Zoho Unifies Marketing Operations with New Platform Driving Business Growth and Improved Customer Experience

Unification of marketing capabilities promotes collaboration and visibility across all marketing stakeholders, streamlining tasks and improving outcomes for campaign management, reporting, and customer experiences

Austin, Texas - May 10, 2022 — Today, Zoho Corporation, a leading global technology company, announced Zoho Marketing Plus, a new unified platform that brings together marketing activities across campaign ideation, creation, execution, management, and measurement, providing stakeholders across the entire marketing organization with a single, shared view of critical information for improved collaboration and results. The new marketing platform increases the effectiveness of digital marketing strategies by giving marketing leaders a deeper understanding of customer preferences and behaviors so they can deliver dynamic, high-value customer experiences that drive brand affinity and customer happiness.

"Our previous marketing solution required time-consuming and costly customization and engineering support just to provide experiences for our customers that didn't scale or produce meaningful insights," said Sundeep MV, Chief Marketing Officer for Techademy. "We embraced Zoho Marketing Plus, integrated Zoho CRM, and now we have a full-stack, unified sales and marketing solution wherein every relevant stakeholder in the organization is armed with the data and tools to increase engagement and drive customer experience. Our evangelism, marketing, pre-sales, and sales teams collaborate within a single dashboard on the platform, which houses all of the content and data we use to derive actionable insights and grow the business."

CMOs require their teams to leverage technology solutions that capture customer insights in ways that add value both to the business and customers. Through automation and business intelligence, the platform synchronizes engagement data to help marketing teams better understand customers, make more informed decisions, and ultimately drive better results, growth, and revenue.

"Consumers and digital marketing continue to evolve at warp-speed, and marketers are struggling to keep up. It's becoming increasingly difficult to properly manage multiple campaigns, channels, customer profiles, data, and ROI," said Mani Vembu, Chief Operating Officer at Zoho. "The complexity of data and personalization at-scale only raises pressure on marketers and CMOs to deliver effective campaigns and revenue. By eliminating redundancies and confusion arising from multiple siloed solutions, Zoho Marketing Plus maximizes productivity and teamwork, allowing marketers to stay nimble and collaborative amid evolving customer needs. When marketers aren't bogged down by operations, they can deliver creative campaigns that promote meaningful relationships between the brand and customers."

The unified platform empowers marketing teams to build continuous and consistent experiences for end customers and deliver more personalized journeys through:

Expand App Building to Solution Building

• Improved Collaboration Across Campaigns - Marketing teams will be able to connect and collaborate on various projects in tandem and with ease, enabling users to create, manage, execute, and monitor individual activities, across different stakeholders, and accurately track the progress of each task and brand asset. The platform delivers a strong creative suite that empowers teams to develop and improve marketing assets through comments, with the ability to maintain version control with flexible sharing capabilities for both internal and external stakeholders.
• Streamlined Management of Marketing Projects - Brand Studio eliminates the need for siloed solutions by serving as the centralized workplace where marketing campaigns can be created and managed. Users strengthen the brand from a single, unified platform where they can oversee all marketing strategies and progress. Capabilities like Brand Assets, powered by Zoho Workdrive, for example, help digital marketers better manage documents and assets, serving as the repository for all project support materials.
• Unified Digital Brand Asset Creation and Repository - Documents, presentations, sheets, videos, and other files can be kept in a single shared space, making assets easy to locate, reuse, or share. Machine-learning-powered search capabilities streamline team efforts, quickly and accurately locating the correct file.
• Strong Marketing Automation Capabilities - Customer insights are surfaced through AI-powered data analysis, which activates marketers to design the journeys customer respond to best. The platform properly tracks engagement and response data of customers, giving marketing teams insights to improve their journeys over time. This clear and granular understanding of customer behaviors gives marketers the ability to collaborate with customers like never before, ultimately delivering experiences that speak to their unique wants and needs.
• Omnichannel Engagement - Customers bounce between channels and devices regularly, yet marketing teams can be ill-equipped to adapt to this rapid movement. Zoho enables marketing teams to access and manage all channels, driving better connections with customers and brand engagement. Email campaigns, social media, customer surveys, webinars, events, and more can all be created and managed from one single interface within the platform.
• Supported Integrations - Zoho's new marketing platform supports strong integrations with third-party solutions, making it easy to share data and insights where needed. For example, sales teams can connect insights from Zoho CRM to existing systems like Salesforce, Microsoft, HubSpot, and more to help measure how much marketing spend is converting to sales. Other key integrations across finance, commerce, and event management strengthen the connections between apps that marketers already have in their arsenal. Platform integrations include Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Google Analytics, Google Search console, YouTube, Survey Monkey; on the finance side it integrates with QuickBooks, Xero, Stripe; on the commerce front it integrates with WooCommerce and Shopify; and on the events front, it integrates with Eventbrite. Integrations can be accessed via Zoho Marketplace from the Campaigns and Analytics sections of the platform.
• Accurate and Real-Time Measurement - Real-time data aggregation and analytics deliver business intelligence that helps marketing teams and leaders determine true marketing ROI. Integrations further support a more accurate view of customer impact, ROI, and revenue growth projections.

"Zoho’s marketing platform goes a long way towards consolidating the fragmented technology stack marketers use to create and optimize customer experiences. Instead of a myriad of point solutions, marketers are increasingly looking for integrated applications that work smoothly in concert to help them execute campaigns and measure results," said Keith Dawson, Vice President & Research Director at Ventana Research. "Zoho’s platform simplifies the stack while also connecting marketing tools to the breadth of the expansive Zoho suite, a significant benefit for marketers and their peers building innovative experiences."

The unified platform includes a vast array of integrated capabilities aimed at helping digital marketers achieve greater results through simplified processes, tighter collaboration, shared assets, and consistent data. Zoho Marketing Plus combines the capabilities of multiple Zoho applications including Campaigns,Social , Webinar, Analytics, Marketing Automation , Workdrive, PageSense, Survey, and Backstage. This newest iteration of Marketing Plus will continue to evolve through tighter integrations with existing Zoho tools such as Cliq, as well as new apps including LandingPage, a no-code page builder that enables marketers to create high-converting website landing pages in minutes without needing a developer-level skillset.

Pricing and Availability

Zoho Marketing Plus is available immediately with a starting price of $25/month, billed annually. For more information, please visit www.zoho.com/marketingplus/

Additional Statements

Liz Miller, VP & Principal Analyst, Constellation Research

“Marketing is the growth engine for the modern enterprise, but the complexity of the marketing technology stack has started to get in the way of realizing that growth. Modern marketing teams want tools and technologies that empower a far more collaborative, connected and organic approach to marketing operations. This is where Zoho's marketing platform delivers, connecting the complex dots of marketing into a single, streamlined pane of glass.”

Gerry Murray, Research Director, IDC

"In the past, marketers had little choice but to adopt best of breed tools over time and cobble them together. For many organizations, ‘best of breed’ has become ‘fragmentation by design’ which makes marketing operations complex and inefficient. The days of separate tools for every channel, every analysis, and every interaction are over. Today, marketers need open solutions like Zoho's marketing platform with integrated capabilities for omnichannel marketing, data management, analytics, and more.”

Charles Araujo, Publisher & Principal Analyst of The Digital Experience Report

“With its unified marketing platform, Zoho is tapping into an emerging market trend towards integration and collaboration. The fact is that customers — whether businesses or consumers — do not view their interactions with an organization in silos. To them, it’s a continuous set of interactions that makeup the totality of their customer experience. The problem for most marketers, however, is that those interactions are enabled by a vast collection of disconnected tools, all but ensuring poor execution and even worse experiences. By bringing everything a marketing team needs together within a single platform and management interface, Zoho’s customers will be well positioned to focus their energy on creating campaigns, engagements, and interactions that delight and wow their customers.”

Laurie McCabe, Co-Founder and Partner, SMB Group

"Marketing should be a team sport -- marketers need shared visibility across different campaigns, channels, customer profiles, and data to provide a personalized experience for customers. Too often, however, SMBs are using different, disjointed marketing tools that put friction into the process. Zoho Marketing Plus brings all of the different marketing tools that SMBs need into one unified platform--helping marketing teams provide better experiences for customers, and get the insights they need to continually improve their brands."

Shelly Kramer, Founding Partner and Principal Analyst, Futurum Research

"Marketing today is both more complex and more critical to business success than ever before. CMOs and their teams need tools that allow them to easily unify and connect all parts of the business, get the data they need when they need it, and which ultimately help make their marketing initiatives more successful. We've taken a deep dive into Zoho's Marketing Platform and it checks all the right boxes in exciting ways."

Cameron Marsh, Senior Analyst, Nucleus Research

“Modern marketing consists of multiple channels across various business stakeholders and messaging continuity is a must. Zoho’s new marketing platform provides a unified suite with built-in omnichannel engagement and marketing tools. This will drive productivity within the marketing team and increase overall visibility.”

Thomas Wieberneit, CEO of Ahead CRM

"Zoho Marketing Plus is a promising solution. It offers a wide range of functionality that marketers need for successful activities across channels. Looking into the roadmap, Zoho is well on track to provide even more value to marketing departments."

From Rebecca Wettemann, Founder of Valoir

"As marketers navigate new regulatory and customer trust challenges, a unified platform with integrated collaboration, asset management, and audit trails are key for both marketing outcomes and minimized risk. Marketing Plus enables a common approach across multiple channels to reduce the burden on marketers and enable them to focus on optimizing engagement."

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