Email Marketing Service Providers

In 2020, this Wave put Oracle, Epsilon, Cheetah Digital, and Zeta Global on its Leader rung, and sat Salesforce and Adobe below them as Strong Performers. Six years later Oracle is gone from the field, Epsilon is absent, Salesforce and SAP sit in the unannounced middle, and the podium belongs to Zeta Global, Cordial, and Adobe. Two pure plays and one converted giant.

The Forrester Wave: Email Marketing Service Providers, Q1 2026 went live in March 2026, and it is the sixteenth edition of one of Forrester's longest-running evaluations.

Sixteen editions deep

Email has been declared dead every year for two decades, and Forrester has scored this market through all of it. The Q3 2024 edition was the fifteenth, focused on innovation. The Q1 2026 edition is the sixteenth, and the medium is fine. What died along the way was not email. It was the idea that email is a channel you buy a tool for.

The oldest channel got the newest scorecard logic. The Q1 2026 evaluation, preceded by The Email Marketing Service Providers Landscape, Q3 2025, treats AI not as a product feature but as what the report calls "a functionality enabler," the layer that assembles each message from data at the moment of sending.

The report under the name: The Forrester Wave: Email Marketing Service Providers, Q1 2026

The evaluation was authored by VP and principal analyst Shar VanBoskirk, whose announcement post ran March 26, 2026. Twelve providers were scored against twenty six criteria: Adobe, Bloomreach, Bluecore, Braze, Cheetah Digital, Cordial, Iterable, Klaviyo, Netcore Cloud, Salesforce, SAP, and Zeta Global.

VanBoskirk's framing sentence: "competitive pressure, combined with the revolutionary power of AI, is pushing the limits of what the email medium can do." The post spells out four ways AI rewrote the workflow. Message creation now happens per recipient at the point of execution, one-to-one at any list size. Deliverability now means optimizing for intelligent inboxes like Gmail Deal Cards and Apple Intelligence. Data management now offers natural language interfaces for writing transformations. Platform interfaces now adapt per user role and interaction.

Three vendors publicly announced Leader placements. The remaining nine placements have not surfaced in full, and this article assigns no tiers the public record does not support.

The podium the data thesis built

Zeta Global's Leader announcement carries the highest Strategy score of any vendor and maximum scores in eleven criteria: Identity Resolution, Data Management, Data Governance, AI Approach, Innovation, Vision, Roadmap, and Partner Ecosystem among them.

Set that against the 2020 citation: "The Zeta Marketing Platform excels because of its data foundation." The 2026 podium is the 2020 thesis, finally scored. Six years ago the data foundation was a differentiator cited in the fine print. In 2026 it is the top of the scorecard.

Cordial, one of only three Leaders in the field of twelve, holds maximum scores in ten criteria including Identity Resolution, Queries and Segmentation, Dynamic Messaging, and Content Management, and says thirty percent of its research and development spend goes to AI.

Then Adobe, the jump. Forrester calls its rise the most notable movement versus the 2024 edition, on content strengths, responsible AI, and orchestration. In 2020 Adobe was a Strong Performer in this category. The giant that adopted the data thesis is the giant that climbed.

The giants who lost the rung

The 2020 edition, published May 12, 2020, scored thirteen vendors on twenty three criteria, and its Leader rung was a roll call of marketing-cloud incumbents: Oracle, Epsilon, Cheetah Digital, and Zeta Global. Salesforce and Adobe sat among the Strong Performers. The inclusion bar was email revenue above one hundred million dollars, or above ten million with forty percent growth.

What happened to that roster is the category's real history. Oracle opted out of Forrester's marketing technology research in 2023 and has not returned. Epsilon declined to participate in the 2024 evaluation and is not in the 2026 field. Salesforce came back for 2026 but has not announced a placement. Cheetah Digital, now part of Marigold, is still in the field.

The giants did not lose the email business. They lost the data argument. The scorecard stopped rewarding scale of sending and started rewarding the identity and governance layer under the send, and the vendors that built that layer first are the ones on the podium.

What AI did to the criteria

The Q1 2026 scorecard grades AI the way VanBoskirk's blog insists it should be graded: as functionality, not feature. One-to-a-segment became one-to-one at any list size, and the scorecard followed.

The confirmed placements illustrate the split. Braze announced a Strong Performer placement with top scores in message composition, queries and segmentation, dynamic messaging, deliverability, and in-email innovation, and Forrester's line that it has "one of the strongest current offerings in the evaluation." Iterable, also a Strong Performer, took the maximum score in innovation on dynamic messaging and deep-data personalization for multichannel brands.

Strong Performers with maximum scores in the exact criteria that decide the Leaders. The gap between the rungs in this edition is not features. It is the data foundation underneath them, and the scorecard says so in the fine print of every citation.

The critique the scorecard earned

The independent first take from Email Vendor Selection calls the Q1 2026 Wave "directionally right, but not yet complete." Its objections are worth reading before any shortlist does.

The Adobe jump is real but the public record does not fully explain it. Vendor inclusion shifted without explanation: Klaviyo added, Optimove dropped, MessageGears and MoEngage absent. And the scorecard has little to say about architectural differences that decide speed, scalability, and cost at volume.

That is the honest limitation of this edition, and it matters more than usual. A scorecard that rewards the data layer should show its work on the data layer, and the public materials leave that work partly unshown.

Three questions for a decisioning surface

Are you buying a channel or a decisioning layer? If your email program is the downstream surface of a customer data strategy, the Leaders' identity and governance scores are your scores. If you are simply sending well, the middle of this field works fine, and you should not pay podium prices for it.

What does transparent AI mean in your account? VanBoskirk's post says "Transparent AI builds trust and reduces risk." Ask to see the logic exposed for testing, aligned to brand guidelines, before you sign.

What is the vendor's shipped cadence, not its roadmap? The report rewards fast, funded innovation. Ask for the last four quarters of shipped AI releases, with dates, and compare cadences across the shortlist.

Forrester does not endorse any vendor named here, and tier placement should not be read as a recommendation to buy.

The natural next comparison is Revenue Marketing Platforms For B2B: forrester frames this category as the collision of marketing automation and account-based marketing platforms competing to become the same thing, and its Leader won specifically on unifying what the collision produced.