Zoho Announces New Marketing and Commerce Platforms
Zoho recently launched a new marketing platform, powered by a marketing automation application called Zoho MarketingHub, and a new commerce platform, dubbed Commerce Plus. The former enables users to execute marketing campaigns across multiple channels, while the latter leverages Zoho’s customer experience, finance, analytics, and intelligence software to provide businesses with an integrated platform for commerce.
“The common theme is that platforms are emerging—it’s no longer about individual applications; all of these are about multiple tools. In the industry we’re seeing features masquerading as products and products masquerading as companies,” says Raju Vegesna, chief evangelist at Zoho. “We are taking another approach where the products become features in the product platform, and we are focusing on making sure that they work well.”
The marketing platform—underpinned by Zoho MarketingHub, which coordinates marketing efforts across channels—aims to provide a multichannel marketing experience and supports more than 20 different marketing channels, including website, social media, text, and email, all of which can be orchestrated to work seamlessly to create unified, cross-channel marketing journeys. The platform also allows users to access analytics tools to measure campaign success: After executing a campaign, they can view reports on ROI and other performance indicators. Additionally, MarketingHub integrates with a number of Zoho apps including Zoho CRM, Zoho Campaigns, Zoho Sites, Zoho Survey, Zoho Backstage, and Zoho Social, as well as third-party apps including Shopify, Eventbrite, and SurveyMonkey.
“MarketingHub brings together all of these [channels] so that they [marketers] can easily—with a single, pre-integrated platform—get their marketing campaigns up and running quickly,” Vegesna says.
Commerce Plus is built on top of Zoho One, the company’s suite of integrated business apps, and it includes capabilities around e-commerce, personalization, and analytics. It enables businesses to quickly set up an online store with built-in templates and allows them to sell across channels such as their own e-commerce store, third-party marketplaces, and brick-and-mortar storefronts. Commerce Plus integrates with Zoho’s Customer Experience platform, allowing businesses to deliver personalized experiences by combining information across customer touchpoints. And it offers several prebuilt dashboards and reports from Zoho Analytics, the company’s analytics platform, including ones for e-commerce and operations.
“If you look at commerce…there is a separate solution for each piece, and businesses are left to put those solutions together…. What we are offering is a solution that is all pre-integrated,” Vegesna says.