There is so much marketing effort going into marketing marketing automation systems (get all that?), They do not, in and of themselves, magically automate all your marketing needs away.  That is the challenge with calling it “marketing automation.”  If you don’t have these three things nailed, stop picking out software and start working on a white board with your team. Executing Actions (lead nurturing, lead scoring, email campaigns). Marketing Automation Thought Leadership marketing software MORE >>

Almost 30 people showed up for the first two Marketing Automation Monday meetups in San Francisco and Palo Alto. The topics for these meetings was drip campaigns and lead nurturing. Lots of good ideas and best practices were exchanged, and I wanted to give you a quick summary in this blog post. You need to tailor your drip campaigns to different audiences. via progressive profiling), so they could run more targeted campaigns. Being in the Bay Area, a lot of the attendees worked for software companies. Another company wanted to automate this. MORE >>

LeadLife released a completely rebuild version of its marketing automation system last month. The best example of this balance, and the most notable change in the system, is campaign design. But LeadLife – like many other marketing automation vendors – found its clients tend to design campaigns as flow charts. Probably more important, LeadLife has also bundled marketing services with its software. For example, vendor staff will design the campaign flows for the client, further reducing the risk that the flow chart will cause confusion. MORE >>

do recognize that they are the best known vendors in the space (with apologies to Vtrenz , whose identity is somewhat blurred since its purchase by Silverpop ). On the other hand, pricing starts at $199 per month for a 2 user system with pretty much all of their marketing features, and you’d be hard-pressed to spend more than $500 per month unless you want lots of users for non-marketing functions such as sales automation or order entry. They focus on email nurturing campaigns and marketing measurement. It shouldn't be hard to figure out which one suits you better. MORE >>

by Jon Miller Marketing automation is a technology that streamlines and automates marketing tasks so companies can increase operational efficiency and grow revenue faster. In other words, companies don’t buy marketing automation to automate their marketing. But while some companies achieve amazing ROI (100%+ improvements) from marketing automation, others achieve more modest gains, and a few fail to get value at all. In this blog, I’ll summarize: The latest research on the ROI of marketing automation, Explain how varying levels of sophistication in usage (e.g. MORE >>