equation.  The way your CRM organizes contacts, accounts, opportunities, products, interests, activities, and other information determines what marketers can actually do with that data. If those relationships weren’t designed with marketing in mind, seemingly simple requests can become surprisingly difficult.  If those requests routinely require exports, spreadsheets, complicated workarounds, or help from a CRM administrator, the problem may not be the data itself.  […]

Marketing teams expect automation to make them more independent.  A marketer should be able to identify an audience, build a campaign, create a customer journey, make changes, launch it, and understand the results without opening a support ticket every time something changes.  For some organizations using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys, the reality can be more complicated.  The issue isn’t that marketers can’t use Dynamics 365 marketing tools. Microsoft has built extensive functionality for segmentation, journeys, personalization, consent management, analytics, and more.  The question is how much technical […]