In this episode of the Marketing Automation Moment Podcast, Hannah and Mike explore the latest trends in partner marketing automation platforms, featuring insights from Forrester’s recent report. They also break down Salesforce’s Summer ’25 release and what it means for marketers.
The conversation continues with Microsoft’s new email marketing restrictions, DotDigital’s surprising rise in email volume, and growing SMS engagement across global markets. Plus, they share a clever way to integrate AI, even if your platform doesn’t support it.
Want to go deeper on AI in marketing? Watch our webinar: “How to Integrate AI Into Your Marketing Campaigns Today.”
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About Napier
Napier is a PR-lead, full service marketing agency that specialises in the B2B technology sector. We work closely with our clients to build campaigns, focusing on achieving results that have a significant positive impact on their businesses and which, above all, ensure maximum return on their investment.
About Mike Maynard
Mike is the Managing Director/CEO of Napier, a PR and marketing agency for B2B technology companies. A self-confessed geek who loves talking about technology, he believes that combining the measurement, accountability and innovation that he learnt as an engineer with a passion for communicating ensures Napier delivers great campaigns and tangible return on investment.
About Hannah Wehrly
Hannah is the Head of Business Development and Marketing at Napier and leads on pitching, proposal writing, lead nurturing, email marketing, social media and content creation. Hannah joined the Napier team back in 2017 as a Marketing Specialist after completing her degree in Marketing and Communications, and her role focuses on developing new relationships with potential clients.
Time Stamps
00:00:00 – Introduction to The Marketing Automation Moment Podcast
00:00:21 – Partner Marketing Automation Platforms
00:03:11 – Salesforce Summer 25 Release
00:05:37 – Email Marketing Restrictions by Microsoft
00:09:38 – DotDigital Email Marketing Report
00:10:53 – SMS Engagement Trends
00:12:46 – Insightful Tip of the Week: Integrating AI
00:14:45 – Conclusion and Final Thoughts
Follow Mike and Hannah:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Hannah Wehrly on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hannah-wehrly-b0706a107/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
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Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast – Marketing B2B Technology: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/marketing-b2b-technology/id1485417724
Transcript: Salesforce Summer Updates, Partner Tools and AI Workarounds
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Hannah Wehrly
Hannah: Welcome to the Market Automation Moment podcast. I’m Hannah Kelly.
Mike: And I’m Mike Maynard. This is Napier’s podcast to tell you about the latest news from the world of marketing automation.
Hannah: Welcome to the Market Automation Moment podcast. I’m Hannah Whirly.
Mike: And I’m Mike Maynard. Today we’re talking about partner marketing automation platforms, Salesforce’s Summer 25 release, Microsoft adopting restrictions around bulk email senders.
Hannah: A new email marketing report from Dot Digital.
Mike: And we also talk about how you can integrate AI into your systems, even if they don’t support them directly.
Hannah: Hi, Mike. Welcome back to another episode of the Market Information Moment. How are you doing?
Mike: Yeah, it’s great to talk to you again, Hannah, although we spent all day yesterday together, so we’re spending a lot of time.
Hannah: We are indeed. It’s been a good week, but a busy week.
Mike: Yeah, and it’s always good. Yesterday, we were out at a conference with a lot of other marketers from agencies. So, I think it’s always good to talk to other people, get other views. So, hope you enjoyed the day as much as I did.
Hannah: I definitely did. Talking about sharing views of other people, let’s kick off the podcast. Now, I know we came across an article together, so I’m going to hand over to you to talk about it, but just to give it a little bit of introduction is that we actually saw an article on Business Wire, and they’re actually talking about a new analyst report on partner multi-automation platforms. Now, do you want to share a bit more detail on that, Mike?
Mike: Yeah, it’s interesting. Forrester have just issued their report on partner marketing automation platforms. And I think it’s something that we haven’t really talked about in the market automation moment, is platforms designed specifically for working with channel partners. And it’s actually an important area of marketing automation, I think something we could forget quite easily.
Hannah: Yeah, I mean, definitely. It’s an area that I personally haven’t really explored a lot before. And when I actually read the article, and actually it’s Structured Web, so it’s the multi-automation platform Structured Web, they’ve been basically recognized and ranked as the highest possible in the kind of exceptional growth in AI innovation. And it’s really interesting because I guess without them, there are these partners and channel partners that wouldn’t really be able to optimize and add things like AI into their automations. I don’t know what you think.
Mike: Yeah, I think it’s really interesting. And maybe we should do a bit of a session about different partner marketing automation platforms. I mean, I think a lot of marketers here, particularly those that don’t work a lot with the channel, they won’t know brands like Structured Web or Mind Matrix or in partner or anything like that. And what it’s trying to do is it’s trying to make interactions with your partner companies be more effective. I guess the question is, how much benefit is there to have a dedicated platform to that versus actually just using your existing marketing tools. And obviously, one of the things that something like structured web will do is enable you to share things that maybe you wouldn’t want to share with a lot of your customers.
Hannah: I think that’s a great point, Mike. I’m so up for doing a separate episode where we can delve a little bit deeper into it. But I actually want to move on, and I know I’m moving on fairly quickly, but I really want to have a chat about Salesforce. Now, as you know, I’m always a big fan of Salesforce. I bang on about Einstein. And so, I saw that they’d released their Summer 25 releases, and I was like, oh, I’m really excited. What are they going to talk about? And I’ve never been so disappointed. Now, I get that there is an element of, okay, we’ve got to keep the platform running. And I think if you look at the releases as a user, I bet there’s something in there you’re really excited about. But I do think it’s a shift in pace because it’s gone from, you know, look at Einstein, look at our AI agents, look at all this cool stuff we’re doing. And now it’s back to the real basic use of the platform. I don’t know, am I maybe being a bit too harsh?
Mike: I don’t understand what you’re saying, Hannah. I mean, you can now maintain and support the authorization model with a who sees what Explorer. It sounds really exciting to me. In all seriousness, I think this feels like it’s a bit of a under the bonnet kind of update. Lots of things that you need to make your Salesforce instance run efficiently and manage it well, but nothing that’s any of these, you know, glitzy bells and whistles that we all love as marketers. Actually, I for one, and you know I’m an engineer at heart, I think they’ve done a great job. With everybody getting excited about AI and people wanting more and more features, actually sometimes you’ve got to take a breath and just make the underlying product better.
Hannah: I can’t believe I’m saying this, Mike, but I think you might be right. You make a really great point. Sometimes as marketers, and I am definitely that type of marketer that’s like, Ooh, look at this shiny new feature. Ooh, what does this do? But if the functionality and the basics aren’t working right, you’re going to be so frustrated with the platform. You’re not going to care about the shiny things. So, I think that’s a really good point to make.
Mike: I think the only thing I’ll throw out there is, maybe as a question, do we think marketing automation platforms have reached peak features at the moment and there’s not going to be more features coming out? I mean, we’re not seeing a lot of demand, you know, channels are actually pretty static compared to how they’ve been previously. And I’m sure there’ll be more integrations and more support in the future, but maybe actually marketing automation platforms are becoming mature. And that could be a big issue for some of these guys, because if you don’t keep moving forward, then obviously some of those smaller guys are going to build up more and more features. And maybe we’re going to see this market compress. And I think that would be interesting. It could perhaps give companies the opportunity to look at more vendors and have a broader choice.
Hannah: Now, I think that’s a very interesting question. And listeners, please get in touch if you have an answer. But I think personally as well, its market automation platforms are going to be forced to look at how they market these. So, if, as you said, we have reached that peak, there’s not much else they can introduce. then these basic updates and the releases that they do, they actually need to learn to package them up slightly differently and make them exciting to people who aren’t perhaps a Salesforce, for example, user at the moment.
Mike: Yeah, and to be honest, if I’m running a large enterprise, I actually care about controlling who can see what, who can do what in the platform. And so, updates that we’re actually dissing as being not very exciting, they can be really important to enterprises. I think it’s going to be an interesting environment for the next couple of years where maybe the features in terms of delivering capabilities, they kind of equalize out, but actually we see more and more in the underlying capabilities for managing the systems that mean platforms like Salesforce and Marketo actually get further ahead in the minds of enterprises than perhaps some of the smaller vendors because they’re doing all of these less exciting but very important features.
Hannah: I think it’s definitely one to watch, Mike, for sure. Now, let’s move on because I have some news for you, which I think you’re just going to be shocked at, and that is that we are once again at the death of email marketing. Now, in all seriousness, I came across a news article, and I’m sure a lot of marketers have seen this by now, but Microsoft has announced that they are joining Yahoo and Google in their email marketing restrictions. So, they are aligning with the new guidelines, so with both emails, you know, marketers could be seeing more emails get rejected or put into spam. Now, I think it’ll be interesting to see the perception of this in the market, but I’m intrigued. What do you think?
Mike: Well, I mean, clearly, it’s the end of email. Again, I think it’s actually quite interesting. It’s really easy for people to freak out. Yes, you can end up with maybe some more emails being rejected or going into spam. However, as a B2B marketer, let’s look at what Microsoft is saying. So what they’re saying is people who send more than 5,000 emails to any of the outlook.com domain, so that includes things like live.com, Hotmail. Does anyone have a Hotmail address anymore? I don’t know anyone who has a Hotmail address. Anyway, it includes these addresses which are primarily consumer. Now, for marketers, I think the concern is that there will be some customers that you’re marketing to or prospects that actually use one of these free email addresses, whether it’s Microsoft’s domain or whether it’s Google, to route all of their marketing information to. We see this happen quite a lot. And it’s going to be harder to get through to those people. But actually, and I think, you know, you and I know this, and maybe no one wants to admit it. If someone’s using a free disposable email address, when they register for things to receive all the marketing information, actually, they’re probably not looking at it, they’re probably not someone you really care about. What do you think?
Hannah: I mean, I couldn’t agree more, Mike. I think it’s really going to come down to the use of emails. And I think marketers as well will start to blame that, you know, God, my emails are just not being read. We’re not getting the results. And they’ll forget to look at the content and they’ll forget to look at their subject lines. And this will be the blame of what everything is going wrong but it’s really the people that you care about and the people that are filling in and often when people are filling in content and they’re sharing their information actually you know they’re serious if they’re sharing their work email and that’s very different than as you mentioned these yahoo emails these Hotmail emails if they’re out there still so I think my word of advice would be to marketers is don’t blame it, still please look at your emails, still look at optimizations. Just because this happened doesn’t mean that this is the blame for your results.
Mike: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, maybe we could invent some new theory here. 20% of the email addresses in your database that are active are going to give you 80% of the results. We could call it, I don’t know, the 80-20 rule, something new.
Hannah: Well, let’s move on, Mike, because, you know, we’ve just spoke quite a bit about email and actually related very well into this is a new report from Dot Digital. Now, this is focused solely really on a bit of email, bit of SMS engagement. But what I thought was really interesting is that the results actually revealed that email send volumes have increased year on year. So, the report actually said it’s increased globally by 23.9%. And I thought that was really interesting because even with these guidelines, actually we’re seeing a growth and you’re still seeing marketers use email as their main function of contacting the people they want to work with.
Mike: Yeah, I mean, obviously, the email is dead story has kind of been debunked by this. But yeah, I think it’s interesting to see the emails growing. It does also say that email is becoming more and more competitive, getting people’s attention is harder. And I think that means we’ve all got to work harder to create great emails. And that’s going to be a big challenge. You know, with more and more emails being sent, you’ve got to do more to stand out.
Hannah: Absolutely. And I mean, another thing in the report that I did want to have a bit of a talk about, which I found quite interesting, was that the report revealed that SMS engagement is low for Europe, but there’s actually a huge growth for it in the US and APAC. Now, I don’t know what you think, but this has surprised me a little bit because what is it with Europe never really wanting to really take that change compared to the rest of the world?
Mike: I thought we were all on WhatsApp in Europe and moved past SMS. So maybe I’m just ahead of my time. I don’t know. I think clearly, it depends on what you’re doing with SMS. And one of the issues that we have, because we’re focused on B2B, is that the Dot digital report doesn’t necessarily represent our industries, because it covers consumer as well. So, I think, you know, what’s happening is that maybe in areas like the USA, people are actually being more creative. There’s probably, you know, more companies or more service providers using it for consumer type emails. And that’s getting engagement.
Hannah: I think that’s a really good point, Mike. And I think you’re completely right in saying, you know, how are they using it? What are they using it for? As always, with these reports, you do have to take them with a little bit pinch of salt.
Mike: Yeah, and also on SMS, I mean, I learned something from this, you know, we don’t do a huge amount of SMS marketing, but obviously, you’re not allowed to do SMS marketing at night in countries like the USA and UK. But in France, you’re not allowed to do SMS marketing on public holidays, for example. I think one of the things about SMS is that you’ve got to be really mindful of what you’re doing. You know, there is a lot of regulation. But frankly, if you’re not getting a response, particularly if you’re not getting a response in Europe, maybe you’re doing it wrong. Maybe you should do it better. Maybe you should look at the right time to do it. Maybe you should be more mindful about what people want, rather than what you’re trying to send.
Hannah: Oh, fantastic point, Mike. Well, I’m looking at the time and so I want to move on to our insightful tip of the week. Now, slightly different approach because I normally bring these to the table, but actually, I believe you’ve got one for this episode.
Mike: Yeah, well, I think one of the things that I’m seeing is, you know, we talked a little bit about features and hype around features and systems. And a lot of things that some of the bigger market automation systems are talking about is the introduction of AI. So, you know, using AI to personalize emails, for example. And just recently, I’ve been talking about integrating AI into existing marketing stack. And I think one of the things that a lot of people don’t realize is that even if your marketing automation platform doesn’t include AI features, it’s actually very easy to integrate that in. And I think more people should be considering using AI to personalize emails to get better results, even if their platform doesn’t do it by using external integrations.
Hannah: Amazing information, Mike. And actually, I think we need to do a shout out for our webinar, because you actually just recently hosted one focused on this topic.
Mike: Yeah, absolutely. This is where it came to, we talked to a couple of clients about it, and then decided we needed to run a webinar because we’re getting more and more questions. So, if anyone’s interested, there is a webinar available. And it’s called how to integrate AI into your marketing campaigns today. It certainly does what it says on the tin. So, if anyone’s interested in that, I think, learn how to use your API and talking about things that are going to get people excited. APIs probably aren’t those things. But learn how to use the API in your marketing automation platform, because it lets you add features on and in particular, adding on AI capabilities, I think it’s become more and more important. as a lot of recipients are going to start demanding, you know, much more personalised email, as marketing automation platforms integrate it. If your platform doesn’t, you’re going to be left behind.
Hannah: Great advice to end on. And Mike, we’ve already got a meeting next week. So, I watched that webinar was like, gosh, we need to be doing more within Napier to make sure we’re utilising this.
Mike: Oh, I’ve got lots of tasks for you, Hannah. We’ll keep you busy until the next episode of the podcast.
Hannah: Well, thanks so much, Mike, for that insight and for a great conversation.
Mike: Thanks, and I’ll talk to you soon, Hannah.
Hannah: Thanks for listening to the Marketing Automation Moment podcast.
Mike: Don’t forget to subscribe in your favourite podcast application, and we’ll see you next time.
