Customer Experience Matrix

JUNE 4, 2014

The marketing automation user survey I mentioned last March has finally been published on the VentureBeat site (you can order it here ). And if you really care about marketing automation success, tilt the odds in your favor by buying the full report. __ * I really struggled to find the best way to present this data.

Marketing Automation Services 120

Marketing Automation Services Customer Surveys Marketing Automation Planning 120

Customer Experience Matrix

NOVEMBER 7, 2011

I’ll be giving a Webinar this Thursday on evaluating marketing automation software, sponsored by Neolane. Part of the content will be a list of Seven Deadly Sins of Marketing System Selection. It’s frightening how often I ask someone how they expect to use their new marketing automation system and am told they don’t know.

Marketing Automation Services 120

Marketing Automation Services Marketing Automation Automation Vendors 120

Customer Experience Matrix

OCTOBER 17, 2012

MarketingPilot is best described as integrated marketing management for mid-tier companies. It has a pretty low profile in the B2B marketing automation world, partly because it serves a mix of B2C and B2B clients but mostly because it started as a marketing operations management system.

Marketing Automation Services 120

Marketing Automation Services Work Management Marketing Management Vendors 120

Customer Experience Matrix

JULY 15, 2013

But since late 2011 the company has also offered a suite aimed at marketers, which now has more than 4,000 paid clients. Even in the small business sector, that count would make Vocus one of the largest marketing automation systems. But Vocus doesn’t quite match the profile of standard marketing automation products.

Marketing Automation Services 120

Marketing Automation Services Marketing Automation Marketing Management Social Marketing 120

Customer Experience Matrix

NOVEMBER 17, 2011

Marketers can do a better job of picking their marketing automation vendors if they roll up their sleeves and work at it. Past innovations: a history of advanced thinking shows the vendor understands marketers’ needs and suggests they'll adapt well to the future. Here are some ways to identify a “future-safe” vendor.

Marketing Automation Services 120

Marketing Automation Services Work Management Marketing Management Vendors 120

Customer Experience Matrix

FEBRUARY 26, 2012

One of first marketing automation systems I ever saw – this would be during the Reagan Presidency – was a custom-built dial-up network to distribute collateral to farm equipment dealers. Some of these channel marketing systems focus on lead distribution, some on locally-customizable promotion materials, and some on campaign management.

Marketing Automation Services 120

Marketing Automation Services Enterprise Management Advertising Agencies Work Management 120

Customer Experience Matrix

SEPTEMBER 1, 2010

Summary: So you want some hard numbers to prove the value of marketing automation? A client asked yesterday if I had some benchmark information to justify the cost of her marketing automation project. Aberdeen Group has published many studies related to marketing automation. Here's a bunch.

Marketing Automation Services 120

Marketing Automation Services Lead Ranking Marketing Automation Marketing Qualified Leads 120

Customer Experience Matrix

JULY 3, 2013

It is clearly “all-in-one” sales and marketing software for very small business, combining marketing automation, CRM, and ecommerce along the lines of Infusionsoft and Ontraport (formerly OfficeAutoPilot). You can be certain that this is the first time “Boy Scout troops” has come up as a category of marketing automation users.

Small Business Marketing 120

Small Business Marketing Marketing Automation Services Communities Lead Ranking 120

Customer Experience Matrix

NOVEMBER 15, 2011

I presented my Seven Deadly Sins of Marketing Automation Software Selection during last week’s Webinar with Neolane. (To This would be fine if most marketers were experts at technology acquisition. That so few run one means the most are buying blindfolded and hoping for the best. To replay the Webinar, click here.)

Marketing Automation Services 120

Marketing Automation Services Marketing Automation RFP Automation 120

Customer Experience Matrix

JANUARY 22, 2013

The investment can be read as validation of Infusionsoft’s strategy of offering unified marketing automation, CRM, and ecommerce exclusively for very small businesses. That third theory – let’s call it the “ease of use” school – has been the dominant approach of the B2B marketing automation industry for the past few years.

Marketing Automation Services 120

Marketing Automation Services Small Business Marketing Work Management Marketing Automation 120

Customer Experience Matrix

DECEMBER 13, 2011

The marketing automation industry continues to grow quickly, with many vendors announcing their client bases have more than doubled in 2011. But there’s also a growing realization that many marketing automation systems are used for only simple tasks – often no more than email, landing pages, and CRM integration.

Marketing Automation Services 120

Marketing Automation Services Marketing Management Marketing Automation Automation 120

Customer Experience Matrix

JANUARY 5, 2012

The immediate subject of my attentions is next Tuesday’s Webinar “ Marketing Automation: One Step at a Time ”, sponsored by Act-On Software. Training: The wall is high but marketers can learn to jump higher. Ease of use: Let’s lower the wall so marketing automation is easier.

Marketing Automation Services 120

Marketing Automation Services Marketing Automation Work Management Automation 120

Customer Experience Matrix

JULY 11, 2011

You know that red-hot B2B marketing automation industry? Our just-released update to the B2B Marketing Automation Vendor Selection Toolkit (VEST) shows that client counts grew just over 50% over the year ending in June, compared with nearly 100% growth for the year ending last December. Not necessarily.

Marketing Automation Services 120

Marketing Automation Services Manticore Marketing Automation ActiveConversion 120

Customer Experience Matrix

JULY 1, 2012

The practical use of lead scoring is to decide which leads to pass from marketing automation to sales, or, even more pragmatically, to predict which leads will be accepted by sales.* This retains the explicit stage criteria, which may help marketers visualize who is in each stage and how best to treat them.

Lead Ranking 120

Lead Ranking Lead Scoring Sales Qualified Leads Budget Programs 120

Customer Experience Matrix

JANUARY 29, 2011

Thanks to the heroic efforts of my friends at OfficeAutoPilot , the new B2B Marketing Automation Vendor Selection Tool (VEST) is finally available for online sales. This gets to the heart of the marketing automation deployment challenge, which is helping marketers get real value from their systems from the start.

Marketing Automation Services 120

Marketing Automation Services Marketing Automation Automation Marketing Report 120

Customer Experience Matrix

MARCH 29, 2011

But what I really want to know is what it means for marketing automation. What makes the connection worth pondering is the approach to marketing automation taken by IBM, most recently in the Smarter Commerce initiative announced earlier this month. Not that I’m obsessed or anything. Bad bad bad. But I won’t.

Marketing Automation Services 120

Marketing Automation Services Paid Search Agency Marketing Automation Automation 120

Customer Experience Matrix

OCTOBER 19, 2010

Summary: Alsa Marketing is a late entry to small business marketing automation. It’s harder every day for a new company to enter the business-to-business marketing automation industry. At best, superior support could built Alsa a small but loyal customer base.

Marketing Automation Services 120

Marketing Automation Services Work Management Marketing Automation Marketing Management 120

Customer Experience Matrix

DECEMBER 22, 2010

Summary: Teradata's acquisition of Aprimo takes the largest remaining independent marketing automation vendor off the market. The market will probably split between enterprise-wide suites and more limited marketing automation systems. Many would no doubt be delighted to sell at such prices.

Resource Management 120

Resource Management Marketing Automation Services Enterprise Management Work Management 120

Customer Experience Matrix

AUGUST 23, 2012

final installment in my series of posts on leaders in the different B2B marketing automation sectors, as determined by the ratings in our VEST report. I’ve saved the best for last, in the sense that the small to mid-size sector is the heart of the industry and its most complicated arena.

Eloqua 120

Eloqua Act-On Marketing Automation Services Marketo 120

Customer Experience Matrix

MAY 21, 2015

Just be glad I don’t review housewares, or this could be about rating knives and forks: A Tale of Two Settings: It Was The Best of Tines, It Was The Worst of Tines. Ah yes, in Las Vegas, at ONE: Teradata Marketing Festival, which is Teradata's conference for users of its marketing applications. But I digress. Where was I?

Resource Management 120

Resource Management Hubspot Marketing Automation Services Enterprise Management 120

Customer Experience Matrix

SEPTEMBER 16, 2010

The best I could do was to make the questions as specific as possible. Here’s a typical example: share assets across campaigns: marketing materials such as templates, emails, Web pages and forms, content blocks and links can be shared across campaigns. . - It relies on the vendors to answer accurately. But that’s a healthy debate.

RFP 120

RFP Marketing Automation Services Marketing Automation Automation 120

Customer Experience Matrix

JUNE 30, 2010

Summary: LoopFuse has launched a free entry-level version of its marketing automation system. LoopFuse today promised to “transform” the marketing automation industry by offering a free version of its system. rather than marketing automation. LoopFuse knows that, of course.

Loopfuse 120

Loopfuse Marketing Automation Services Enterprise Management Marketing Management 120

Customer Experience Matrix

SEPTEMBER 30, 2014

Here you go: Technology Evaluation Best Practices describes the challenges that marketers face in selecting the right systems and lists best practices to follow for success.

Marketing Automation Services 120

Marketing Automation Services Marketing Management Vendors Paper 120

Customer Experience Matrix

JANUARY 26, 2011

The good news is, my new B2B Marketing Automation report (more formally: the Vendor Selection Tool, or VEST) is now available. The bad news is I can't actually sell it online, despite the best efforts of Web masters on two continents.

Marketing Automation Services 120

Marketing Automation Services Work Management Marketing Report Marketing Management 120

Customer Experience Matrix

DECEMBER 29, 2010

These weights produced a reasonable set of vendor group scores – small vendors scored best for small buyers, mixed and special vendors scored best for mid-size buyers, and big vendors scored best for big buyers. This changed when I added negative scoring to sharpen distinctions among vendor groups.

Marketing Automation Services 120

Marketing Automation Services Vendors Marketing Automation Paid Search Agency 120

Customer Experience Matrix

AUGUST 16, 2015

The good people at CommuniGator , a UK-based marketing automation system, were kind enough to sponsor a paper along those lines. It's a do-it-yourself guide to picking social media marketing methods. The actual mechanics of relating these factors are something you’ll best understand by downloading the paper.

Paper 120

Paper Social Media Social Marketing High Quality Lead 120

Customer Experience Matrix

JANUARY 19, 2009

As promised, I've written a white paper with the 37 Marketing Automation Best Practices listed in last week's post. Tags: marketing best practices demand generation. This is in the Resources section of the Raab Guide to Demand Generation Systems site; you have to register and then log in. Registration is free.

Paper 120

Paper Practices Best Practices Demand Generation 120

Customer Experience Matrix

JANUARY 27, 2021

It’s easy (and correct) to see these deals as efforts to assemble comprehensive marketing suites. These deals all involve CDPs with marketing automation functions (that is, segmentation, message selection, campaigns, personalization, and cross-channel orchestration). These will likely be large enterprises.

Marketing Automation Services 270

Marketing Automation Services Enterprise Management Marketing Management Lead Ranking 270

Customer Experience Matrix

JUNE 2, 2016

I got all excited when I saw this description from messaging vendor Intercom about new "smart campaigns" in marketing automation that automatically send the best message at the best time in the best channel to each person without pre-designed campaign flows.

Campaigns 120

Campaigns Marketing Automation Services Trigger Marketing Work Management 120

Customer Experience Matrix

MAY 17, 2016

For this one, I finally got around to listing the specific features that ABM requires that are not part of standard marketing automation. This may not sound very significant but many marketing automation databases didn’t even have a distinct account object until recently, making account-based analysis difficult and unreliable at best.

Account Based Marketing 149

Account Based Marketing Conference ABM Funnel Advertising 149

Customer Experience Matrix

NOVEMBER 9, 2015

The system also has connectors to import data from marketing automation and Google Analytics. The actions can include sending an alert or creating a task in the CRM system, assigning the lead to a nurture campaign in marketing automation, or using an API to trigger another external action.

Lead Ranking 120

Lead Ranking Lead Scoring Work Management Marketing Automation Services 120

Customer Experience Matrix

MARCH 26, 2015

Tuesday’s post on the Adobe Marketing Cloud illustrated the complexity of solutions that combine many marketing and advertising components. Despite my best efforts, and much cooperation from Adobe, I’m sure it still misses many nuances of how Adobe components do or don’t work together. email-based targeting.

Paid Search Agency 120

Paid Search Agency Display Enterprise Management Marketing Automation Services 120

Customer Experience Matrix

NOVEMBER 3, 2018

I’ve for years divided customer management systems into three broad categories, which are best seen as layers in a unified architecture. Like message delivery, those are complicated tasks that can easily be the sole focus of a “best of breed” product or products. Let’s start with the big picture.

Marketing Automation Services 325

Marketing Automation Services Work Management Marketing Management Multi-Channel 325

Customer Experience Matrix

JUNE 13, 2016

ZenIQ assembles account data from a company’s CRM, marketing automation, and Web systems; supplements this with account and contact information from external sources; assesses the current state of each account; and takes actions to improve that state. Marketers will also design the actions themselves. Then I saw ZenIQ.

Account Based Marketing 120

Account Based Marketing Marketing Automation Services Work Management Buy 120

Customer Experience Matrix

APRIL 10, 2014

Real Time Personalization already exists, obviously, and will remain a separate product that can work with any marketing automation system. This borders on integration of Web display with marketing automation, an extremely important trend. Every major marketing automation vendor has tried to do the same.

Marketo 120

Marketo Marketing Automation Services Conference Work Management 120

Customer Experience Matrix

DECEMBER 13, 2012

Most decision managers assume content is best stored with the touchpoint systems, while SiteCore wants to store most content itself. Although I just compared SiteCore with decision management systems, its more immediate competitors are marketing automation vendors. The approach to content is a more significant distinction.

Enterprise Management 120

Enterprise Management Work Management Marketing Management Marketing Automation Services 120

Customer Experience Matrix

MARCH 2, 2015

If there’s a substantive difference between the earlier Autopilot vision and the latest edition, it’s that the vendor spoke in 2013 of making it easy to build custom apps for Autopilot, while today they speak of integrating with existing best-of-breed systems. But from Autopilot’s own perspective, its real differentiator is simplicity.

Multi-Channel 120

Multi-Channel Marketing Automation Services Enterprise Management Marketing Management 120