Forrester Wave
Netcore’s success as an ESP (email service provider) got recognition from Forrester in its recent Wave report on Email Marketing Service Providers (Q1 2022). Wrote Forrester’s Shar VanBoskirk: “The need to reliably communicate location-specific inventory updates, sanitation protocols, or changes to branch availability — combined with the appeal of a delivery vehicle for low-cost promotions — maximizes email’s moxie. Sixty-five percent of reference clients we surveyed for this report said that email marketing is somewhat or significantly more important to their companies today than before the COVID-19 pandemic. But email excitement can lead to careless correspondence. Surging email volume and data restrictions make preserving email addresses — and using them responsibly to unlock user identity and permission — critical.”
Forrester surveyed 13 email companies. Netcore debuted as a “Contender” – in the middle of the quadrant evaluating the current offering and market presence of the surveyed entities. From the report’s comments about Netcore:
Privately held and profitable Netcore Cloud is the most experienced email marketing vendor you’ve never heard of. That’s because it sends 55% of all the promotional emails in APAC and has just a sliver of business in the US. Netcore believes that email is about experiences, not just messages, and sells a related suite of customer and product experience solutions as well. While we’d love more behind its vision than just “send the right emails, to the right users, at the right time to create a memorable inbox,” Netcore does land its target market. The vendor is growing 40% year over year. Netcore’s campaign creation interface, querying capability, and ability to measure engagement outside of just opens and clicks are competitive with its western platform peers. Plus, this vendor is ahead of the curve at applying AI to marketer workflow. It offers in-line predictive segments and predictive content/offer performance to guide campaign creation. Netcore’s data integration is less flexible than that of the Leaders in this evaluation, so it primarily uses customer behaviors and profile attributes instead of contextual data to optimize message content and cadence. It also lacks packaged integrations with most major content management systems and doesn’t support distributed or franchise businesses.
So, even as there is room for improvement, Netcore has a very strong story for its enterprise customers. Its dominance in the hyper-competitive mobile-first markets of India and South-East Asia has pushed it to think deeper about the future of email. And from these conversations has emerged what I believe is the answer to the twin challenges facing every brand (rising CAC and lack of data): the pioneering innovations of Email 2.0.
