Rolling out an ABM campaign is no small task, but research from Demand Gen Report shows that potential payoffs are big. More than half of B2B organizations (56%) say ABM has improved marketing and sales alignment, 46% say it has resulted in a more efficient use of marketing resources and 33% say it has streamlined the customer acquisition path.

The continued strive for a 360-degree view of the customer is coming closer to fruition as B2B businesses are finding innovative ways to aggregate and understand their customer data — all while offering simplified, streamlined customer experiences.

The month of June brought in a heat wave of M&A activity in the software/technology category, and the megadeals that took place could point to future deals more directly impacting the martech and salestech categories.

Salesforce announced new details about its Customer 360 offering, which officially brings the company into the customer data platform (CDP) race. The company detailed that Customer 360 will be designed to act as a data layer underneath its Marketing, Sales, Service and Commerce Cloud offerings.

Salesforce has released four new tools for its Marketing Cloud users that leverage the company’s continuously developing Einstein AI. Unveiled at Salesforce Connections in Chicago, the tools aim to help Marketing Cloud customers increase customer engagement with relevant and timely email touches.

Specifically, the tools aim to help users identify the best cadence, timing and messaging to engage with prospects via email.

“I'm excited that we’re bringing more machine learning and AI into the hands of marketers, without the need to turn them into data scientists,” said Armita Peymandoust, VP of Product Management for Salesforce Marketing Cloud, in an interview with Demand Gen Report. “This new set of Einstein capabilities for Marketing Cloud will help marketers increase their customer engagement. These are all the learnings of making that personalized engagement possible at scale for our customers.”

Available today, the tools include:

• Einstein Engagement Frequency: In-depth insights on how many emails are required to keep prospects engaged. “Every marketer wants to know that sweet range,” Peymandoust said. “Because they want to know if the customer is receiving too many emails, or receiving too little.”
• Einstein Send Time Optimization: Specific details on what time in the day prospects engage with their email. “It’s about engaging with your buyers on their own terms,” Peymandoust said. “We use Einstein with Time Optimization to send each of these emails right at the time that they're most engaged with their inboxes.”
• Einstein Content Tagging: A new tool that helps ensure images tagged within Marketing Cloud for email align with the messaging and the buyer. “That [makes] the marketer much more productive at what they do, by bringing the same type of capabilities that you have in photo sharing to the Marketing Cloud.”
• Transactional Messaging: The ability to incorporate transactional messages, such as receivals of subscription renewals via email and messaging, into Marketing Cloud engagement workflows. “When you send out different email messages and SMS, there are two types: one is promotional and the other is transactional,” Peymandoust said. “We’re enabling marketers to send those types of messages in one platform.”

Ultimately, Peymandoust said that the continued investment in email technology is a necessity, as B2B buyers continue to prefer email as a communication channel with prospective vendors.

“Our own research shows that 64% of customers still prefer email over other channels,” Peymandoust said. “On the marketing side, the amazing part is that they are still investing in that channel because it's still the highest ROI channel — we’re seeing 42:1 return on email.”

Salesforce announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Tableau, a data visualization software company, in an all-stock transaction valued at $15.7 billion.

Perficient, Inc., a digital transformation consulting firm, acquired Sundog Interactive, Inc., a B2B marketing agency. The acquisition is positioned to strengthen Perficient’s Salesforce and manufacturing consulting capabilities, and adds about 100 technology, sales and consulting professionals to the company.

Demandbase has launched the Demandbase ABM Ecosystem, which is designed to expand ABM from single-vendor solutions to include marketing automation, CRM, content management systems, direct mail platforms, analytics engines and more technologies needed to execute an effective ABM strategy.

Sigstr, an email signature marketing platform, released Sigstr Relationships on the Salesforce AppExchange.