December, 2011

Customer Experience Matrix

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Influitive Helps Marketers Build an Army of Advocates

Customer Experience Matrix

Marketers recognize the potential reach of social media, but are rightly frightened that they can’t control the message. Most social marketing applications sidestep the issue by focusing on creating communities ( Jive , Lithium ), monitoring conversations (Radian6 , Trackur ) and running promotions ( CrowdFactory , Nextbee ). Marketing automation vendors have mostly worked on making it easy to post and share messages and to capture social data.

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Marketing Automation Skills are Scarce: Strategies to Close the Gap

Customer Experience Matrix

The marketing automation industry continues to grow quickly, with many vendors announcing their client bases have more than doubled in 2011. But there’s also a growing realization that many marketing automation systems are used for only simple tasks – often no more than email, landing pages, and CRM integration. For example, LoopFuse found that nearly twice as many used email and web landing pages as lead scoring.

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Social Media Features in Marketing Automation Systems: Who Does What?

Customer Experience Matrix

Social media is arguably overhyped as a marketing trend: it gets well under 10% of marketing budgets (different surveys have figures from 3% to 8%) and results are questionable (it was rated the least effective content marketing tactic in a recent MarketingProfs study ). But social is clearly growing fast and has great potential. So marketing automation vendors are understandably eager to support it in their systems.

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How to Assess Marketing Automation Vendor Services Before You Buy - Yet Another Workbook

Customer Experience Matrix

I wrote yesterday about our new workbook for marketing automation cost estimates. Today I’ll describe the other one: evaluating vendor services. Both are available free at the Raab Guide Web site. The problem with services is simple: you won’t use them until you’ve already bought the product. So the trick to evaluating them is to ask lots of questions in advance to understand whether they’ll meet your needs.

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New Workbook: Estimating the Cost of Marketing Automation

Customer Experience Matrix

We released two more vendor selection workbooks last week, both sponsored by Eloqua and available for free on the RaabGuide Web site. One is about estimating the cost of a marketing automation system and the other is about evaluating vendor services. The cost workbook was a particular challenge because the subject is so complex. After much thought, I came up with four cost categories: direct system costs : the actual price paid for the marketing automation software itself.

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Beyond Marketing Automation: Building a Complete Marketing Infrastructure

Customer Experience Matrix

This started as a post about Empathy Logic , a company that merges data from marketing automation, CRM, Web tracking, order processing, social monitoring, and other systems; lets marketers segment and select from this more complete set of data; and sends the resulting lists back to message delivery systems such as email and Web sites. You might think that Empathy Logic isn’t needed because a marketing automation system is supposed to build that integrated database.

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Marketing Automation Interfaces Need Radical Surgery

Customer Experience Matrix

Several vendors have shown me their new campaign management interfaces recently. All were refined, attractive, and thoughtful. Each had subtle features that appeal to a connoisseur: floating tool pallets! Fly-over icon labels! Dynamic menus! But they’re all still basically the same flow charts that Frank Gilbreth (of Cheaper by the Dozen fame) introduced in 1921 and I’ve been seeing in marketing systems for more than 20 years.