Customer Experience Matrix

APRIL 18, 2012

With its usual fanfare, Marketo today announced the acquisition of social marketing campaign company Crowd Factory. The CoreMotives acquisition is quite interesting, since CoreMotives creates a merger of CRM and marketing automation (which I’ve long predicted) rather than the now-standard model of separate systems for each.

Act-On 120

Act-On Marketing Automation Services Marketo Buy 120

Customer Experience Matrix

MARCH 13, 2014

Last year’s biggest marketing automation acquisitions were products for consumer marketing: ExactTarget by Salesforce.com , Neolane by Adobe , and Responsys by Oracle. The system can deliver emails and support real time interactions across other channels. Most other systems do this audience definition outside the campaign flow.

Enterprise Management 120

Enterprise Management Marketing Automation Services Resource Management Marketing Management 120

Customer Experience Matrix

JANUARY 4, 2012

This would translate to around $7 million revenue, for a price of just over 1x revenue, compared with 4 to 5x revenue in other recent acquisitions. This is a clever and largely unique approach, although Right-On Interactive does something broadly similar. In particular, LeadFormix infers visitors' “intent” (i.e.,

Marketing Automation Services 120

Marketing Automation Services Marketing Management Marketing Automation Automation 120

Customer Experience Matrix

DECEMBER 22, 2010

Summary: Teradata's acquisition of Aprimo takes the largest remaining independent marketing automation vendor off the market. other recent marketing system acquisitions, and wide knowledge that Aprimo was eager to sell, no one is particularly surprised by this transaction. Given the previous Unica deal.

Resource Management 120

Resource Management Marketing Automation Services Enterprise Management Work Management 120

Customer Experience Matrix

FEBRUARY 1, 2010

Here are some quick thoughts on two items: Unica ’s acquisition of paid search bid management system MakeMeTop (now mercifully renamed Unica Search) and Alterian ’s recently-released and excellent annual marketing survey. I say “almost” only because Unica seems to intend to link search click-throughs to a traditional marketing database.)

Database Marketing 120

Database Marketing Paid Search Agency Demand Generation Agencies Paid Content 120

Customer Experience Matrix

APRIL 25, 2013

Similarly, there have long been specialized systems for real-time interaction management (such as Infor Interaction Advisor and Oracle Real Time Decisions ) and for predictive modeling ( SAS , IBM SPSS , KXEN ). This is fast enough to manage Web banner ads – something not all interaction managers can achieve.

Marketing Automation Services 120

Marketing Automation Services Work Management Marketing Management Class 120

Customer Experience Matrix

APRIL 11, 2011

This reinforced and refined my conclusions from last month’s OMMA Metrics conference , which identified the burning industry issues as: - better understanding of the interactions between online and offline events (both advertising and results), and - better scalability for successful online advertising programs.

Conference 120

Conference Advertising Channels Ad Frequency Ad Exchange 120

Customer Experience Matrix

FEBRUARY 2, 2010

It’s self-evident that digital marketing (mostly on the Internet, but also mobile, in-game, and eventually interactive TV) is a major change from both traditional mass media and more recent database marketing (mail, email, telemarketing, CRM). This is an important topic, so I thought I’d return for a closer look.

Database Marketing 120

Database Marketing Work Management Marketing Management Marketing Automation Services 120

Customer Experience Matrix

JUNE 22, 2011

Offline interactions, such as telephone and retail, are definitely out of the picture. The strategic purpose of the FatWire acquisition is self-evident: to fill a gap in Oracle’s customer-facing technologies, which already had ATG ecommerce and general Enterprise Content Management for Web sites, as well as Oracle CRM and Oracle Loyalty.

Enterprise Management 120

Enterprise Management Digital Asset Management Marketing Management Marketing Automation Services 120

Customer Experience Matrix

OCTOBER 15, 2013

Key findings will be presented in a Webinar next Thursday, sponsored by TreeHouse Interactive ; you can register here. As I mentioned in last week''s post , I’m writing a paper on stages of marketing automation deployment. The paper itself will be available to Webinar attendees.

Marketing Automation Services 120

Marketing Automation Services Marketing Automation Automation BtoB 120

Customer Experience Matrix

FEBRUARY 19, 2015

Since last year’s funding, Ensighten has supported its strategy with acquisitions of tag management competitor TagMan in March 2014 and cloud analytics and predictive marketing vendor Anametrix in October 2014. This approach means the company’s real competitors are other marketing suites and customer data management systems.

Tagging 120

Tagging Enterprise Management Work Management Marketing Management 120

Customer Experience Matrix

FEBRUARY 29, 2012

SAS itself noted the company is now more involved in architectural discussions of how its systems interact with the rest of the enterprise infrastructure. The new capabilities will also create some business changes as SAS competes more directly with companies like IBM and Oracle to embed analytics within operational processes.

Analytics 120

Analytics Paid Search Agency Enterprise Management Conference 120

Customer Experience Matrix

JUNE 29, 2011

They've been pulling these together with an “Interactive Marketing Hub” in beta since last September, which is now used by 500 of their 4,000 clients. In Eloqua’s case, most of the initial applications are connectors with other systems for Webinars, social communities, messaging and data acquisition.

Eloqua 120

Eloqua Marketing Management Marketing Automation Services Lead Ranking 120

Customer Experience Matrix

APRIL 14, 2010

But combined with a social network marketing announcement in February from smartFocus and Alterian's acquisition of social media monitoring system Techrigy last July, all major consumer-oriented marketing automation vendors have now added some flavor of social media marketing to their systems. .

Social Media 120

Social Media Enterprise Management Marketing Management Marketing Automation Services 120

Customer Experience Matrix

APRIL 5, 2011

Whatsnexx offers itself as a radically easier way to manage customer and prospect interactions than conventional marketing automation. The process is this: users first define “scenarios”, which are customer processes such as acquisition, retention or complaints, and "states", which are customer types such as new, high value, or disgruntled.

Work Management 120

Work Management Campaigns Salesforce.com Marketing Automation Services 120

Customer Experience Matrix

NOVEMBER 15, 2007

Another reason for overlapping products is that SAS has made many acquisitions as it expands its product scope. Of the 13 products listed under Customer Relationship Managment, I can immediately identify three as based on acquisitions, and believe there are several more.

Resource Management 120

Resource Management Enterprise Management Work Management Marketing Management 120

Customer Experience Matrix

AUGUST 21, 2009

The new offering is designed to support all stages of interactive marketing, starting with traffic generation from paid search, Web banner ads and blogging, and continuing with visitor behavior tracking, landing pages and forms, interactive dialogs, multi-step email campaigns, lead scoring and CRM integration.

Marketing Automation Services 120

Marketing Automation Services Digital Asset Management Marketing Management Paid Search Agency 120

Customer Experience Matrix

MAY 25, 2007

You’ll recall it drew a picture of several systems (Web ads, mobile messages, email, paid search, unpaid search) feeding traffic to a Web site, which in turn was served by several more systems (behavioral targeting, site optimization, Web analytics, real time interaction management) that manage customer treatments.

Enterprise Management 120

Enterprise Management Marketing Management Paid Search Agency Doubleclick 120

Customer Experience Matrix

JANUARY 25, 2008

Specifically, it added high volume email generation through its May 2006 acquisition of Dynamics Direct, and added marketing resource management through the acquisition of Nvigorate in September of that year. It says those products are now fully integrated with its core system, working directly with the Alterian database engine.

Enterprise Management 120

Enterprise Management Work Management Marketing Automation Services Marketing Management 120

Customer Experience Matrix

NOVEMBER 8, 2006

The substance of the vendor’s argument was that the general-purpose vendors’ technologies cannot handle the high volume of data generated by Web logs and interactions, leading users to buy systems that are specifically designed for Web data. He might as well have raised a “Mission Accomplished” banner and snarled “bring ‘em on.”

Analytics 120

Analytics Banners Vendors Acquisitions 120

Customer Experience Matrix

OCTOBER 18, 2007

By contrast, many Neolane competitors have added these three functions at least in part through acquisition. Nor, so far as I can tell, does it offer real-time interaction management—that is, gathering information about customer behavior during an interaction and determining an appropriate response.

Marketing Automation Services 120

Marketing Automation Services Enterprise Management Work Management Marketing Management 120

Customer Experience Matrix

FEBRUARY 7, 2007

These in turn are always built from the same customer interactions—promotions, purchases, support requests, and so on. The primary exception is promotion costs, which are typically listed separately for initial acquisition. Today we’ll look at them.

Analysis 120

Analysis Comparison Acquisitions Segmentation 120

Customer Experience Matrix

SEPTEMBER 24, 2018

One of the more jarring aspects in Adobe ’s briefing last week about its Marketo acquisition* were several statements that suggested Marketo and Adobe’s other products were going to access shared customer data. Again, nothing wrong with that and not all CDPs are designed for real-time interactions, either.

Enterprise Management 295

Enterprise Management Work Management Marketing Management Marketing Automation Services 295

Customer Experience Matrix

JUNE 17, 2019

Because the marketing clouds are built from acquisitions that remain technically separate, integrations for each component are developed and delivered in whatever sequence the vendor thinks best. A rigorous, requirements-based acquisition process will often favor the existing CDP vendors, whose products are proven and mature.

Enterprise Management 209

Enterprise Management Work Management Marketing Management Marketing Automation Services 209

Customer Experience Matrix

JUNE 18, 2017

Most of the comments I’ve seen about Amazon ’s acquisition of Whole Foods have described it as Amazon (a) expanding into a new industry (b) continuing to disrupt conventional retail and (c) moving more commerce from offline to online channels. This means whoever owns the voice interaction can intercept customer behaviors before anyone else.

Amazon 212

Amazon Paid Content Buy Marketing AI 212

Customer Experience Matrix

AUGUST 1, 2018

This was purchase was noteworthy as the first big CDP acquisition by a marketing cloud vendor. Before the acquisition, they told me some of their clients ingest customer-level detail but most do not. That the buyer was Salesforce was even more intriguing, given that they had purchased Mulesoft in March for $6.5

Enterprise Management 120

Enterprise Management Buy Work Management Marketing Management 120

Customer Experience Matrix

MARCH 3, 2019

This is a normal event in the development of a software category: products are developed as single-purpose "point solutions" and then, after the category is validated and requirements are standardized, the capability is assimilated into larger suites by acquisition (usually) or internal development.

Enterprise Management 205

Enterprise Management Work Management Marketing Management Buy 205

Customer Experience Matrix

NOVEMBER 20, 2012

The postal equipment giant has aggressively moved to become a provider of “customer communication technologies”, making 83 acquisitions costing $2.5 Dialogue and Interaction Optimizer are closely linked, sharing a user interface for campaign definition and both using Foundation to connect with external systems. billion since 2000.

Interactive Marketing 120

Interactive Marketing Marketing Management Marketing Automation Services Campaigns 120

Customer Experience Matrix

AUGUST 18, 2016

Identify Target Accounts Plan Interactions Execute Interactions Analyze Results The next step was to define the system functions that support each process step. Plan Interactions Assemble Messages This includes building marketing messages and importing messages built in external systems. Either approach can be effective.

Work Management 120

Work Management Marketing Automation Services Marketing Management Account Based Marketing 120

Customer Experience Matrix

JANUARY 18, 2015

Customer Management Functions CDPs exist because marketers need to coordinate customer (and prospect) interactions across channels. There’s some investment on the Data layer in data gathering vendors, especially along the lines of acquisitions by big companies (Oracle/Datalogix, D&B/NetProspex, etc.). And what about the suites?

Marketing Automation Services 120

Marketing Automation Services Marketing Management Marketing Attribution Lead Ranking 120

Customer Experience Matrix

JANUARY 14, 2019

By contrast, leading and mainstream departments had similar responsibility levels for traditional marketing activities such as automation rules, data acquisition, and analytics. Mainstream marketers are nearly as likely as leaders to lead customer experience initiatives and to run real time interactions in at least one channel.

Customer Surveys 149

Customer Surveys Marketing Attribution Enterprise Management Personalization 149

Customer Experience Matrix

OCTOBER 18, 2012

The crown jewel turned out to be RightPoint, a pioneering real-time interaction manager since renamed Interaction Advisor. As I noted in yesterday’s post , B2C marketing systems like Epiphany have actually been more popular acquisition targets than B2B products. A new user interface is planned for next year. Neat trick.

Marketing Automation Services 120

Marketing Automation Services Digital Asset Management Interactive Marketing Enterprise Management 120

Customer Experience Matrix

AUGUST 7, 2013

At first I was struck by the coincidence, and then realized what had happened: Nix was up because he had been talking to the folks in Israel, and he replied because he wanted to discuss his acquisition, not my report. Insert image of deflating self-importance]. There’s really nothing wrong with that.

Enterprise Management 120

Enterprise Management Work Management Marketing Management Marketing Automation Services 120

Customer Experience Matrix

SEPTEMBER 23, 2009

Even as analysts are still sorting through the implications of last week’s acquisition of Omniture by Adobe , the industry saw two additional important announcements this week: Omniture combining its data with comScore to help measure Web advertising audiences , and Nielsen working with Facebook to poll consumers on advertising impact.

Enterprise Management 120

Enterprise Management Analytics Work Management Marketing Automation Services 120

Customer Experience Matrix

OCTOBER 31, 2007

Like Assetlink, Infor gives Teradata a quick way to offer a capability (real time interaction management, including self-adjusting predictive models) that is increasingly requested by clients and offered by competitors. Even then, though, real-time interaction flows will be defined outside of Teradata Relationship Manager.

Enterprise Management 120

Enterprise Management Work Management Marketing Automation Services Marketing Management 120

Customer Experience Matrix

SEPTEMBER 14, 2006

Acquisitions form the never-ending background noise of the technology industry. In particular, profit per customer and profit per interaction can only be measured meaningfully with an activity-based approach. Some illustrate such obvious trends they are barely worth noting, while others hint at something important.

Enterprise Management 120

Enterprise Management Marketing Management Acquisitions Resource Management 120

Customer Experience Matrix

FEBRUARY 13, 2007

If the difference isn’t clear, think about acquisition programs: assuming the same cost, a program that brings in 100 customers worth $5 each ($500 LTV) is more valuable than one that brings in 50 customers worth $6 each ($300 LTV). But it’s one of those things that are so obvious that you sometimes forget about them.

Forecasting 120

Forecasting Aggregators Comparison Segmentation 120