Marketing cloud providers such as Acoustic (formerly IBM Watson Marketing, SilverPop), Adobe Marketing Cloud and Salesforce Marketing Cloud have all recognized the importance of introducing real-time event based campaigns. This technical capability is required to support use cases such as abandoned cart, browsing abandonment and other highly relevant real-time scenarios.
Each solution has developed their own proprietary data streaming service and capabilities to help solve for this challenge. In addition, vendors promise relative ease of implementing the initial “out of the box” scenarios. However, customers are often surprised at the amount of custom development and page tagging that is required to enable even the most vanilla use cases.
This unexpected effort can have marketers scrambling to find the appropriate technical resources to help. Unfortunately, their IT counterparts are often poorly positioned to help, as their existing data streaming skill sets are based on corporate global standards like AWS Kinesis, and do not possess the niche skillset required for marketing vendor specific streaming services.