Sailthru doubles down on web personalization as cross-channel personalization heats up

Sailthru, a marketing technology vendor known primarily for its ability to deliver personalized emails, is announcing new on-site personalization capabilities.

Email remains the marketing ROI leader and the best channel for retention marketing. However, a website visit or interaction with a mobile app allows you to collect much more data than via email. The rich details of what we look at, how long we look at those things, what we download, what device and browser we’re using, etc. provide excellent insight into who we are and what we want.

In our own research, we found that many personalization vendors are beginning to use signals from web and mobile interactions not only to make those channels more personal, but also to improve the effectiveness of other channels, like emails.

Sailthru’s approach has been to focus on email personalization first, and only now to focus more on web. Today’s announcement is about better on-site personalization and better coordination of personalized message across channels.

Few technology vendors today coordinate data and real-time personalization across email, web, and mobile on a one-to-one level. (Through a new partnership with mobile marketing automation vendor Appboy, Sailthru customers will be able to send personalized mobile messages and notifications.)

Sailthru SVP of product Stephen Dove said that the marketing clouds of Salesforce, Oracle, and Adobe are its primary competitors in this category. But with its new focus on website personalization, the company also expects to also be competitive with vendors like Rich Relevance, Certona, Monetate, Qubit, and Optimizely.

As we cover in our recent report, web personalization is a diverse category, with different vendors focusing on different industries, business types (B2B vs. B2C), company sizes, and types of visitors (anonymous vs. known).

Sailthru is effectively making its way up the funnel, having started with email personalization and now adding the ability to create individually personalized content for authenticated website visitors and mobile users.

For now, the company’s web personalization efforts are focused on authenticated, or “known,” visitors. Many of its customers are membership sites, for example, that have a large number of logged-in users.

But what about anonymous visitors?

For most companies, the majority of website traffic is anonymous. Today Sailthru uses mostly historical data to create recommendations, and has no capabilities like collaborative filtering that would allow clients to better create more personalized experiences for anonymous visitors. Many of the existing website personalization vendors, like RichRelevance, Evergage, Qubit, and Granify already offer those capabilities. That is on the roadmap, Dove said.