Dell announced today that it has added Pardot marketing automation to its list of Dell Cloud Business Software applications. Other products in the suite include Salesforce.com for sales automation and customer service, Adobe EchoSign for e-signatures, AppExtremes Conga Composer for proposal creation, Dell’s own Boomi for application integration, and a Dell-built analytics platform. The Pardot system costs from $1,000 to $3,000 per month depending on the email volume, file size, and numbers of forms, landing pages, programs, and automation rules. MORE >>

So the news here is price. In other words, this is a price cut. To me, it looks like a reaction to the success of other low cost small business systems, including HubSpot , Act-On Software , and Pardot. HubSpot and Act-On have similar pricing to Spark, while Pardot runs a bit higher. Whether Marketo actually makes any money at this price is questionable. If Marketo simply wanted to lower its entry price, why bother to create a new brand? One reason is to try to avoid cannibalizing sales of its other, higher-priced editions. MORE >>

Two common business terms combined describe the an increasingly popular outreach tool: marketing automation. According to marketing research firm Raab Associates , the marketing automation system industry will reach $750 million in 2013, growing 50 percent from 2012. Developing a personal rapport with businesses has been an enduring characteristic of successful B2B marketing, so it seem counterintuitive to rely on automated emails and social media platforms. But marketing automation systems aren’t meant to replace personal engagement. MORE >>

Now that I’m more or less finished launching the B2B Marketing Automation Vendor Selection Tool (VEST) , I can start catching up on the other topics. ClickDimensions does pretty much the standard marketing automation activities: email, landing pages, Web visitor tracking, drip marketing campaigns, and lead scoring. In fact, I (and many others) have long argued that marketing automation makes more sense as an integrated component of a CRM system than a stand-alone product. What’s missing from the list is CRM integration. But I digress. MORE >>

New-ish marketing automation vendor NurtureHQ showed me its product recently. Clean interface, easy to use, all the standard marketing automation features. Definitely take a look if you’re in that market for that sort of product. NurtureHQ hopes to differentiate itself as “dead easy marketing automation”, which it arguably is. Before building its system, the company spent six months talking to current marketing automation users. But I’m beginning to think those marketers were really saying something else. It’s really nice. MORE >>