'Net Features : marketing automation

Less than 25% Use Autoresponders

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 17:20:00 GMT

Did you hear it? Did you hear the sound of my digital heart breaking into a googol of pieces? That's the feeling I got upon hearing that only 25 percent of companies analyzed from the Inc. 5,000 were using autoresponders within their marketing automation programs.

The study, conducted by Optify, examined companies with annual revenues of at least $1 million operating in the Advertising & Marketing, IT Services, Software or Business Services industries. What they found will (well, should) absoluetly astound you.

- Nearly 25% of websites do not offer any type of online contact form.
- Of the companies with online contact forms, only 24% respond immediately with an autoresponse email. Approximately 30% respond within one hour.
- Only 37% of companies follow up via email within one week of form submission.
- Only 8% of companies send more than one email within a week after form submission.

"Autoresponders allow businesses to capitalize on a unique opportunity to engage with prospects at the moment they express interest online," said Doug Wheeler, Optify CMO. "Using autoresponders for your marketing automation -- and using them correctly -- can help you accelerate better, more personalized relationships with prospects and customers. These are basic steps that every company can adopt -- no matter what size."

Optify Adds Closed-Loop Email Marketing

Linc Wonham — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 14:30:00 GMT

Business-to-business software vendor Optify is expanding its inbound marketing solution by adding closed-loop email marketing to its suite.

Optify’s closed-loop system expands the sales pipeline from every email drop and measures more than just click-throughs and leads. The new solution provides sales teams with a list of the contacts that showed the most research activity on their company’s website after receiving the email, rather than just those who filled out a form.

“The new email marketing application is a valuable addition to Optify’s Inbound Marketing Suite because it allows us to execute campaigns to a very targeted subset of our house list,” says Benjamin Christie of GourmetAds. “And when they respond, Optify automatically appends their previously anonymous visitor history from our website to their contact record. The ability to track all of our online marketing efforts in one integrated solution is another huge plus we’ve seen.”

The new addition includes the following key features:

•    Closed-Loop Visitor & Response Tracking: Online marketers can track all of their visitors’ online research activity, driven by all of their marketing programs, including email campaigns.

•    Contact Manager & Activity History: Automatically ties a contact’s anonymous visitor history to their record the first time they click your email.

•    List Segmentation: Segment campaigns to target specific subsets of a master list. Optify makes it simple to create and manage various lists within one account.

•    HTML Email Builder: Create personalized emails through a simplified process of customized templates, or cut and paste existing HTML directly into Optify.

•    ExactTarget Embedded Technology: Seamlessly built on top of the ExactTarget Embedded email delivery platform giving Optify customers an enterprise-class email platform with industry-leading deliverability rates.

Optify’s email marketing solution is available immediately with the Professional Edition.

Add Pinterest Pin and Follow Buttons with One Click

Linc Wonham — Thu, 03 May 2012 15:30:00 GMT

It was never a question of if, only who and when. And now Eloqua says it is the first marketing automation company to provide customers with the ability to natively drag and drop the Pinterest Pin It and Follow buttons to their most valuable content.

Using the Pinterest component from the Eloqua AppCloud, marketers can embed the Pinterest Pin It and Follow buttons to their landing pages with one click. The Pin It makes it possible to add content to a user’s Pinterest account without leaving the landing page, and the Follow button means a user can immediately follow a brand’s Pinterest page.

“We all live in a visual world and marketers know that quality of design often means the difference between content that spreads and content that stalls,” says Steven Woods, chief technology officer at Eloqua. “The best marketers in all industries are realizing this. But with any new platform, there’s initial anxiety. We’re making it easy for our customers to extend their reach on one of the hottest social platforms by making it simple for their buyers to ‘pin’ their high-value content.”

In conjunction with the announcement, Eloqua unveiled its own Pinterest page. The new Pinterest component is available now in the Eloqua AppCloud.

Nurturing Users in the Buying Cycle with LoopFuse & Salesforce

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 02 May 2012 15:24:00 GMT

Marketing automation platform LoopFuse announced a deepened integration with Salesforce, introducing two new enhancements that will help its users make the most of the popular CRM system.

LoopFuse announced the release of LeadFlow Enroller, a plugin which allows users to add leads and contacts into an existing LeadFlow program directly from Salesforce and even displays which programs are active for a particular lead or contact. Features like this ensure that prospects are receiving all essential marketing messages, nurturing them through the buying cycle.

The marketing automation platform is also now providing the ability to create a testing environment through its Sandbox Connector feature that can be used with sandbox functionality available in premium Salesforce editions.

“Our customers are always seeking ways to add tighter integration between their sales and marketing teams,” said Sean Dwyer, CEO of LoopFuse. “The addition of these two capabilities does just that with the LeadFlow Enroller allowing salespeople to directly add or remove prospects from lead nurturing tracks and the Sandbox Connector offering greater workflow testing capabilities.”

The Leadflow Enroller is available through the Salesforce.com AppExchange, and the Sandbox Connector is available now to all paid LoopFuse Oneview accounts.

Prioritizing SEO with Pardot’s Keyword & Competitor Monitoring

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 15:40:00 GMT

Marketing automation software Pardot is offering up some new search engine optimization focused tools (modules) that are worth a look.

Pardot’s now includes a feature for monitoring keywords and competitors within the cloud-based system. Marketers can track site rankings in Google and Bing, see the ranking difficulty, the average cost per click and the approximate search volume for an exact query. Marketers can perform side-by-side comparisons of keywords (filtering by tag or by rank) and even have access to an audit of historical data to track performance over time.

The marketing automation solution is also offering up a competitor monitoring tool, to see how their SEO campaign performance measures up to that of competitors. Users can track a competitors PageRank, inbound links and indexed pages as well as view historical data to view trends over time.

"We're excited to provide our customers with this advanced technology," said Zach Bailey, vice president of products at Pardot."As inbound marketing becomes more competitive, the search marketing module will give Pardot clients the insight they need to gain an advantage."

B2B Metrics Aren't Measuring Up

Michael Garrity — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 23:30:00 GMT

A survey by marketing automation solution provider Pardot reveals that a significant number of business-to-business (B2B) marketers aren’t actively or accurately tracking the revenue that their campaigns generate, a non-practice that can lead to missed opportunities in establishing B2B marketing’s “essential role” in the growth of a business.

For the survey, Pardot talked with dozens of anonymous B2B marketers about their strategies and how they implement their programs, including what they choose to measure, how they do it and the standards they use for qualifying leads.

According to Pardot, as many as 37 percent of all marketers simply aren’t tracking the revenue they generate. By not measuring the results of their lead management programs, many B2B marketers are not accurately reporting their value to their organizations.

Of those marketers who aren’t tracking and reporting their results, approximately 40 percent said that it was because they lacked the time and/or resources necessary to create and analyze these sometimes complex reports.

The survey also found that 20 percent of marketers don’t measure marketing-sourced leads at all, 30 percent don’t track “advanced” metrics, like marketing-sourced opportunities, 35 percent don’t use lead nurturing for less qualified leads and almost 30 percent lack the tools needed to track leads through the sales cycle.

These are pretty dire numbers for the B2B marketing industry, which does, at least, understand that it needs to adapt its analytics approach to a more data-driven model; as many as 80 percent of the survey’s respondents said that they want to spend more time in the upcoming year focusing on marketing metrics, and 85 percent will be initiating plans that require leads to meet a given set of criteria before they're passed on to sales teams.

In addition, the survey found that one-third of respondents felt that marketing qualified leads (MQLs) are the most important metric for them to measure, while marketing-contributed opportunities came in second. Metrics that were less revenue-driven, like site traffic or page views, were considered the least important.

Eloqua Brings Social to Demand Generation

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 19:45:00 GMT

Eloqua, a provider of revenue performance management solutions and a company referenced on Website Magazine's Big List of Marketing Automation Software, has released a set of applications that enable B2B marketers to use social media to foster demand generation, drive leads and revenue.

A quick side note; demand generation is a marketing classification that focuses in on driving awareness and interest in products and services. The integration between Eloqua's marketing automation platform and social networks including Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter is by no means new in its approach, but does show the company's commitment to helping its clients tap into social in order to improve campaign performance.

Marketers using the Eloqua platform can enable prospects to share content across social networks, let buyers see who in their networks have interacted with which content, and even allow them to use social sign-on (Facebook ID, Google ID) instead of lengthy forms. Eloqua customers will also be able to pull in buyers social data from social networks and segment messaging based on influence using Klout and Twitter. Finally, users can also track and measure their campaigns.

"There's no doubt that social media has dramatically reshaped the marketing landscape," said Paul Teshima, Senior Vice President of Product Management at Eloqua. "But for marketers focused on driving demand, social has been a bit like shaking the Magic 8 Ball. With Eloqua Social Suite, those marketers can finally realize the potential of social for identifying influencers and tapping into prospects' trusted peer network, lowering the common barriers to driving higher conversion rates and getting a full view of buyers' digital behavior. With that level of insight, our customers can at last see how social can truly drive revenue performance."

One (All-in-One) Platform from Hydra

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 18:39:00 GMT

SaaS marketing solution provider Hydra conducted a survey of 300 UK marketers recently and found that a third of respondents said less than 50 percent of their needs are being met by their current marketing toolset.

The survey results were announced in tandem with the release of Hydra’s One Platform, which enables marketers to manage and optimize digital performance in natural search, paid search and social media. While powerful tools exist for each of these channels, few are available which do all three well. There might just be a spot at the table for Hydra’s platform if it fulfills its promise.

Several features make the platform stand out including its central feature in WordBank, a keyword research tool for all three primary marketing channels (social, CPC, and organic), and a Natural Search module which provides site specific recommendations of keywords. The platform also provides a competitor analysis tool – something we at WM believe to be an essential component of integration marketing software.

“Companies have multiple people, doing multiple tasks, in different ways, across the same set of words, all with the same goal of acquiring customers and engaging them in the language they use. The One Platform brings synergy to currently fragmented work streams”, says Martyn Jobber, Hydra Chief Executive Officer, formerly a member of the Omniture (an Adobe Company) EMEA Executive team. “We have listened to digital marketers’ needs and the One platform is our response. It is unique to the market and has specifically been developed and tailored to address and solve the pain points they have told us they routinely face.”

Marketing Automation and Lead Scoring

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 20:25:00 GMT

The big list of marketing automation software solutions/platforms Website Magazine published recently as well received by our readers.

One of the questions we received directly from our faithful fans (quite a few actually) regarding what benefit these services provide and the type of functionality to look for when selecting a marketing automation platform. While each Web business and enterprise will be different, a few possible answers today come from the 2011 Loopfuse Marketing Automation Survey.

According to the survey results, "better quality leads" was the most important benefit of marketing automation among respondents, followed closely by a better understanding of prospect behavior and a higher volume of leads overall. The survey also indicated that among most widely used marketing automation features, Email Marketing tops the list, followed closely by Web Lead Capture. Lead Scoring, a more advanced practice, scored the lowest, uncovering a significant opportunity for capturing better quality leads.

“Marketing Automation continues to gain traction among SMBs, especially as they seek to engage more potential customers online,” said Sean Dwyer, president and CEO, LoopFuse. “Within such a dynamic marketplace, neither high costs nor complexity should be barriers to marketing automation adoption among SMBs. Our SMB-friendly pricing and feature set, including a free version, removes cost and complexity as barriers to adoption and allows any company to realize the clear benefits of marketing automation.”

Big List of Marketing Automation Software

Administrator — Tue, 17 May 2011 18:35:00 GMT

Marketing automation software is here to stay. No longer an emerging trend or the domain of a select few savvy businesses, these software platforms streamline sales and marketing departments by replacing high-touch, repetitive manual processes with automated solutions. Sounds good, right? But what do these solutions really enable your organization to do, how can it benefit search marketing efforts and who are the real leaders in the space?

Users of marketing automation software platforms, typically those responsible for marketing a website or business (search, email, social, advertising), are able to specify criteria and outcomes for tasks and processes that are then interpreted, stored and executed by the software. While that undoubtedly sounds complex, the objectives are simply to increase efficiency and reduce human error. One possible cause for a lack of adoption in small and medium size businesses is that these solutions come in a variety of forms with a lot of feature cross-over. Before moving forward it is important to understand the various classifications of marketing software.

- Marketing intelligence software tracks behavior (what activity did the user engage in and where) for the purpose of understanding intent, enabling marketers to improve targeting based on interest and vertical market. Appropriate for any size organization.

- Marketing workflow focuses more on budgeting and planning, workflow and approvals, collaboration, asset creation and management internally within an organization. Marketing workflow solutions are typically designed for larger enterprises.

- Marketing automation software focuses on lead generation with marketing programs to drive awareness and interest in products/services. The best solutions on the market couple marketing technology with sales processes as delineated by a CRM program.

These are very broad definitions of the marketing software classifications that should help identify what type is appropriate for your business and in particular your search, social, email and advertising campaigns. Ultimately, any marketing software should aid in performing functions and tasks including analyzing marketing campaigns (and customer behaviors), managing those marketing campaigns, and organizing and storing customer data. So who are the best of the best in the marketing automation software business? WM has listed a few top tier vendors below.

'Net Features : marketing automation

Less than 25% Use Autoresponders

Optify Adds Closed-Loop Email Marketing

Add Pinterest Pin and Follow Buttons with One Click

Nurturing Users in the Buying Cycle with LoopFuse & Salesforce

Prioritizing SEO with Pardot’s Keyword & Competitor Monitoring

B2B Metrics Aren't Measuring Up

Eloqua Brings Social to Demand Generation

One (All-in-One) Platform from Hydra

Marketing Automation and Lead Scoring

Big List of Marketing Automation Software

Eloqua

Marketo

Pardot

Optify

InfusionSoft

RightNow

Genius.com

NetSuite

Aprimo

Loopfuse

Silverpop

Unica