Oracle announced today that it has agreed to purchase B2B marketing automation leader Eloqua for $23.50 The deal makes obvious sense, in that it gives Oracle a much stronger position in the fast-growing B2B marketing automation industry*. Oracle does have an existing B2B marketing automation product, based on the technology it acquired from Market2Lead in 2010. One very specific reason is that B2B marketing automation vendors have always touted client counts as a competitive success metric, which encouraged them to sell to a lot of small clients to inflate that number. MORE >>

How’s this for a definition of B2B marketing automation? In my view, the primary benefits of B2B marketing automation are: It allows marketers to accomplish more, usually at a lower cost, than they can get done manually; It facilitates continuous improvement by allowing marketers to track and measure the results of their campaigns, then make necessary adjustments, in near real-time. Do you have a better definition of marketing automation? Do you see other benefits that marketing automation delivers? Unfortunately it’s a mouthful, isn’t it? MORE >>

I presented my Seven Deadly Sins of Marketing Automation Software Selection during last week’s Webinar with Neolane. Software-as-a-Service makes it possible for marketers to purchase and deploy a marketing automation system without help from IT, but that doesn’t make it a good idea. marketing automation system selection vendor selectionTo replay the Webinar, click here.) If you’re wondering how many companies actually commit those sins, the sad answer is: a lot. Here are some statistics. About half of buyers consider only one system , I’m told by various vendors. MORE >>

Enter marketing automation…. What is marketing automation? Marketing Automation focuses on lead generation with targeted marketing programs to drive awareness and interest in a company’s products and services and nurture leads from first interest through to sale. Commonly used in business-to-business (B2B) or longer sales cycle business-to-consumer (B2C) sales cycles, Marketing Automation is really the marriage of email marketing technology coupled with a structured sales process as defined by a customer relationship management (CRM) program. Tough call? MORE >>

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. But B2B marketing automation products are largely limited to data they generate internally or import from CRM. MORE >>