Buyer’s Guide: Marketing Automation Systems and GDPR Readiness

The KuppingerCole Buyer’s Guide for Marketing Automation helps organizations streamline vendor selection by focusing on high-impact evaluation areas: use cases, functional criteria (with a strong emphasis on GDPR), non-functional criteria, technical and organizational prerequisites, and key vendor questions. It is positioned as a structured starting point rather than a complete selection methodology, guiding teams from identifying primary use cases through scoring vendors, asking targeted follow-up questions, shortlisting, and then continuing with deeper RFIs and proofs of concept while ensuring prerequisites are in place.

The guide frames marketing digitalization and omni-channel customer journeys as irreversible shifts that drive major organizational change. Successful marketing automation increasingly requires close cooperation across marketing, sales, product management, e-commerce, IT, and also information security, legal, and privacy roles. It contrasts past best-of-breed tool stacks and separated “classic vs. digital” marketing with today’s need for integrated orchestration across inbound and outbound channels, analytics, automation, and commerce.

KuppingerCole segments the market into integrated marketing automation suites versus specialized tools (email, social, ads, SEO, analytics), with the guide focusing on integrated solutions. It highlights blurred boundaries between marketing automation, CRM, and e-commerce, often addressed either through broad platforms or interfaces, and notes vendor expansion via acquisitions.

A core theme is GDPR: solutions should support compliant tracking, profiling, consent capture, privacy preference management, data-subject rights handling, and secure identity/access features (SSO, admin authorization). The guide provides a use-case-to-criteria weighting matrix, plus non-functional considerations (deployment model, vendor strategy, roadmap, ecosystem, pricing) and prerequisites covering interfaces, security, cloud/on-prem infrastructure readiness, governance, process definition, training, and service management.

• The guide covers use cases, functional selection criteria with a special GDPR focus, non-functional criteria, technical prerequisites, organizational prerequisites, and vendor questions.
• The document is intended as a starting point to streamline decision-making rather than a complete vendor-selection guideline.
• The market is classified into integrated marketing automation solutions and specialized marketing automation tools.
• The guide primarily focuses on integrated marketing automation systems.
• Marketing automation solutions are offered as SaaS and for on-premises deployment.
• Pure-play SaaS solutions are multi-tenant by design.
• Managed service offerings are run independently per tenant.
• SaaS licensing is often priced per user and based on feature sets.
• On-premises licensing can be priced per user, per server, or by features/modules.
• The top six use cases listed are inbound marketing, outbound marketing, omni-channel commerce, customer journey orchestration, CRM, and consumer/customer behavior analysis.

• “This document is not a complete guideline for selecting vendors, but should provide an excellent starting point to streamline the decision-making process.”
• “Digitalization in terms of marketing is a recent trend that cannot now be stopped.”
• “Close cooperation among marketing, sales, product management, e-commerce, IT and further departments such as information security, legal and privacy is key.”
• “Marketing automation, customer relationship management and e-commerce are areas with blurred borders.”
• “Reporting is key when it comes to marketing automation.”
• “In the past it has been quite difficult to measure the success of marketing.”
• “Automated and event-driven lead nurturing can be beneficial in ensuring a fit-for-purpose customer journey.”
• “It makes no sense to implement a system without defining and optimizing its processes.”
• “In most cases, it is not possible to gather all relevant requirements theoretically.”
• “Some organizations struggle with these topics, not because of technical weaknesses and wrong products, but because of a lack of organizational maturity.”