Microsoft today announced the acquisition of marketing management system vendor MarketingPilot , which will become part of its Dynamics CRM group. The acquisition is significant on several levels. Most obviously, it’s another example of an adjacent vendor finding the marketing automation attractive: following Pardot ’s acquisition last week by email vendor ExactTarget , and earlier acquisitions of Leadformix by CallidusCloud (sales effectiveness), Alterian by SDL (Web content), SmartFocus by Emailvision (email), and Demandforce by Intuit (small business accounting). MORE >>

You’ll also see them in Google Analytics as you review campaigns and traffic sources.  This is critical to make decisions on where to invest marketing dollars and understanding costs related to customer acquisition. Marketing Automation Web Analytics campaign tracking crm Salesforce.com utm 'We wanted to share the details  on a new report we’ve just added to LoopFuse – the “UTM Source” campaign report.  UTM codes can be passed to LoopFuse when you create custom campaign elements for tracking purposes.  Enjoy! MORE >>

Why would you not want to understand the total impact a loyal customer can have on your acquisition and retention efforts based on this calculation? Our approach to this problem is to leverage customer and marketing information using analytics to come up with what we call the “Loyalty Metric,” a measurement that allows clients to make business decisions based on a real and accurate lifetime views of the customer, not just a 12-month or even 60-month snapshot. Bill Harriss. Makes sense, right? The Challenge. that can stand in the way. The Breakthrough. Image Credits: [link]. MORE >>

Upon seeing the online media frenzy about the announcement of IBM’s intention to buy Unica, it was hard for me not to create a blog post of my own about the pending acquisition. Four years ago, when we were first raising money to found Marketo, many prospective investors expressed the opinion that marketing automation was a “failed category”, or was unnecessary, or was just something that the big CRM vendors would get around to some day.  This is surely one of the reasons IBM is interested in this acquisition.  This announcement is exciting although not surprising to me.  MORE >>

Summary: One way to understand consolidation and competitive trends affecting marketing software is to look at systems across several dimensions: how closely they relate to customers; whether they are operational or analytical; and whether they support online or offline activities. On Wednesday, IBM announced formal completion of its acquisition of Unica. The circle surrounding that holds CRM systems, which deal with identified customers as well as prospects. Tags: industry consolidation demand generation marketing automation analytical systems Coincidence? MORE >>