Even the leading survivors, including Neolane (founded 2001) and RedPoint (founded 2006) have their roots in traditional outbound campaigns, although they now support Web, social, and real-time interactions to varying degrees. 'I’m writing this post on my old DOS-based WordPerfect software, to get in the proper mood for discussing business-to-consumer marketing automation.* Still, I’m excited as an entomologist with a new beetle to see another vendor in the space. deep dive left me seriously impressed. The first thing you need to know about Selligent is that while it’s new to the U.S. MORE >>

This brings considerable good news: the micro and core vendors are indeed adding features, especially in lead generation, campaign management, and reporting. Lead Scoring: remember that old Sesame Street song, “One of these things is not like the others”? You wouldn’t expect lead scoring on a list of most-improved marketing automation features, since it’s been a key marketing automation capability all along. We may see lead scoring on next year’s most-improved list too: plenty of vendors still lack other advanced lead scoring features. But enough generalities. MORE >>

The Act-On survey isn't perfect for today's purpose: it was sent to small and mid-size business, listed several marketing automation components separately (email, lead nurturing, and lead scoring), lumped all of social media into a single category, and ignored Web analytics entirely. 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. So, yes, there’s a need for a company like Empathy Logic. MORE >>

The company is now doing more to help marketers nurture the leads its attracts. This involves strengthening its “middle of the funnel” tools for more powerful email, better segmentation and content selection, and enhancing lead profiles with data from social media. These include segmentation, building lead scoring models, and content selection. Back on September 20, I posted various tips from the Inbound Marketing Summit and HubSpot User Group. Here goes. The conference yielded a clear picture of HubSpot’s business strategy for the coming year. What Does It Mean? MORE >>

This leads to different questions than I used to get, including the ever-popular “what’s a reasonable response rate for our emails?” One of the things I’m enjoying about my new role as head of analytics at Left Brain DGA is being closer to hands-on marketing than I was as a consultant. That one came up last week and led me to review my files on industry benchmarks. Without giving away any deep secrets, I thought I’d share the results. found five relevant studies dating back to 2009. But it does distinguish gross opens from unique opens, which are significantly different. Here is the U.S. MORE >>