2024 In Review: Customer-Centric Product Innovation From SAP Emarsys

As a leader in omnichannel marketing, we continue to focus on empowering marketers to engage customers seamlessly across multiple channels. With a majority of our customers running omnichannel campaigns we’ve expanded our omnichannel capabilities to help brands meet their audiences wherever they are, ensuring consistent and personalized experiences. To name a few: 

• Conversational Messaging: WhatsApp: Now with support for rich media, personalization and CTA capabilities, this channel is poised to become a cornerstone for global customer engagement.
• LinkedIn and TikTok Ads: Enable marketers to extend their campaigns and target audiences on the social platforms where they spend the most time.
• Mobile Wallet Enhancements: Unlock dynamic updates to existing passes and add expiration dates ensured timely and relevant interactions, to drive online to offline engagements.

Building on our industry recognized leadership in personalization for the past five years, we continued to innovate in this area in 2024. Our team keeps their eye on empowering marketers to tailor their campaigns to be more relevant and consistent across any channel. That’s a key focus of our omnichannel and AI capabilities.

Omnichannel Personalization

The name of the game continues to be creating personalized experiences for customers at scale, and customization needs to be connected across touchpoints so that prospects and customers can feel seen and understood. To that end, we’ve continued to expand our omnichannel personalization tools. 

• Personalization Tokens: Expanded support in Conversational and In-app channels
• Reusable Content Blocks for Email: Enable marketers to save, reuse and adapt high-performing content across campaigns
• Account-based Targeting via LinkedIn Ads: Target companies and the key decision makers with precise, value-driven messages

At SAP Emarsys, we work with some of the largest, global brands like Home Depot, PUMA, and John Frieda, who require enterprise-grade solutions to meet the demands of their global and multi-faceted operations. My team and the broader SAP Emarsys family continues to deliver on this front with highly impactful features for data and account management, collaboration, and productivity across business units, brands and regions. 

• Unified Dashboard: Offer a high-level consolidated view of customer engagement and campaign analytics across business units for fast comparison.
• Marketing Area Development (Internal Pilot): Allow teams to separate data and content by region, brand or product line and tailor different marketing strategies.
• Asset Tagging (Pilot) & Distribution: Enable categorization and distribution of high performing content, campaigns, and automations between regions or business lines to  improve asset management and efficiency.
• Open Data & Flexible Analytics: Share marketing data in preferred analytics applications and embed the charts back into SAP Emarsys to streamline analysis. 
• Multi-Currency Conversion (Pilot): Work with multiple currencies in a single account with automatic conversion to simplify global campaign management and ensure accurate revenue reporting.
• UI Translation: With a near 100% translation rate of SAP Emarsys product application UI we made Emarsys more accessible to global teams than ever before. (See supported languages)

Although we’ve built SAP Emarsys to serve our customers’ marketing needs in many ways, we also realize there is no such thing as a one-stop shop. It’s why we further invested in our open ecosystem and extensible technology approach,strengthening integrations and partnerships that allow marketers to work seamlessly with their existing technology stacks.

• CDP Connectors: Facilitate seamless data flow between additional market leading CDPs including SAP and mParticle.
• Tactics Marketplace Expansion: Unlock additional marketing opportunities and accelerate time to launch with pre-built campaign automations based on Mention Me, Annex Cloud, and optilyz partner integrations.
• Google Analytics Integration: Use Google Analytics information within SAP Emarsys to create segments and power automation programs.
• API Authentication with OAuth 2.0: Deliver enhanced security with self-serve setup for simplified connectivity and industry-standard protocols.

These advancements ensured that marketers could integrate SAP Emarsys with confidence, whether leveraging SAP tools or third-party solutions. Our roadmap calls for even more adaptability and scalability no matter what a customer’s martech stack looks like, making SAP Emarsys the obvious plug-and-play solution that gets companies up and running quickly to seamlessly execute omnichannel campaigns that convert.

Not every day is Black Friday, but every Black Friday should run as smoothly as any other day. This past Black Friday, we saw a decline in support requests despite a rise in messages and traffic. We have a commitment to providing reliable performance not just during regular business, but also during peak times. This led to our most successful Black Friday and Cyber Monday yet in 2024.

Black Friday-Cyber Monday Performance at a glance:

• 2.2 billion messages sent, with 371 million messages opened across all channels on Black Friday alone.
• 230M API calls processed seamlessly while sending 1.8 billion messages on Cyber Monday.
• 173 million messages generated per hour at peak speeds, ensuring inbox delivery ahead of competitors.
• A 28% decline in support requests year-over-year, reflecting improved reliability and scalability.

When every second counts, SAP Emarsys delivered on its promise of stability and speed, empowering marketers to focus on their prospects and buyers without disruption. This remains our ongoing commitment to our customers no matter the size of their database or the complexity of their campaign.

In his 18 years in the Software Industry, Stefan worked as Product Strategiest, Product Manager, and Product Leader across various lines of business and application domains at SAP. Since 2015, his focus has been on advertising and marketing technology. Before joining Emarsys in 2021, he had the role of Head of Product for SAP Marketing Cloud. He has a PhD in Business Information Systems. Stefan lives with his family in Heidelberg, Germany.