Taking the oldest first: Silverpop International Email Marketing Benchmark Study, 2009 This one doesn’t break out results by mailer type, so it’s probably dominated by business-to- consumer marketers. It breaks out results for several categories, of which the most relevant are probably Computer, Consulting, Large Business and Small Business. The best-in-class, average, and laggard classifications illustrate the huge gap between even average performers and best-in-class. That one came up last week and led me to review my files on industry benchmarks. Signup.to MORE >>

The company’s marketing is tightly targeted at very small businesses (under 25 employees) but its marketing features are competitive with demand generation products aimed at much larger firms. Of the other two, lead scoring is primitive at best (I only saw an ability to apply segment tags, which I suppose is all you really need; the company says lead scoring is available “but we don’t advertise it because we haven’t made it easy enough within the software yet”). That said, the campaign manager you’re getting here is not as polished as the best mainstream demand generation systems. MORE >>

By contrast, most business intelligence tools must pre-aggregate large data sets to deliver fast response. The really good news is you can still get the best of both worlds: work out design details with ad hoc reports on small data sets; then, once the design is stabilized, add precalculations to handle large data volumes. It’s also something that’s done by business analysts with a bit of QlikView training, not database administrators or architects. Tags: qlikview database technology analytics tools qliktech business intelligence analysis systems So far so good. MORE >>

Where the vendors differ is in the details of how they implement the common features, applying approaches that are generally best suited to one type of marketing organization. The chart above shows our ratings for the micro business sector, defined as companies with under $5 million in revenue. As of July 2012, marketing automation vendors reported more than 17,000 micro-business installations, just over 60% of the industry total. The first two are micro-business specialists; in particular, they have built-in CRM and order processing. MORE >>

The system makes it easy for small business to generate leads through social marketing campaigns and track results. The investment can be read as validation of Infusionsoft’s strategy of offering unified marketing automation, CRM, and ecommerce exclusively for very small businesses. The company has alternated between charging an implementation fee and not charging for it – and determined that a paid fee, and the more extensive hand-holding this permits, is more effective at building a long-term business. Starting price is $30 per month after a 30 day free trial. MORE >>