Market2Lead offers the usual list of demand generation functions: outbound email, Web forms and landing pages, automated lead nurturing, integration with sales, and campaign return on investment analysis. Market2Lead’s approach to Web pages is more flexible: users can either build and serve Web templates within Market2Lead, or they can embed Market2Lead tags in externally-hosted pages. Sales force contacts are, of course, captured through two-way integration Salesforce.com and other sales automation systems. But it’s just fine. MORE >>

Categories for the self-evaluation seem pretty obvious: they would be the standard demand generation functions (outbound email, landing pages and forms, nurturing campaigns, lead scoring, and Salesforce.com integration), maybe a menu for less standard functions (e.g. events like Webinars, paid and organic search, online chat, direct mail, telemarketing, partner management, etc.), build decision rules from prebuilt functions for specific situations, such as ‘X web page visits in past Y days’. price range, and willingness to consider less established vendors. MORE >>

If you look at the Web site of Act-On Software , you’ll see a typical set of demand generation features: email marketing, demand generation (equated with landing pages and forms), lead nurturing, Website visitor tracking, channel (partner) marketing, and lead scoring. In most ways, working with Act-On is like working with other products: users build emails, landing pages and Web forms; track activities through page tags and cookies; do scoring and segmentation with activity history and lead attributes; and pass qualified leads to Salesforce.com. MORE >>

In a third stage, variety diminishes as widely successful approaches become templates for standard configurations. Lead scores can be based on just a few attributes and activities: industry, job title, company size, location, lead source, email status, activity indicator, most recent activity date, and visits to specific Web pages. The system includes a resource library for both internal assets (templates, emails, Web forms, etc.) However, event-based triggers are limited to submission of a Web form. The system provides its own Web analytics, based on page tags. MORE >>

But it lacks other features that are equally advanced: approval workflows, templates linked to deployed content, split tests, campaign actions to update data values, support for channels beyond email, and, most important, any way to direct leads from one campaign to another. Emails, landing pages and Web surveys all support rule-driven content selection, which lets the system send different messages in different situations even without conventional branching. Users build emails and Web pages by positioning objects (text, data entry fields, images, etc.) in layers. MORE >>