• by Andy Thorpe , February 26, 2015

It’s not a secret that the phrase “big data” didn’t actually bring anything new. Single customer view, data mining, etc. have been around for a long time. But the ability to attain, store and use that data tends to require a customer build in-house or a very expensive, all-encompassing suite.

Subsequently this got written off for all but the larger brands who could use and justify the entire suite. It felt like this knowledge got lost over the generations of SME marketing managers whose predecessors had ripped the knowledge from the archives to save future generations from such disappointment. The catchphrase “big data” was enough to bring these wants and dreams back to the minds and hearts of all marketers, including those who couldn’t afford it.

This time though, those people whose investigations would have thrown them into such hope of a feature set -- only to be broken by the price -- had a much better time of it. They say “Multitasking is the thief of quality” -- and today’s solutions are about specialist software, focussed and best of bread, not the full, all-singing, all-dancing suites.

Big Data is a fragmented solution where you buy a solution to your problem -- not one solution to all problems -- and use what you need.

Added to that, new demands from marketers have caused existing software providers to make more of their data available, along with added features to use.

ESPs are a great example. While an ESP will count each event that can happen to an email, the stats available are often basic. This new requirement has pushed EPSs to compete over data-mining features, as they have over deliverability, visual-editors and customer service in recent years.

It may not surprise you to know that not all features are written by each ESP; some are white-labelled specialist hird parties. That is not a bad thing at all. No ESP has tried to write their own inbox preview software, most just API to Litmus and tell people about it.

The only concern is when brands get bought and solutions are bundled together as a single products, and feature quality is diluted as the suite grows.

A few seasoned ESPs have been bought by seasoned database & enterprise solutions firms or have bought other companies for features they want. There is a lot of confusion over what they actually offer now, which will serve to open the door to more- fragmented solutions where you pick and choose dedicated best-of-breed solutions and expect them to work together.

Nowadays people expect the ESP to integrate more because that is the end point for the data, but cloud based single-customer-view solutions are arriving to sit in between multiple databases. Keep an eye out for them -- they’re game-changers.