2013 Marketing Automation Benchmark Report

ContentPart 1: Topic OverviewPart 2: Reasons to ImplementPart 3: Value DriversPart 4: ChallengesPart 5: Performance MetricsPart 6: Success StoryPart 7: Vendor Landscape

SidebarsSurvey StatsBenchmark KPIsCore TechnologiesGleanster NumbersVendor Quick Reference Guide

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Q3 2013

Gleansight Benchmark Report

Contrary to the name, marketing automation tools are only partly about automating marketing. Automation for the sake of automation accomplishes very little for organizations. More importantly, automating mediocre processes just accelerates mediocre results. Marketing automation tools are designed to build more intimate relationships with prospects over one or more digital channels – across the entire lead-to-customer lifecycle. These relationships form the basis for predictable revenue performance, and visibility into how marketing dollars translate to sales results.

Marketing Automation

The tools facilitate digital multi-channel communications (mainly via email, landing pages, website analytics, and social media) with target audiences to collect and aggregate individual customer data across different engagement channels. What really makes marketing automation tools compelling (and where the “automation” really comes into play) is the ability to configure business rules that can trigger and initiate communications with prospects at just the right time, over just the right channel, with just the right message, without manual intervention from marketers. In essence, marketing automation tools help marketers automate more intimate relationships to identify new revenue opportunities, gain visibility into the effectiveness of marketing spend, and unite marketing and sales in the common goal of maximizing profit for the organization.

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Gleansight: Marketing Automation 2



Marketing automation helps to centralize multi-channel customer data so marketers can infer buying intent, automate lead nurturing communications to educate potential buyers, or route the hottest leads directly to CRM and alert sales accordingly. This Gleansight benchmark report explores the use of marketing automation in the context of Top Performing organization to identify what they do differently with the tools, how they maximize a return on investment, and how they measure the success of initiatives. It turns out Top Performing organizations are 5x more likely than Everyone Else to use marketing automation. But it’s not just about using the tools, it’s about using them in the right way, because as Top Performers can attest to, there’s a lot more to extracting benefits from marketing automation after the initial implementation.

Research over the last five years has indicated that, in general, marketers are experiencing diminishing returns from traditional tactics such as large volume email campaigns. Target audiences are inundated with information, and not all of it is useful in the context of making a purchase decision. Many organizations have already recognized the impending need to shift marketing strategy away from generic communications and toward hyper-personalized engagement – engagement that is designed to earn a dialogue and build relationships with prospects. New tactics such as inbound marketing are proving effective because they shift marketing spend away from broadcast messaging to embrace a customer centric approach that fosters relationships grounded in personalized and relevant communications. Content forms the basis of these relationships. But content proliferation is a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, buyers have access to more information. On the other hand, more information makes it easy to become overwhelmed. That makes it extremely difficult for marketers to rise above the noise. It’s no longer about segmenting your target audience based on demographic attributes, it’s about segmenting the target audience based on demographic attributes AND the buyer’s journey – and marketing automation is the only tool on the market that can effectively automate multi-channel communications based on the buyer’s purchase cycle. Lead scoring and multi-channel capabilities in marketing automation provide just the right tools to solve this challenge.

Survey StatsThe research findings featured in this Gleansight benchmark report are derived from the Q2 2013 Gleanster survey on Marketing Automation.

• Total survey responses: 220

• Qualified survey responses: 151

• Company size: <$1M (6%); $1 - 10M (19%); $10-100M (45%); $100M - $1B (20%); >$1B (10%)

• Geography: North America (95%); Europe (3%); Other (2%)

• Industries: Software and Technology (36%); Business Services (8%); Financial Services (16%); Education (7%); Entertainment (1%); Other (32%)

• Job levels: C-level (12%); SVP/ VP (29%); Director (18%); Manager & Staff (41%)

Sample survey respondents:

Director, Cisco

VP of Marketing, Link America

Manager, MicroTech

CMO, OverGo Studio

Manager, Dassault Systems

Director, Reflexis Systems

Director, QA Symphony

Part 1: Topic OverviewAs many organizations can attest to, having multiple disparate customer engagement technologies (separate tools for email marketing, landing page hosting, web analytics, list management, social media marketing, etc.) that don’t integrate is problematic in the age of the empowered consumer. You can use separate tools to engage target audiences, but it’s very difficult to collect and aggregate customer behavior across different channels, customize message frequency to buying triggers, and give marketing and sales visibility into the data collected. According to Gleanster, the average organization has 3-5 disparate technologies supporting customer engagement. Disparate technologies lead to fragmented data, difficulty managing customer preferences, and multiple licenses. Marketing automation can actually replace some of these disparate systems AND layer on a rules-based communication engine to maximize revenue for an organization.





Increase Revenue. Marketers are sometimes stereotyped as more interested in clever advertisements or customer attitudes than in concrete business results. But, in fact, driving revenue is their most important concern. In fact, the most successful Top Performing organizations are 16x more likely than Everyone Else to report that marketeering performance and incentives are directly tied to revenue performance. These days relevance is the gateway to revenue, and marketing automation tools help marketers simplify multi-channel communications with business rules that ultimately push and pull prospects through the buying cycle.

Higher quality leads. For quite some time, marketers were myopically

focused on generating more leads: More is better. Wrong. It’s a good sign to see Top Performers indicating that the number two reason to implement marketing automation is to generate higher quality leads (and, of course, more of them!). Marketing automation uses a process called lead scoring, whereby prospect behavior is tracked and aggregated over time. A score then represents the propensity to purchase and leads can be routed to nurture marketing campaigns or pushed to sales depending on their stage in the buying cycle. That means sales spends less time qualifying opportunities and more time selling to a finite number of high quality opportunities. This also helps distill sales metrics like average

Part 2: Reasons to ImplementMarketing automaton has moved beyond the early adopter stage. Best estimates suggest that somewhere shy of 20,000 companies are using marketing automation today; that actually represents a tiny subset of the organizations that could benefit from marketing automation. While top reasons to implement still center around performance (revenue, lead quality, and cost reduction), many companies are starting to wake up to the harsh reality that marketing automation is increasingly necessary to maintain competitive parity, especially in industries where prominent competitors have already embraced marketing automation and are raising the bar on customer engagement.

Marketing automation is designed to centralize and align disparate technologies that support email marketing, web analytics, landing page hosting, and social media engagement, so marketers can build a more comprehensive view of the target audience at the customer level. Marketing automation tools not only allow organizations to divest of disparate marketing technologies, they help aggregate customer data so it is available for business rules that can automate individual communications with prospects and customers based on their propensity to buy. It’s simply not possible for marketers to manually deliver the type of relevant and cross-channel communications that can be automated by a marketing automation platform. More importantly, marketing automation helps to bridge the gap between marketing and sales to route leads with a higher propensity to purchase directly to sales.

Benchmark KPIs Gleanster uses 2-3 key performance indicators (KPIs) to distinguish “Top Performers” from all other companies (“Everyone Else”) within a given data set, thereby establishing a basis for benchmarking best practices. By definition, Top Performers are comprised of the top quartile of qualified survey respondents (QSRs).

The KPIs used for distinguishing Top Performers focus on performance metrics that speak to year-over-year improvement in relevant, measurable areas. Not all KPIs are weighted equally.

The KPIs used for this Gleansight are:

• Year-over-year increase in revenue

• Click-through rates on email

• Volume of marketing qualified leads

To learn more about Gleanster’s research methodology, please click here or email [email protected].

Reasons to Implement represent the reasons Top Performers invested, or plan to invest, in a technology. These also represent the most common ways to justify the investment.

What are Reasons to Implement?


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mailto:research%40gleanster.com?subject=Research%20Metholology%20Question




Core Technologies

The basic components and core capabilities required for a marketing automation system include:

Outbound email. Users must be able to create templates to generate personalized emails from the system database. They must also be able to import email lists from trade shows, print advertising, CRM and other sources. Emails must contain trackable links to system-generated landing pages.

Social media. Users can post content to social media, track social media-generated traffic, help recipients share content to their own social media accounts, and monitor social media conversations. More sophisticated features include forms and personalized ads within social platforms, using social sign-on to capture more data, and building more detailed profiles based on activities, consumption, connections and influence.

Landing pages and Web forms. Users must be able to create Web forms and landing pages that can capture leads from system-generated emails and other sources. Forms are designed to collect prospect information and marry this with cross -channel behavioral response patterns allowing the organization to identify which prospects are ready to talk to sales. These pages are hosted by the marketing automation system and post data directly to the marketing automation database.

deal size and the sales cycle for more accurate forecasting and budget allocation because sales personnel are truly focused on the best short-term opportunities.

Divest of fragmented marketing technologies. According to Gleanster research, the average organization supports marketing with 3-5 disparate technologies. Those licensing fees often add up quickly, and in some cases the cost of disparate technologies is reason enough to justify an investment in marketing automation. Fragmented marketing technologies pose three major challenges for Top Performers. First, they lead to fragmented customer data that is often difficult to access or not actionable. Second, marketers must learn to operate multiple interfaces. Third, disparate technologies complicate the customer data integration strategy, and often managing and configuring links to CRM places too much of a burden on IT and IT queues.

Visibility into marketing and sales performance. For Top Performing organizations marketing automation brings increased visibility into marketing spend, by channel. More importantly, marketing automation provides visibility into pipeline performance across marketing and sales. This eliminates the incessant blame game that traditionally plagues marketing and sales leaders – “You didn’t follow up on our leads.” “Your leads stank.” Marketing automation gives senior leaders a better sense of where to optimize performance to maximize revenue and the ability to back into necessary spend in order to meet revenue targets. For marketers, marketing automation helps justify marketing investments by linking them directly to sales; marketers know exactly which channels a prospect engaged, when, and how effective different communication messages were at nurturing prospects to the point where they were ready to engage sales.

* According to Top Performers, based on 151 Qualified Survey Responses to the Q3 2013 survey on marketing automation.**According to Everyone Else shown only when a notable disparity occurs relative to Top Performers

79% Say:

Increase revenue

76% Say:

Higher quality leads

53% Say:

Divest of fragmented marketing technologies

MOST COMPELLING REASONS TO IMPLEMENT MARKETING AUTOMATION*

** versus 45% of Everyone Else





Behavior tracking. The system must track the behavior of individual visitors to the company website, typically using a combination of cookies to identify visitors and tracking tags embedded in company web pages. Conventional web analytics captures page and session statistics but does not usually link these to persistent individual identities.

Lead scoring. The system calculates one or more scores to measure the quality of a lead, primarily to determine when it should handed to the sales department. Scores are based on the combination of individual attributes (title, company, location, etc.) and behaviors (search terms, email responses, Web forms completed, pages viewed, etc.). Scoring formulas can be complex, so special interfaces are needed to make them easy to build, understand, and maintain.

Lead nurturing. The system can be configured for automated engagement based on the unique needs of a prospect. In conjunction with lead scoring, communications can adapt based on the prospect readiness to talk with sales. The messages can change in response to lead behaviors such as Web page views and email opens. Lead nurturing flows may be simple, linear sequences or can incorporate complex decision rules that send different leads down entirely separate paths.

CRM integration. The marketing automation system maintains its own lead database, but exchanges updates with CRM so both systems have consistent information. Integration may also extend to coordinating campaigns between the two systems and sending alerts to sales people about behaviors captured by marketing automation.

Automate nurture marketing. Top Performers readily accept the fact that marketing automation will demand a more intimate approach to content creation. In truth, marketing automation can do little to mitigate the challenges around content creation. But marketing automation can help with pushing content out through multiple channels, particularly digital channels. Inbound marketing uses content like bait to attract leads through a relevant and personalized message and educate them to action. The campaign configuration features in marketing automation allow marketers to push content out to multiple channels to both engage existing prospect lists and find new leads through landing page form capture. Marketing automation also makes behavioral triggers more accessible to marketers. That means marketing communications can be triggered based on prospect behavior (a click on a link, a form fill, or a webpage visit).

Increase the quantity of leads. Lead quantity was rarely selected as a top reason to implement marketing automation by Top Performers. However, marketers that did select this option overwhelming chose it along with the need to increase revenue and the need to isolate higher quality leads. A larger volume of higher quality leads is of course the ideal situation for any Top Performing organization.

Lower marketing costs. Marketing budgets are under continuous pressure. Few marketers would buy an automation system specifically so they can spend less, but many want a system that helps them to understand their spending and eliminate pockets of waste. This is especially true at less mature marketing organizations, where existing systems may not provide adequate cost management. Outside of cost reduction, marketing automation can also help eliminate spend in areas that do not generate sufficient returns. Top

51% Say:

Visibility into marketing and sales performance

45% Say:

Automate nurture marketing

44% Say:

Increase the quantity of leads

COMPELLING REASONS TO IMPLEMENT MARKETING AUTOMATION*

** versus 77% of Everyone Else






36% Say:

Lower marketing costs

28% Say:

Competitive pressures

21% Say:

Better alignment with sales

LEAST COMPELLING REASONS TO IMPLEMENT MARKETING AUTOMATION*


Performers indicate they use marketing automation to benchmark performance and continuously optimize marketing spend to get the biggest bang for the buck.

Competitive pressures. Top Performers indicated that the need to maintain competitive parity was of lesser importance when justifying an investment in marketing automation. That’s a good sign, because Top Performers recognize that marketing automation demands a sea change in the traditional marketing and sales approach. Just because a competitor has raised the bar doesn’t mean an investment in technology will solve the challenge. If you accelerate poor processes or mediocre communication strategies with marketing automation, you accelerate mediocre results. That doesn’t make the need to step up exceed customer expectations any less important, especially if competitors

are making it difficult. But it should be done for the right reasons and with sufficient commitment to all components of change: people, process, and technology.

Better alignment with sales. Because closer integration between marketing and sales is a growing necessity, both departments are looking for ways to achieve it. Most sales departments already have basic operating systems in place to distribute, track, and manage leads and customer contacts. Marketing automation provides a corresponding infrastructure for the marketing department, so the two organizations can easily exchange information and coordinate activities without huge amounts of manual effort. In fact, deployment can be the catalyst for alignment efforts that both groups have long recognized were essential but never quite found time to begin.

Reporting. The systems provide information on messages sent, responses received, and profiles of the lead database. Many also import sales results from the CRM system and use these to for Return on Investment calculations. Some vendors go further to provide reports tracking leads through stages in the combined marketing and sales “revenue cycle” from initial acquisition through closed deals.





Part 3: Value DriversDespite increased adoption, research shows that marketers continue to struggle with embracing marketing automaton the way it was initially designed to be used. Top Performers were 9x more likely to customize lead scoring capabilities in marketing automation. In fact, 90% of respondents (including Top Performers) report regular and periodic use of marketing automation for large-volume email campaigns. It seems old habits die hard. The survey revealed that Top Performers rank ease of use of the system as the single most important element for extracting value from marketing automation. This comes as no surprise since vendor usage statistics revealed 7 out of 10 organizations had tried multiple marketing automation tools. Clearly organizations see value, but for whatever reason – cost, usability, or features – there is very little loyalty among providers.

Unfortunately, the levers that impact a return on investment have less to do with the technology and more to do with organizational alignment, process improvement, and content creation. Top Performers tend to leverage the full breadth of features in marketing automation tools. For example, 68% of Top Performers (compared with 23% of Everyone Else) had pre-configured cross-channel campaigns that used customer behavior data to trigger campaign communications. Interviews with some of these Top Performing organization revealed it took months or years after implementation before marketers embraced customized lead scoring, dynamic segments, and trigger-based rules. It’s important not to fall into the “what we are comfortable with” trap after investing in marketing automation. Push your organization to embrace the full breadth of the tools early, as this will generate a faster return on investment. A crazy concept: Use the tools the way they were built to be used to maximize the return.

Easy to use system. Ease of use as a value driver was the subject of much debate because it’s quite subjective. Shockingly, Top Performers ranked tool ease of use as a critical element to successfully achieving a return on investment in marketing automation. Since Top Performers display an affinity toward process re-engineering, change management, use of lead scoring, and multi-channel campaign execution, it stands to reason that the tools must strike the right balance between features, functions, and usability to take full advantage of these

best practices. That makes marketing automation investments akin to purchasing a new vehicle: You look for the features and functions you need, then the nice-to-haves, and then a style and color that matches your own personal preferences. When selecting a marketing automation solution it’s a good idea to elicit feedback from the users who will physically be configuring campaigns on a day-to-day basis. Ask solution providers for a demo or even a trial period prior to making the investment.

Value Drivers represent the processes, organizational considerations, and tactics that help Top Performers maximize the return on investment in a technology initiative.

These are the things Top Performers would attribute to the successful implementation and use of a technology.

What are Value Drivers?





Re-usable campaign templates. Top Performers tend to rely on a handful of campaign templates (the flow across different channels, timing, etc.) that are repurposed with new content and refreshed on a periodic basis (think semi-annually). One of the biggest mistakes organizations make with marketing automation is custom configuring every different campaign that is delivered. You don’t need dozens and dozens of campaign flows. This dramatically complicates measurement and execution. It also makes it difficult to switch providers should the need arise. Top Performers have found that the consistency of the layout and the general creative look and feel impacts conversion, especially when prospects may stumble across a variety of personalized campaigns based on their specific stage in the purchase cycle. Some consistency reinforces the brand, particularly across different channels.

Cooperation with sales. Cooperating with sales means jointly agreeing on the

types of customers to pursue, defining lead scoring rules and processes to pass leads from marketing to sales, and designing marketing messages for active prospects and current customers. These are all in addition to developing traditional sales materials such as price sheets and product brochures. Marketing and sales should also commit to regularly meeting to validate the shared definition of a qualified lead. Marketing automation is about removing the guesswork in lead qualification. But this requires an iterative process of continuous optimization. As long as sales is transparent about its needs, marketers can develop materials that truly help to educate and pre-qualify new leads before they reach sales. Theoretically, marketing automation should eliminate any dispute on lead value. You will know exactly where the bottlenecks are. You may not have the resources to address all of them, but that’s a different conversation. At least you know where to focus the effort.

MAXROI!

100%

Destination...

50%

Re-usable campaign templates

87%Easy to use

system

92%Cooperation

with sales

77%

MOST IMPORTANT VALUE DRIVERS FOR MARKETING AUTOMATION*






Marketing performance tied to sales. Top Performers are 6x more likely than Everyone Else to tie marketing performance and management by objectives directly to revenue. This may not be possible right out of the gate, but organizations should have a line of sight to using marketing automation as a window into marketing and sales performance. Diligent tracking of costs and channel attribution (which can be accomplished manually, through fuzzy logic, or using linear models in many marketing automation tools) gives marketers data points about how closed won opportunities engaged with marketing prior to talking to sales.

Executive alignment. Top Performers almost always have an executive-level champion for marketing automation. This is critical because the real work starts after the decision to implement marketing automation is made. A marketing automation initiative needs organizational support, including strong and public commitment by top

management, adequate staffing of the project team, and cooperation from workers whose jobs will be affected. Most organizations can only support a few large initiatives at any one time, so it’s important to ensure that marketing automation will be given adequate priority before committing to a major change. Otherwise, it may still be possible to deploy marketing automation as a simple replacement for existing systems. This will at least get the system in place so the company can phase in the more advanced applications over time.

Change management. Marketing automation initiatives involve substantial changes to processes within the marketing department and between marketing and sales. These changes must first be analyzed and planned to ensure they will achieve the desired results. Then implementation must be managed carefully to ensure that operations continue smoothly as they are introduced. Even after

MAXROI!

100%

Destination...

50%

Executive alignment

65%Marketing

performance tied to sales

72%Change

management

59%

IMPORTANT VALUE DRIVERS FOR MARKETING AUTOMATION*






implementation, follow-up is needed to ensure that the company does not lapse back into old habits and that new employees are trained correctly. The ability to plan, deploy, and maintain process changes is a specialized skill that must itself be acquired by the organization, either through staff training or use of outside resources.

Cross-channel campaign execution. Today’s buyers communicate across many different channels – direct mail, email, Web, social, telephone, mobile, etc. Cross-channel campaigns may present the same message in a recipient’s channel of choice, or may present different messages in different channels over time. Either type of coordination is extremely difficult when each channel is managed through a separate system. It’s important to note the difference between multi-channel and cross-channel. Cross-channel orchestrates communications across many channels delivering a consistent customer experience and reinforcing the

message. It’s much easier to execute and manage cross-channel campaigns from within a centralized platform like marketing automation.

Analytical culture (fact-based decisions). The difficulty of measuring marketing results has often forced marketers to make decisions with little hard evidence. Marketing automation makes sound measurements more available, at least to marketers who are willing to seek them. An organization that is committed to fact-based decisions is more likely to invest in marketing measurements and to use measurements to guide future marketing activity. These measurements will help to ensure that the possibilities made available by marketing automation are converted into actual benefits.

Help from outside resources (agencies, consultants). Marketing automation requires new skills in program design and measurement that extend well beyond learning to operate the system itself. These skills are often

MAXROI!

100%

Destination...

50%

Analytical culture (fact-based decisions)

32%Cross-channel

campaign execution

53%Help from outside

resources (agencies, consultants)

27%

LEAST IMPORTANT VALUE DRIVERS FOR MARKETING AUTOMATION*






not available in-house, especially at less mature marketing organizations. Some skills may be needed for a limited time, may be highly specialized, or may be hard to learn. In those cases, it may make sense to partner with consultants or marketing agencies. This sort of assistance can speed the

initial marketing automation deployment and significantly increase the chances for success. Once the company has completed its initial deployment, it will be in a better position to judge which skills it should add to its own staff and which should remain with external providers.





Part 4: ChallengesThe best-laid plans for marketing automation will still face obstacles. These are less likely to be technical than organizational. Lack of funding, staff skills, and management support are all concerns. But the most immediate impact comes from operational issues, including poor marketing processes, problems with data quality and integration, and inability to create enough good content. These must be resolved in advance or the project cannot proceed. Metrics pose a different challenge: The system can be deployed without them, but they’re needed to measure success. Otherwise, the company won’t know which marketing projects are most valuable or whether the system itself is worth its cost. This puts it at risk when budgets are tight and management is looking for ways to cut expenses. However, real business value requires more than getting the software to run.

Companies must set realistic goals for their project and measure progress toward those goals. They need to train staff to use the systems, to design new marketing programs that take advantage of system capabilities, and to populate those programs with effective marketing content. They need to assess and improve data quality, both by fixing internal processes and by purchasing external information. Perhaps most critical, they must coordinate with the sales department to ensure the programs are delivering valuable leads and that those leads will be handled effectively when sales receives them.

Creating enough content at a reasonable cost. Top Performers recognize content creation as the single biggest hurdle to overcome when adopting marketing automation. Here’s the thing: It can’t be avoided. The minute a competitor starts developing relevant targeted content that is gaining exposure to your target audience, you have a problem. There are, however, lots of ways to develop content on the cheap. In fact, 75% of Top Performers report using blog posts in lead nurturing and drip marketing campaigns. The most important consideration with respect to content is to make it valuable and develop it with the goal of becoming a trusted advisor to the prospect. The days of the hard sale and the promotional white paper are long gone. Brand promotion in white papers still

has a place in the lead lifecycle, but they are generally much later when prospects are educated and ready to talk to sales. The most valuable content you can create will be front-of-the-funnel inbound content. Use content like bait to attract the right type of leads to your marketing automation engagement strategy. To keep costs within reason, companies should develop a library of materials they can reuse across programs. This can be based on a matrix that lists different buyer types and stages in the purchase process. Materials can be developed for each buyer type at each purchase stage, and then used in all programs targeted at that.

Data quality and integration. Data quality is often an unexpected stumbling block to successful marketing

Challenges represent the various roadblocks to watch out for before, during and after a technology implementation. These are the things that prevent Top Performers from maximizing the return on technology investments.

Challenges





automation deployments. Many sales automation systems contain duplicate and obsolete records that salespeople can simply ignore, but will pollute the database if they are imported blindly back into marketing automation. In addition, many marketing automation providers tier pricing based on the number of active users. The industry has also significantly cracked down on data uploads. Most providers will not accept purchased lists or lists that were generated without the use of an opt-in clause. An early, thorough assessment of existing data is an important task in any implementation process. The result should be carefully planned rules for deduplication, field-level updates, and use of external services to clean and enhance marketing records. In addition, you’ll need to design any custom fields or tables that will extend the standard data models.

Poor marketing processes. Garbage in, garbage out. Marketing departments can survive poor processes when channels and programs are disconnected, but coordination requires predictability

and more complex programs require greater efficiency. Companies with poor marketing processes need to first document the existing processes and develop effective ways to change them as needed. Help may be available from manufacturing, finance, or other departments with long experience in process management. If those skills are not accessible in-house, marketers can draw on outside specialists in marketing operations management.

Rethinking legacy processes. It’s a good rule of thumb not to try to automate complex processes in a new system. If you are finding loads of custom fields and unique processes are necessary to execute campaigns, then consider simplifying these legacy practices by looking at the real business value derived from more complex processes. Top Performers often found that the incremental value of customization wasn’t worth the investment in time and resources. Don’t assume that just because that’s “the way it has always been done” that it should be that way in the future. Marketing automation investments are

100%

50%

Poor marketing processes

Data quality and integration

Creating enough content at a

reasonable cost

97% 85% 84%

MOST CHALLENGING ASPECTS OF MARKETING AUTOMATION*






a great excuse to completely rethink what works and doesn’t work for your organization.

Lack of skilled staff. Marketing automation requires a range of new staff skills. These go beyond running the system itself to include designing new types of marketing programs, developing appropriate content, creating new business processes, building lead scores, coordinating between marketing and sales, and measuring results. Rather than attempting to acquire all these new skills at once, companies can rely on outside resources to help set up initial programs. This setup should include training so that company employees will be able to do the work for themselves in the future. The most popular providers have communities of power users, but they can be expensive to onboard. An increasingly popular option is a managed service approach whereby an agency or service provider will host and manage the marketing automation tool, and some can even take on campaign execution.

Lack of funding. The landscape for marketing automation is in a state of

constant evolution. Barriers to entry are generally fairly low, so new class disruptors are constantly popping up to challenge industry leaders on pricing, features, and usability. In general, companies complain about pricing and cost when the tool is perceived to be lacking a return on investment – and that’s usually because the company failed to change processes or struggles with resource limitations. However, cost is not just a function of the tool itself. Top Performers are quick to point out that there are real costs to developing sufficient content, hiring resources to manage campaigns, and data quality.

Divesting of legacy systems. Marketers are generally resistant to change. Replacing existing tools will likely require some degree of change management diligence. It’s a good idea to plan a phased approach to fully divesting of legacy systems. Often that means setting hard date when legacy systems will no longer be available. It helps if this date coincides with a real, tangible business fact – we are not paying for licensing anymore so the system will be gone, IT is moving the

100%

50%

Lack of fundingLack of skilled sta�Rethinking legacy processes

75% 73% 62%

CHALLENGING ASPECTS OF MARKETING AUTOMATION*






100%

50%

Senior manage-ment mindset

Selecting metricsDivesting of legacy systems

55% 52% 40%

LEAST CHALLENGING ASPECTS OF MARKETING AUTOMATION*


data and turning this system off, etc. Leave a buffer period for marketers to test the new system and ensure customer data was ported appropriately. It’s hard to avoid all of the pain associated with divesting of systems that have been customized or are deeply engrained in legacy process, but it can be mitigated through planning and strict milestone dates.

Selecting metrics. It’s easy to create metrics from the wealth of data provided by marketing automation. The challenge is deciding which metrics are most important. Marketers should recognize that they need different metrics for different stages of the lead lifecycle. Then there are a variety of metrics in broad categories including activity metrics such as number of emails sent;

response metrics such as Web traffic; efficiency metrics such as cost per lead; and value metrics such as revenue generated. Remember that metrics reflect your business priorities, so they should evolve as priorities change over time.

Senior management mindset. Most marketing automation projects will rely on senior managers to help secure the necessary resources and push for needed changes. If senior managers don’t support the project, find out why: Do they not understand the concept, do they not believe it will work, or do they simply not trust marketing? Address their concerns and gain support. Or limit the initial deployment to a small scope where help from other departments is less essential.





Part 5: Performance MetricsMarketing automation is about creating marketing value. But marketing value can’t always be measured directly because the results are affected by sales performance, competitive behavior, business conditions, and any number of other factors outside of marketing’s control. This leaves marketers with a choice of imperfect measures, such as estimates of marketing-influenced revenue, cost per lead, and promotion response rates. Most firms use a judicious mix of these, supplemented with tactical measures to track the results of specific projects, and with lifecycle measures that trace movement of customers through stages in the buying process. All must be presented so they effectively communicate the desired information. Keys to achieving this include providing context, such as comparisons to previous results and to plans, highlighting significant variances, visualization to illustrate important relationships, and filters to show each viewer information relevant to his or her particular role.

Number of qualified leads generated. Marketers consider lead generation their primary task, so the number of leads generated is clearly a primary metric. Since unqualified leads are a drain on company resources, it makes more sense to focus on the number of qualified leads rather than the actual total. If leads are turned over to sales once they are deemed qualified, this figure also reflects an important stage in

the purchase cycle and can be used in cycle analysis. Marketing leads can be classified as Marketing Qualified, which signals the lead is ready to be passed to sales, and Sales Accepted, which forces sales to acknowledge that the lead meets certain criteria. These gates help drive accountability around the flow of leads from marketing to sales.

Cost per lead. Marketers must balance

84% 77% 71%

Conversion rate (from inquiries to leads) on

marketing-sourced leads

Number of quali�ed leads

generated

Cost per lead

MOST COMMON METRICS FOR MEASURING MARKETING AUTOMATION ROI*


These represent the most common metrics Top Performers use to physically measure the success of a technology initiative before and/or after the implementation.

Performance Metrics





lead cost against lead quality and quantity. Thus, these values should be reported together to give a clear picture of marketing effectiveness. Cost per lead is fairly easy to calculate once a marketing automation system is in place to track costs and results. However, it applies only to acquisition programs. Projects that aim to nurture existing leads and to improve results from existing customers require other metrics.

Conversion rate (from inquiries to leads) on marketing-sourced leads. A lifecycle approach to customer management tracks the movement of leads through stages, from initial inquiries through final purchase. The inquiry-to-lead conversion rate measures one of these transitions. It can be interpreted to show marketing’s effectiveness in producing this transition, although factors outside of marketing may also influence the results. Top Performers generally report having a solid understanding of the flow of leads across the lead lifecycle. This helps marketing and sales leaders take accountability for bottlenecks and address them early.

Close rate on marketing-sourced leads. The percentage of deals that ultimately become closed sales is a common measure of sales performance. The close rate of marketing-sourced leads can be compared with the close rate of leads from other sources to infer the relative quality of the marketing leads. Top performers are much more likely than others to use this and other metrics that connect marketing efforts with sales results.

Marketing-sourced deals as share of pipeline. It can take a long time for leads to convert to revenue. Companies seeking a quicker evaluation of marketing contribution can look at the number or percentage of marketing-sourced deals in the sales pipeline. This may be reported in terms of deal counts or deal value, and might be further adjusted to account for the estimated probability of the deals being closed. Since deal size and probability are both estimates, these adjustments add considerable subjectivity to this metric.

Response rates. Response rates are among the easiest metrics to report and understand. But the significance of any response rate can only be judged

69% 52% 48%

Response ratesClose rate on marketing-sourced

leads

Marketing-sourced deals as share of

pipeline

COMMON METRICS FOR MEASURING MARKETING AUTOMATION ROI*






in the context of past results, offers, audiences, cost, and response quality. This means that response rates are best used within the marketing department to compare results within a particular channel and program.

Marketing cost per revenue dollar. The ratio of marketing cost to revenue is a broad measure of marketing efficiency. It seems simple but can be misleading when large amounts of revenue originate outside of marketing or when revenue is earned long after the original marketing costs. This measure is best used by sophisticated organizations with the resources to properly understand its components.

Incremental revenue from marketing efforts. The incremental impact of an individual marketing effort is arguably the most important metric of all since it serves as the basis for calculating that effort’s true value. Marketers calculate

it in many different ways, some more accurate than others. A highly reliable estimate requires formal testing that few marketers have the time, skills, or budget to accomplish. Incremental revenue is especially important in connection with lead nurturing and existing customer programs, which can’t be judged on acquisition cost.

Marketing-sourced revenue. This is a strategic metric that shows how much revenue originated with marketing-generated leads. Like reports on lead quantity, it must be viewed within the context of related marketing costs and compared with results for previous periods. It is also typically compared with revenue generated from non-marketing sources, such as leads that salespeople find for themselves. For this measure to be useful, marketing and sales must agree on rules to determine which department gets credit for generating which leads.

NUMBERS

67Percentage of Top Performers (compared to 35% of Everyone Else) using lead scoring.

38Percentage of Top Performers (compared to 6% of Everyone Else) using trigger-based marketing tactics on lead nurturing campaigns.

79

Percentage of Top Performers that have been using marketing automation for more than 2 years.

35Average percentage of marketing sourced leads in the sales pipeline.

75Percentage of Top Performers that rank data proliferation as a top 2 challenge for marketing in 2013.

65Percentage of All Respondents that were “confused about the definition of RPM”.

37% 29% 19%

Marketing-sourced revenue

Marketing cost per revenue dollar

Incremental revenue from

marketing e�orts

LEAST COMMON METRICS FOR MEASURING MARKETING AUTOMATION ROI*






Part 6: Success StoriesVoices.com is an online marketplace where business connects with professional voice actors and voice-over talent. Radio and television stations, advertising agencies, marketing professionals, casting directors and voice talent agencies rely on Voices.com to easily find, audition and hire narrators and other voice-over talent. Voices.com clients include NBC, ESPN, PBS, The History Channel, The Discovery Channel, Reader’s Digest, Audible, Comcast, Bell Canada, Sony Picture, Microsoft, Cisco Systems, ING, Western Union, American Airlines, Ford, GM, Toyota, the US Government and thousands more.

The Challenge

Voices.com initially turned to marketing automation to manage email communications and gain some much needed visibility into performance. “Email is a very large part of our business,” said Ben. “We had little control over our automated messages. They were also being sent from multiple applications, and the email systems didn’t talk to each other. We couldn’t see who’d opened an email, clicked through, etc. Managing email was a huge issue.” Voices had distinct criteria they were looking for when evaluating marketing automation tools.

The Solution

Voices.com evaluated several systems and used a set of specific criteria to compare and contrast providers. Solutions had to be user friendly, with a short learning curve. They needed to be capable of creating and updating email campaigns quickly and easily. The

solution would be consolidating all of Voices.com’s existing email platforms and therefore needed to report email open and click-through rates for all campaigns. Finally, Voices.com used Salesforce.com for CRM and wanted a system that could easily create lists and email contacts generated by criteria from Salesforce.com.

The Results

“With marketing automation we easily set up automated email

campaigns that push/pull data from Salesforce,” said Ben. “Being able to send customers the

right content at the right time is very important to our strategy.” “We now have an average 84% email open rate and a 40% click through rate, well above the industry standards of 22% and 3.5% respectively. We have a consistent brand message with the templates. Once an email’s gotten the green light, we send the message, or schedule it to be sent, in a mere few clicks.”

Note: The original version of this Success Story may have been prepared—and previously published—by an enabling solution provider. If so, it is edited and reproduced here by permission. While reasonable efforts have been made to verify the accuracy of the information contained herein through independent fact-checking, Gleanster disclaims liability for any content that was developed and submitted by third parties. Success Stories are selected based solely on the merits of the content as judged by Gleanster’s Research Oversight Committee. Vendors are not charged a fee for inclusion and no preference is given to vendors based on their ability to purchase other Gleanster products or services. Any questions or concerns regarding this particular Success Story–or Gleanster’s selection criteria or policies, in general–should be directed to [email protected]. Case studies may be submitted for publishing consideration using the Success Stories Submission Form.

we now have an average open rate of 84% on email.”“


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Part 7: Vendor LandscapeThe last few years marked some very critical milestones for the marketing automation industry. Industry leaders Eloqua and Marketo both filed for initial public offerings, which ultimately helped validate the technology and proved that marketing automation was more than a passing fad. Then much-anticipated consolidation by the big suite players started to take shape. Oracle acquired Eloqua for a whopping $871 million, or 9 times revenue. Salesforce.com acquired Exact Target (which brought with it the former acquisition of Pardot). Microsoft acquired Marketing Pilot and Adobe acquired Neolane. This consolidation brought a new set of dynamics to the marketing automation landscape, and in some respects it opens the door to more questions than answers. Can industry tier-one marketing automation solutions continue to innovate and grow at the same accelerated pace under a broad suite of offerings? Consolidation certainly has its benefits, particularly when it comes to up-selling and cross-selling to existing clients.

One thing is for sure: The value of marketing automation is not limited by industry verticals or business model. The future of marketing is all about data-driven rules-based customer dialogs. While early adopters of the technology were largely B2B organizations with complex sales cycles, Top Performers from a variety of industries are using marketing automation to power relationship marketing, which benefits both B2B and B2C organizations. What largely differentiates a marketing automation solution from, say, an email marketing or campaign management tool is the ability to engage customers on two or more channels, lead scoring features, and integration with CRM. For the most part, any viable provider can check these boxes on features like lead scoring and multi-channel campaign delivery. That means the decision making considerations tend to weigh heavily on setup and support, usability, email deliverability, and pricing.

Today there are largely two classes of marketing automation technology: solutions built with robust functionality that can address the demands of the enterprise and solutions built to address the basic needs of a small-to-midsize organization. Enterprise class solutions tend to be more expensive and generally lock the buyer into a long-term commitment (which is somewhat justifiable because setup and optimization inside the bureaucracy of an enterprise can take longer, which extends the return-on-investment timeline). Enterprise solutions have more robust role-based security features, customizable data fields, single sign-on integration, performance scalability, multiple instances, and sophisticated data integration capabilities. Reporting and campaign management can get quite complex inside of a large enterprise, so enterprise-class tools walk a fine line between robustness of features and ease of use. There are a handful of providers that are more appropriate to address the needs of the enterprise including: Oracle Eloqua, Marketo, Callidus Cloud Leadformix, SalesFusion, Hubspot, Saleforce.com Pardot, and Act-On. For small-to-midsize businesses there are about a dozen different providers that feature all of the basic marketing automation necessities. Last year, integration with social media and web conferencing platforms became a popular add-on in marketing automation tools. Low barriers to entry in the space have led to a flurry of new entrants, even over the last few years. In many cases, new incumbents have very

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ActiveConversion www.gleanster.com/vendors/activeconversion

“ActiveConversion is the leader in lead nurturing, lead management and demand generation for companies with less than 1000 employees. We make it easy to see which marketing initiatives are paying off, and introduce you to sales-ready leads. ActiveConversion provides a single tool to help manage marketing and optimize sales.”

Gleanster Skinny: ActiveConversion provides all of the basic accoutrements expected in a marketing automation tool. The tool is specifically designed for mid-size organizations with basic marketing automation needs such as anonymous visitor tracking (based on a reverse IP lookup), lead scoring, lead nurturing, and granular report dashboards. In May 2012, the company launched pre-configured integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Other commonly leveraged integration partners include Google, VerticalResponse, and Salesforce.com. If you are looking for basic marketing automation features and an easy to configure tool, ActiveConversion might be a good fit. Don’t expect frequent and innovative product enhancements. The AC-ProspectAlert module delivers real-time alerts to sales agents when prospects are active, identifies lead trends, and collects company data, which users can send to Salesforce or Dynamics. ActiveConversion does not offer its own email services. Instead, users have the option to rely on their existing service providers or integrate with one of ten major ESPs, including VerticalResponse, Constant Contact, Campaigner, and ExactTarget.

Act-On Software www.gleanster.com/vendors/act-on-software

“Act-On Software’s cloud-based integrated marketing platform helps smaller marketing teams succeed – without dedicated database maintenance, process analysis or IT support. Our solutions include all the tools you need to automate your critical marketing tasks, and see your results. And Act-On plays well with others, integrating seamlessly with the CRM and webinar management systems you’re already using.”

GS: Act-On provides an easy transition between basic email systems and full-scale marketing automation. It offers a comprehensive on-demand marketing automation platform targeting small-to-midsize organizations. Act-On offers contract-free pricing with no setup fees. Act-On Software’s platform provides tools for email marketing, the creation of landing pages and forms, website monitoring, list management, automated programs such as drip marketing campaigns, and, of course, pre-configured lead scoring. Act-On was one of the first marketing automation providers to provide out-of-the box integration with WebEx for an end-to-end webinar promotion and management tool. In October 2012, Act-On announced Act-On Partner Exchange (APEX), a simple and effective way for companies that need specialized products and expertise, and those who provide such services, to easily find each other.

The company has experienced impressive growth over the last year and recently opened offices in the UK. Users report limitations in the availability of exportable data and customization

Note: As with all Gleanster research findings, vendor rankings on the FLASH charts are determined by the experiences of industry practitioners and not by Gleanster’s own analyst assessment or opinion. The omission of a particular vendor name from one or more of the FLASH charts may be due to a lack of sufficient data about that vendor and may be no indication of its performance relative to other solution providers. Using a 1-5 point rating scale, survey respondents are asked to assess the solution provider(s) they are currently using, or have had the experience of using within the past two (2) years, across four (4) different dimensions: Ease of Deployment, Ease of Use, Features and Functionality, and Overall Value. To qualify for possible inclusion on one or more FLASH charts, vendors with less than $10M in annual revenue must be rated by a minimum of five (5) qualified survey responses and vendors with more than $10M in annual revenue must be rated by a minimum of eight (8) qualified survey responses. A mean class performance score is calculated for each vendor. Top-scoring vendors are then assigned to the FLASH charts on a rank-order basis. Gleanster screens all survey submissions that are used as the basis for vendor rankings and removes duplicate submissions from the same client company (factoring in only the highest scores). The final rankings are not intended to provide conclusive advice or recommendations but to merely serve as a source of directionally relevant data points. All solution providers included in the Vendor Landscape section are given an opportunity to invite their customers to participate in the survey at least six (6) weeks in advance of publication. Through no other means are solution providers allowed to influence their placement on these FLASH charts.

viable offerings that have been built and designed using the latest technologies and often address some of the shortcomings of established solutions. One thing to specifically look out for is the level of integration with CRM and the level of customer service provided. Some providers have deeper packaged integration with a handful of CRM tools. Customer success coaches are another added benefit to look out for. It behooves marketing automation providers to get clients set-up and happy with the solution as quickly as possible. In some cases, customer success coaches will even help configure existing email and landing page templates inside of the tool, which could shave weeks off of the setup and reduces the burden on marketing resources who should be more focused on re-thinking marketing processes and alignment with sales.


http://www.gleanster.com/vendors/activeconversion

http://www.gleanster.com/vendors/act-on-software




of reports within Act-On, but generally find the solution to be intuitive and accessible. In 2013, the company augmented the platform with some very cool inbound marketing capabilities to help optimize web pages, landing pages, forms, and adwords spend. These include both SEO audit analysis and recommendations for improvements in an area that marketers are largely relying on little more than educated guessing.

Adobe Neolanewww.gleanster.com/vendors/neolane

“In July 2013, Adobe announced “the completion of its acquisition of privately held Neolane, a leader in cross-channel campaign management technology. Neolane integrates online and offline

marketing data from across an enterprise – performing robust audience segmentation and delivering marketing messages across channels. It offers a best-in-class platform for sophisticated automation and execution of campaigns across the Web, email, social, mobile, call center, direct mail and point of sale (POS). This enables marketers to deliver consistent customer experiences, personalized campaigns and increased ROI.”

GS: Neolane’s platform is designed to deliver personalized and measurable cross-channel marketing and lead management campaigns. Neolane is based in Europe, but started moving aggressively into the United States in 2007. The company boasts profitable growth for the last five

GOOD BETTER BEST

ADOBE NEOLANE

GENIUS.COM

ORACLE ELOQUA

SILVERPOP

INFUSIONSOFT

MARKETO

LEADLIFE

ACT-ON

ETRIGUE

HUBSPOT

SALESFORCE.COM

MARKETING AUTOMATION VENDORS RANKED BY EASE OF DEPLOYMENT

BASED ON EXPERIENCE FROM USERS

Vendor Rankings FLASH chart © Gleanster, August 2013. Note: Vendor rankings are determined by the experiences of industry practitioners, according to survey feedback, and not by the assessment or opinion of Gleanster analysts. The omission of a particular vendor may be due to lack of sufficient data and may be no indication of that company’s performance relative to other solution providers. Information on the research methodology used for vendor rankings is available elsewhere in this Gleansight benchmark report and also in the FAQ section of the Gleanster website.





years, an impressive and rarely seen exception in the marketing automation landscape. Neolane has largely positioned around the concept of “conversational marketing” which Neolane references as an evolution in cross-channel marketing. As a marketing automation provider, Neolane is unique because the solution is built to optimize relationship marketing for both B2B and B2C organizations. While all of the core capabilities such as lead scoring, segmentation, nurture marketing, and reporting exist, the solution takes these a step farther by delivering a core system of record for customer data which the company references as the “single marketing view of the customer.”

Adobe desperately needed to fill the campaign management hole in the Marketing Cloud offering. Purely from a suite standpoint, Adobe is simply unmatched with respect to supporting the marketing value chain. From creative to execution to measurement, the Marketing Cloud is a very competitive offering – expensive, but competitive. Historically, Adobe has done a fairly good job pulling acquisitions into the stack and aligning them under the Marketing Cloud vision. Neolane brings a true cross-channel (online and offline) database marketing platform to the table, which is essentially capable of pulling in data from other Adobe Marketing Cloud offerings and making it actionable across ANY channel.

Beanstalk Data www.gleanster.com/vendors/beanstalk-data

“Beanstalk Data is an information technology based marketing provider that develops, sells and employs proprietary software to automate clients’ marketing output. However, Beanstalk Data is more than software. We provide invaluable advice and automation to meet specific marketing challenges.”

GS: Beanstalk data provides all the basic B2B marketing automation functions, including mass email, landing pages and surveys, behavior tracking, lead scoring, nurture campaigns, and CRM integration. It’s targeted at small to mid-size businesses, an audience that usually doesn’t require anything more advanced. Lead scoring is done the usual way: by assigning points to lead attributes and behavior. However, unlike most vendors, Beanstalk typically builds the scoring

rules for its clients rather than leaving the clients on their own. In terms of campaign management, Beanstalk’s “campaign steps” feature supports an unusual variety of output formats, including email, list exports, text messages, Facebook posts, digital printing, call center, and Web posts to external systems. Steps can also change data within the Beanstalk database and schedule calls in the CRM system. Beanstalk has existing connectors for Salesforce.com, NetSuite and Leads360 and also provides some basic CRM features of its own, including call notes, task reminders, opportunity tracking, and drill-down to a lead’s contact history, behavior history, score history, campaign history, and link history. Through its marketing services, Beanstalk helps clients define strategies, develop their creative and set up their marketing automation programs.

Bislr www.gleanster.com/vendors/bislr

“Bislr takes your B2B marketing to a whole new level by enabling you to learn more about your prospects as they browse your site. Get a real-time feed that tells you how prospects are engaging with your site as well as what they just posted on Twitter and LinkedIn. Connect this information up to your favorite CRM system (Salesforce, NetSuite). Get the intelligence you need to accelerate revenue. As marketers, we just want to focus on what we’re good at, instead of dealing with technical woes and unwieldy solutions. From years of research and experiencing this problem first hand, we set out to solve the problem of executing marketing online faster, more cost effectively and completely integrated with other business solutions like CRM and marketing automation software. We set out to make an integrated intelligent website marketing solution that allowed us to generate new leads faster, from every medium, on every channel.”

GS: Bislr has a bit of a unique approach to marketing automation which they call an intelligent marketing platform. But the approach is actually quite compelling when weighed against the challenges organizations still face with marketing automation adoption and use. Bottom line, marketing automation can still be quite cumbersome to learn and

ActiveConversionAct-OnAdobe (Neolane)AgiloneAprimoApteanBeanstalkDataBislrCallidus Cloud (LeadFormix)ClickSquaredDecision SoftwareDistribioneTrigueFirstwaveGenius.comGenooGreenRopeHubspotIBM (Unica)InferInfusionsoftKali8Lattice EnginesLeadLifeLeadMasterLoopFuseLyrisMakesBridgeMarketoMicrosoft (Marketing Pilot)MindMatrixMintigoNet ResultsNetsuiteOntraportOptifyOracle (Elouqa)Pitney BowesPUBLITRAC RedPointRightOn InteractiveSales Engine InternationalSalesforce.com (Pardot)SalesFusionSalesOptima SAPSilverpopSitecoreTeradataTreehouse InteractiveTrue InfluenceVelocifyVenntive

Quick Reference Guide


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use, and few competitors have challenged the traditional approach to the interface and feature offering. Bislr provides marketers with a single drag-and-drop platform to manage digital content management (asset management, landing page creation, mobile websites, SEO optimization, etc.) with the core benefits of a lead generation solution (CRM integration, Social Media Marketing, Testing, Email Marketing, Lead Prioritization, etc.). What is particularly compelling is the use of HTML5 to develop an intuitive drag-and-drop interface for creating email campaigns, landing pages, mobile websites, and blogs. Bislr has also developed a widget library, offering more advanced features across e-commerce, lead generation, and social. The template library gives marketers access to

crisp differentiated templates that truly stand out against the often clunky legacy templates in similar priced solutions. Bislr officially launched in February 2013 with a $3.5M round of seed funding. Bislr is a great option to evaluate for companies looking for intuitive content management and lead generation capabilities in a solution built on the latest technology platform.

CallidusCloud Leadformix www.gleanster.com/vendors/calliduscloud

“LeadFormix is a cloud-based B2B marketing automation platform that identifies and qualifies leads based on online behavior. Aimed at marketers we deliver an unprecedented level of lead intelligence. Our solution empowers you to follow your natural flow, plan, structure

GOOD BETTER BEST

ADOBE NEOLANE

GENIUS.COM

LEADLIFE

ORACLE ELOQUA

ETRIGUE

INFUSIONSOFT

SALESFORCE.COM

SILVERPOP

ACT-ON

HUBSPOT

MARKETO

MARKETING AUTOMATION VENDORS RANKED BY EASE OF USE








and run marketing campaigns with little or no dependencies.”

GS: In January 2012 LeadFormix was acquired by CallidusCloud (NASDAQ:CALD), the market and technology leader in sales effectiveness and cloud computing. CallidusCloud continues to innovate and invest in the technology. In 2013, LeadFormix released a new intuitive user interface and tighter integration with CRM providers like Microsoft, NetSuite, SugarCRM and Salesforce.com. LeadFormix boasts a robust set of marketing automation features including anonymous website visitor tracking, lead scoring, lead nurturing, email marketing, a mobile app, and social media marketing. CallidusCloud is a public company with a strong product vision for a comprehensive marketing and sales effectiveness suite of products. In 2013, the company started positioning the concept of “lead-to-money” with the goal of building a comprehensive suite of integrated products that make the sales process more efficient. For mid-to-large enterprise organizations looking for an integrated offering, LeadFormix has a lot to offer. LeadFormix has seen impressive growth over the last few years and gained considerable traction among small and midsize businesses looking for an intuitive low cost solution. However, the solution includes all of the robust features necessary to scale at an enterprise level and recent client wins suggest LeadFormix does well competing against Marketo and Pardot. Enterprise features include role-based security, hub-and-spoke instances, and scalable email deliverability.

ClickSquared www.gleanster.com/vendors/clicksquared

“ClickSquared is a global provider of cross-channel cloud marketing software and services. With innovative offerings ranging from self-service campaign management and email to fully managed customer engagement and loyalty programs, ClickSquared’s pioneering Cross-Channel Marketing Hub enables marketers to orchestrate and deliver analytics-driven, relevant and personalized customer communications across email, direct mail, social, survey, mobile and web channels.”

GS: Originally a marketing services firm, ClickSquared has emerged as a leading provider

of cloud-based campaign management software. The Cross-Channel Marketing Hub extends beyond campaign management, integrating a range of features and functionality typically found in stand-alone channel-specific platforms. It combines campaign management, marketing database management and customer intelligence tools with delivery and execution across email, print, web, survey, mobile and social channels. It’s designed to deliver relevant offers and messages across customers’ preferred channels, and manage complex campaigns such as multi-wave campaigns and automated behavior-based trigger campaigns. Some functionality is powered by third-party tools (business intelligence, for example, is enabled by Jaspersoft). ClickTRACK gives marketers the ability to collect real-time customer behavior data across marketing channels as well as segment their customers; ClickSURVEY provides the ability to measure customer satisfaction and to gather and supplement customer preferences; ClickSCORE delivers predictive and descriptive models; and ClickSHARE is an interactive, customized, content sharing module that allows users to incorporate a built-in referral mechanism into the campaign. ClickSquared’s Cross-Channel Marketing Hub also provides a strong analytical framework and reporting tools for performance measurement, response attribution and customer analysis.

At the core, ClickSquared is a relationship marketing platform for engaging customers in more relevant and personalized interactions across multiple-channels. As such, the solution is primarily designed to optimize loyalty marketing programs. Today, ClickSquared is largely used by B2C organizations with a strong client base in Sports & Entertainment, Travel & Hospitality and Retail.

Decision Software www.gleanster.com/vendors/decision-software-inc

“Decision Software is an established marketing services and software provider located in Lanham, Maryland, near Washington D.C. We are privately owned, stable, and profitable. Here at DSI, we are focused in two areas: Marketing services - including database hosting maintenance, address hygiene, e-marketing,



http://www.gleanster.com/vendors/eloqua




surveys, and dashboard reports. Campaign management software - our industry-leading MarketWide product works with relational database systems including Oracle and SQL Server, allowing marketers to launch sophisticated multi-stage marketing campaigns, track results, run AdHoc queries, extract data, and create reports.”

GS: Decision Software offers a campaign management solution called MarketWide that can be deployed on-premise or hosted and managed by the vendor. One of the key benefits is MarketWide’s open architecture. The system sits on top of a company’s existing database and can work directly with relational databases such as Oracle or SQL Server. MarketWide is able to update and keep data fresh by running SQL queries in real-time directly against the database. The latest release, version 4.0, delivered enhanced reporting and an OLAP interface for the new Analyzer module. It also introduces a slew of new features to MarketWide’s robust campaign management tool, called PromoTrak, including support for multi-wave campaigns. Users can output files in any format they want or run matchback on new responses for campaign analysis. Users are even able to take a previously mailed segment and resolicit them.

Distribionwww.gleanster.com/vendors/distribion

“The Distribion multi-channel distributed marketing platform automates the entire marketing process and enables corporate marketers and local sales to execute effective campaigns through aligned marketing resources, up-to-date messaging, brand consistency and effective tracking under one dynamic, user-friendly and sales-focused platform. From industry to industry, one goal remains the same: to increase marketing efficiencies and offer leveraged marketing strategies with consistent messages.”

GS: Distribion is a multi-channel marketing automation platform designed for distributed marketing and sales environments. The tool delivers marketing automation capabilities such as email campaigns, personalized communications, social media integration,

corporate managed templates that can be customized at the local level, corporate approved asset management (logos, etc.) and local / corporate level reporting. Distribion addresses the unique multi-channel needs of Franchises, Financial Services, Insurance, Healthcare and Hospitality. In these environments multi-channel marketing can be very cumbersome and difficult to measure. Distribion centralizes brand management to a core platform that extends capabilities to local agents so they can own and maintain relationships at the local level. Naturally a core system of record makes customer channel preferences easier to manage and provides dashboard visibility into all customer facing communications.

Entiera (acquired by FICO)www.gleanster.com/vendors/entiera

“Entiera is the premier provider of On Demand Customer Dialogue Management Platforms. The Entiera Insight platform helps optimize every marketing interaction with customers, and drives marketing ROI by consolidating customer data and making it actionable across marketing channels. Entiera’s unique open architecture enables seamless connectivity to data sources and channels (including web, social, email and mobile), including real-time, event driven interactions.”

GS: Entiera offers an on-demand campaign and interaction management with robust capabilities, some enabled by integration with outside technologies (e.g., ExactTarget for email delivery). Entiera does not offer a lead nurturing component as part of its platform capabilities and, unlike most systems, Entiera creates and hosts custom databases for its clients. A suite of data quality and data integration services combine multi-source customer and prospect data from disparate sources. It aggregates information from billing systems, call center and customer service systems, web analytic applications, e-mail service providers, product registration systems, social media platforms, contact management systems as well as third party data and lists. Entiera’s campaign manager supports a range of multi-channel batch campaigns, including event-triggered and recurring or scheduled campaigns.

Note: While Gleanster strives to include all of the most relevant and noteworthy solution providers in the Vendor Landscape section, the list is by no means comprehensive in nature. Omissions may occur due to lack of sufficient market presence, as judged by the Gleanster research analyst team. Space constraints may necessitate some amount of paring of even those vendors that do have sufficient market presence. Simple oversights may also happen on occasion. To submit information about a solution provider, please complete the Solution Provider Information Form. To schedule a vendor briefing, please email [email protected]. Vendor descriptions are taken verbatim from company websites or from vendor-submitted profile information. Gleanster Skinny (GS) commentaries are based on vendor briefings, customer interviews and Gleansight research findings as well as on company press releases and various other information sources.


http://www.gleanster.com/vendors/eloqua

http://www.gleanster.com/vendors/entiera




eTriguewww.gleanster.com/vendors/etrigue

“Developed by marketers, eTrigue provides easy-to-use marketing automation, demand generation and sales acceleration Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications. eTrigue is a leading provider of marketing automation SaaS products that accelerate the way marketing and sales teams generate qualified leads and close sales. The DemandCenter® marketing automation platform helps marketers build more successful demand generation programs that target, nurture and qualify prospective customers based on their “digital biography, and give sales teams the real-time sales intelligence they need to identify, prioritize and effectively interact with prospective customers.”

GS: eTrigue offers a comprehensive marketing automation platform at an affordable price, making it attractive for companies of all sizes. However, its solution, called DemandCenter, is primarily targeted towards the small and mid-size business. Generally speaking, marketing automation providers rarely differentiate on features and functions. Without exception, eTrigue consistently produces some of the most innovative and graphically pleasing user experiences in the industry. For the price, eTrigue offers a very robust, clean, and simple-to-use interface with a well-thought lead nurturing and scoring layout. In addition, DemandCenter includes tools for email marketing, visitor tracking, audience segmentation, campaign management, and reporting and analysis, and it supports integration with Salesforce CRM,

GOOD BETTER BEST

INFUSIONSOFT

GENIUS

LEADLIFE

SALESFORCE.COM

ACT-ON

ETRIGUE

SILVERPOP

ADOBE NEOLANE

HUBSPOT

MARKETO

ORACLE ELOQUA

MARKETING AUTOMATION VENDORS RANKED BY FEATURES AND FUNCTIONALITY




http://www.gleanster.com/vendors/etrigue




Microsoft Dynamics and NetSuite. eTrigue launched the latest iteration in March 2011. It features pre-designed best practice campaign templates and a drag-and-drop interface for creating marketing and lead campaigns. It also features the ability to copy all or part of an existing campaign, which allows users to easily share and replicate successful marketing strategies, and it enables multiple campaigns to be built and displayed in real-time. In 2013 eTrigue expanded the email template library, added mobile access, extended integration with Microsoft Dynamics, and enhanced the anonymous visitor tracking capability.

Firstwave www.gleanster.com/vendors/firstwave-leadtracker

“FirstWave Technologies brings customers solutions for the complete sales life cycle helping you generate leads, increase sales, and retain your valued customers. Since 1984, we’ve pioneered the sales automation field and now offer innovative lead generation services including robust delivery of B2B email campaigns and compelling e-newsletters. FirstWave recently introduced Leadtracker™ to help customers capture all leads coming from online and offline marketing campaigns in one location—visible through a single dashboard—where you can track and compare results and ROI.”

GS: FirstWave includes all of the basic necessities one would expect in a marketing automation solution: email, landing pages, lead scoring, and ad tracking. FirstWave customers cover a broad range of industries including technology, software, marketing, manufacturing, financial services, business services, and healthcare. Gleanster has not engaged in vendor briefings with FirstWave.

Genius.comwww.gleanster.com/vendors/genius-com

“Genius.com provides B2B and B2C marketers and sales professionals worldwide with a smart and simple marketing automation solution. With Genius, SMB and enterprise companies alike are able to increase their demand generation by deploying email marketing campaigns with

integrated sales lead tracking features. With our free trial offer and easy SaaS deployment, Genius can be up and running in no time.”

GS: Recently named #150 on the “Inc. 500” list of fastest growing private companies, Genius helps small and medium-sized businesses make the transition to marketing automation from email systems by providing an accessible, scalable and affordable option for introducing tracking and nurturing functionality. The company offers a variety of pricing tiers, each with specific capabilities designed for the number of users in the plan. The Solo version includes one user and allows companies to send up to 1000 emails a month. Pricing then ranges from $400 to $1200 per month. Genius has taken a refreshing lifecycle approach to marketing automation recognizing that many small or midsize organizations may not need the robust and costly features that competitive solutions tend to offer. For companies truly looking for the most scaled back and feature light solutions Genius might be the place to start your marketing automation journey. Larger organizations using the Pro version report pricing can actually get fairly expensive prompting many survey respondents to consider other solutions with similar capabilities as alternatives. Having said that, users are generally pleased with the ease of use and feature set.

A free solution called Genius Demand Generation that has already attracted 1,500 companies, many of which are reportedly converting to paying customers. Released in August 2010, it provides easy-to-use tools for marketing automation, demand generation and email marketing such as auto-triggered response emails, drag-and-drop web to lead forms for creating landing pages, and behavioral lead tracking. One key product differentiator is Genius URLs (gURLs), which are specifically designed to help users track both structured marketing campaigns and ad-hoc social-media “conversations”.

Genoowww.gleanster.com/vendors/genoo

“Genoo was founded specifically to give Small-to-Midsize businesses an affordable yet full featured set of online marketing tools, including


http://www.gleanster.com/vendors/exacttarget






marketing automation that enables companies to generate more leads, nurture them, and convert them into customers. Our current customers range from startups to $100 million in revenue. We get asked this a lot: “How could you have all the features we need for that low price?!” You get full featured marketing automation with Genoo. Best of all, we listen to and partner with our customers when there is something you need that isn’t available -- now that’s a breath of fresh air! Affordable doesn’t have to mean scaled-back features or lower quality.“

GS: Genoo is a fairly new entrant to the marketing automation landscape but boasts a portfolio of happy clients that tend to stick around. To compete in an already cluttered

arena, Genoo positioned itself as the highest-value-to-cost ratio in the industry. Genoo is a full-featured marketing automation tool, but for the price you wouldn’t know it. Starting at just $199/month for unlimited leads and unlimited landing pages, Genoo is truly an affordable and compelling solution for small business owners. Genoo recently launched AppExchange integration with Salesforce.com and a snappy new SEO Competitive Analysis feature that gives even Hubspot a run for the money.

Greenropewww.gleanster.com/vendors/greenrope

“GreenRope.com was founded by entrepreneurs who saw the need to make it easier to run and grow a business. We have struggled through the

GOOD BETTER BEST

SALESFORCE.COM

SILVERPOP

ADOBE NEOLANE

MARKETO

ORACLE ELOQUA

ACT-ON

ETRIGUE

HUBSPOT

INFUSIONSOFT

MARKETING AUTOMATION VENDORS RANKED BY OVERALL VALUE








same difficulties you are no doubt experiencing, and over the past 12 years of providing software as a service to organizations like yours, we listened to people like you. Hundreds of small business owners, managers, and marketers came together to shape GreenRope to be what it is today. We hope you like what we built for you!”

GS: GreenRope targets small businesses with a robust and comprehensive marketing and sales solution. The features are almost too numerous to list. Actually, they are too numerous to list. With everything from customer database management, to campaign management, invoicing, event management, web analytics, lead scoring, and more it might be a bit overwhelming to the average buyer. But, GreenRope is designed for the simple, yet extensive needs of the small business owner. With pricing that ranges from $99 to $399, GreenRope is one of the most affordable and comprehensive solutions on the market.

HubSpot www.gleanster.com/vendors/hubspot

“HubSpot all-in-one marketing software helps more than 7,000 companies in 42 countries attract leads and convert them into customers. Applications in the software platform include blogging and social media marketing, search engine optimization, website management, lead management, marketing analytics, landing pages, email marketing and marketing automation.”

GS: HubSpot all-in-one marketing software helps more than 9,000 companies in 56 countries attract leads and convert them into customers efficiently and effectively. Hubspot is widely regarded as one of the big three competitors in the marketing automation space (alongside Eloqua and Marketo). A pioneer in inbound marketing, HubSpot started with roots in lead acquisition by optimizing blogs, SEO, Adwords, and Social Media. In 2012, HubSpot released the much anticipated 3rd generation of the product which included marketing automation capabilities such as email campaigns, landing pages, forms, lead management, Salesforce.com integration. Hubspot pricing is structured around active contacts. As, such, it can get very pricy to move large lists over to the system- which is cause for concern for many small-and-midsize

companies.

Hubspot has heavily messaged around the value of inbound marketing, and the turnkey call-to-action integration is a unique and compelling feature. Users can create dynamically updated forms for the website with a variety of different call-to-action messages that change based on prospect behavior. From an outbound standpoint (configuring and sending email campaigns), users report the system is still fairly basic – and like many marketing automation solutions it’s not entirely intuitive for new users. Simplicty is a core tenant to Hubspot’s success, however Top Performers invariably indicate the more they see benefits from advanced features the more likely they are to incorporate the full breadth of marketing automation capabilities in day-to-day operations. While HubSpot boasts the largest user base in the industry, the survey data suggested churn may be high based on pricing and the accessibility of key features. Nonetheless, Hubspot is without question a shortlist marketing automation contender for companies that are looking for a comprehensive acquisition-to-conversion solution and are willing to throw down some bucks to buy a tier one solution.

IBM Campaign www.gleanster.com/vendors/ibm

“Speaking directly to each individual customer is the key to successful marketing. IBM® Campaign, formerly Unica Campaign, allows you to target thousands — or millions — of individuals with just the right message. With IBM’s campaign management solution, you can quickly and cost-effectively design, execute, and measure customer-driven communication strategies across all of your channels, online and offline. IBM Campaign’s integration with IBM Digital Analytics allows cross-channel, multi-wave marketing campaigns to make easy use of digital behavior data to improve campaign targeting and relevance.”

GS: IBM acquired Unica in October 2010 to help its customers streamline and automate marketing processes as well as understand and predict customer preferences. As of 2013, IBM re-branded the solution to IBM Campaign and continues to move forward on the full Enterprise Marketing Management vision.







The IBM Campaign platform provides web and customer analytics, offline and online demand generation, and marketing resource management. It’s a comprehensive solution with a range of different components. IBM Campaign offers tools to help users qualify, prioritize, and assign leads as well as notify and deliver leads to sales teams and qualified agents. IBM Detect helps users create event-based marketing programs and IBM Interact is the inbound, real-time marketing component. IBM Campaign is designed to allow marketers to plan, design, execute, measure and analyze multi-wave, cross-channel, personalized marketing campaigns.

Infer www.gleanster.com/vendors/infer

“Founded in 2010, Infer delivers data-powered business applications that help companies win more customers. Its cloud-based solutions leverage proven data science to rapidly model the untapped data sitting in enterprises, along with hundreds of external signals from the web. Inspired by the simplicity of the consumer web, Infer manifests advanced statistics across huge data sets in applications that anyone can get up and running in just days. Customers include several of the Fortune 1000 and numerous high growth companies.”

GS: Infer is not a marketing automation solution. The solution is actually designed to make predictive analytics about leads far more accurate and accessible offering a powerful boost to lead generation efforts. In April 2013, Infer raised a $10M Series A from Redpoint Ventures. Infer offers a unique approach to lead optimization whereby existing customer data from various sources is aggregated and married with publicly available data on the web. Things like job listings, company financials, legal filings, and social media. This data is used to infer buying intent on the product or service that the Infer client is offering. Infer uses a machine learning algorithm to learn over time and determine which signals are the strongest and most important for clients offering a unique and customized model for every Infer client. Infer is about developing a better predictive model for sales leads and preliminary clients like Box, Jive,

Yammer, and Zendesk suggest the company is onto something big.

Infusionsoft www.gleanster.com/vendors/infusionsoft

“The only all-in-one sales and marketing software built for small business. With Infusionsoft sales and marketing automation software, everything you need to get more customers, grow sales and save a whole lot of time is right at your fingertips. It’s your small business CRM, e-commerce, email and social marketing solution all in one place.”

GS: Infusionsoft offers a comprehensive sales, marketing, and e-commerce on-demand solution. One of the company’s key differentiators is its laser focus on serving small businesses. Infusionsoft positions itself against Constant Contact, Salesforce.com, and AWeber, and re-branded the company from a CRM solution about five years ago to become more “marketing automation”-centric. With over 13,000 unique customers, Infusionsoft has propelled to the top ranks for small business marketing automation. In January 2013, Infusionsoft raised a whopping $54M from Goldman Sachs and seems intent on forging ahead for a possible IPO.

Infustionsoft offers a comprehensive customer engagement solution for small businesses. This includes all for the basic marketing automation capabilities such as lead nurturing, lead scoring, segmentation, multi-channel campaign configuration, asset management, business rules, email templates, landing page templates and reporting. The easy drag-and-drop campaign configuration is intuitive, even for the most technologically challenged small business owner. New clients are given access to a dedicated customer success coach who helps with configuration of templates and general questions about the platform. Infusionsoft also boasts a massive partner community for development and resale.

Lattice Engines www.gleanster.com/vendors/lattice-engines

“Lattice is revolutionizing sales and marketing through the power of Big Data. Our Big Data for Sales platform, salesPRISM, delivers real-time,








predictive and actionable insight to sales and marketing professionals wherever they are so they can engage the most receptive customers in the most compelling ways. Fortune 5000 companies such as Staples, Dell, EMC and SunTrust rely on Lattice to generate 75 percent more pipeline, triple conversion rates, and double win rates.”

GS: Lattice isn’t exactly a marketing automation solution. But companies evaluating marketing automation should be aware of the Lattice offerings because the predictive lead scoring capabilities can help bolster even the most successful marketing automation firm. Lattice unlocks big data by applying predictive analytics to extract real-time insight about customer needs and wants. The data then alerts inside and field sales people via CRM, mobile, and email about prospects that are likely to buy – in real-time.

Lattice Predictive Lead Scoring blends the contact profile and behavioral information from marketing automation with thousands of additional attributes that could contain hidden buying signals. Whether it’s the Web, internal data, or third party sources.

Exrsonalized Web content and product recommendations powered by newly acquired iGoDigital; Business-to-Business Automation, which expands ExactTarget’s online lead nurturing capabilities through integrations with salesforce.com, NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and SugarCRM powered by newly acquired Pardot; and Fuel, ExactTarget’s new platform for third-party development and integration.

LeadLife Solutionswww.gleanster.com/vendors/leadlife-solutions

“LeadLife Solutions is the only provider of a premier lead management solution combining people and technology. At LeadLife, we power our first-class marketing automation technology (the “brawn”) with lead management experts (the “brains”) to help clients maximize sales opportunities. Our specialists augment your staff with the time and expertise to build and execute marketing campaigns. With LeadLife’s flexible and intuitive software, we can help you increase the value of your lead generation dollars online/offline, qualify sales leads, shorten sales cycles

and increase your marketing ROI.”

GS: LeadLife Solutions, a spin-off of marketing automation company FirstWave, experienced noteworthy growth over the past year. The company attributes a large portion of its growth to LeadLife’s marketing service packages, which assign dedicated LeadLife marketing specialists to help each client plan and implement lead nurturing campaigns.

The company has been recognized for its thought leadership. LeadLife President and Co-founder Lisa Cramer was selected as one of the 50 Most Influential People in Sales Marketing Automation of 2009 and 2010 and also recognized as one of the top 20 Women to Watch in Sales Lead Management by the Sales Lead Management Association (SLMA).

LeadLife’s platform includes a new visual drag-and-drop campaign editor as well as tools for lead scoring, campaign tracking, lead nurturing with drip marketing, automated landing pages and surveys, emails and e-newsletter editor, and visitor tracking and marketing ROI reporting. In May 2012, LeadLife released a new, free website visitor tracking tool called Funnel Fixer.

LeadMaster

“LeadMaster delivers tangible benefits to sales, marketing and call center teams through its web-based LeadMaster solutions. The company’s online application closes the loop between marketing and sales by tracking leads in real time throughout the sales cycle, from demand generation to lead closure. Combining sales force automation, marketing automation and virtual call center capabilities, this powerful web-based CRM application helps companies pinpoint where leads are quickly converting into revenue in order to increase close ratios and maximize return on investment on marketing campaigns.”

GS: Gleanster analysts have not briefed with LeadMaster.

LoopFuse www.gleanster.com/vendors/loopfuse

“LoopFuse offers a B2B marketing automation


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platform that tells you who is visiting your website, helps you capture their information, sends lead nurturing emails, scores the best opportunities, and integrates it all into your CRM system with advanced reporting. Once in place, you’ll see more qualified leads, shorter sales cycles, increased marketing and sales efficiency, and the automation of once manual and repetitive tasks. In short, we help you generate revenue faster. LoopFuse is privately held company based in Atlanta, GA.”

GS: LoopFuse OneView delivers inbound marketing, email marketing, lead capture, lead nurturing, CRM integration, lead scoring, and lead management capabilities. The latest release also features new Lead Capture Form analytics designed to provide insight into which referring sites, search engines and keywords are leading to the highest conversion rates. OneView offers Inbound and Search Engine Marketing analytics, as well. In May 2012, LoopFuse added two major enhancements to its Salesforce.com customer relationship management (CRM) support: LeadFlow Enroller and Sandbox Connector for Salesforce.com.

Lyris www.gleanster.com/vendors/lyris

“Lyris ONE is the first solution to natively integrate deep behavioral analytics with real-time data processing to provide marketers with actionable insights that optimize targeting, messaging, and campaign performance. Lyris ONE’s powerful dynamic profiling, marketing analytics, campaign design and automation capabilities enable marketers to maximize the relevancy and impact of every customer interaction - and deliver unprecedented value to the channel of ONE.”

GS: As a well-established player in the digital marketing space, Lyris has always been in an advantageous position with respect to understanding the multi-channel needs of marketers. Lyris ONE is a completely new approach to digital marketing engagement – built from the ground up following a beefy round of VC funding. Lyris ONE was developed from the ground up using the latest technology to provide a scalable platform. While Lyris continues to offer the traditional Lyris HQ solution, all indications suggest they plan to slowly

encourage customers to migrate away from the Lyris HQ platform which at its core contains many of the same features and functions as Lyris ONE. Ultimately, Lyris HQ hit a wall with respect to how much it could be customized and fixed to address an expanding customer base and exponentially more data. From this perspective, it’s important to remember, there are quite a few applications and on-demand solutions on the market today that may be approaching their shelf life, especially if the fundamental platform has not been refreshed over the last 10 years. One consideration when evaluating solutions like Lyris ONE is they contain the latest technology and therefore will likely be around for a lot longer without dramatic changes in the underlying code.

Lyris ONE treats customers and prospects as channel agnostic, and is designed to automate multi-channel engagement in one core system of record. Lyris is primarily targeting midsize and large enterprise clients with Lyris ONE, but any organization that struggles with multi-channel execution and data proliferation would benefit from such an approach. Lyris ONE boasts a single interface for configuring multi-channel campaigns, and the approach should resonate well with companies that struggle to embrace multiple siloed solutions in marketing.

MakesBridge www.gleanster.com/vendors/makesbridge

“MakesBridge delivers marketing automation and affordable hands-on services that are used by companies around the globe. MakesBridge’s rich marketing automation platform features easy-to-use tools that allow even the most novice of User to execute essential prospect management tasks such as email marketing, direct mail, automated nurturing, lead qualification, and sales alerts. Package costs range from $29.95 for basic email marketing to $1,500 per month for access to its full suite of software and a team to implement and manage marketing programs.”

GS: MarkesBridge started out as an email service provider in 2001 and later introduced a marketing automation platform after expanding its email solution’s functionality in 2010. MakesBridge offers an on-demand product available without long-term obligation via monthly subscriptions that range between $29.95 and


http://www.gleanster.com/vendors/makesbridge

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$1,500.00 per month. The platform is available both as a stand-alone platform and offered as an add-on solution to Salesforce and NetSuite. While it mostly serves small businesses, MakesBridge is used by some very large and well-known companies. Recognized names such as Time Warner Cable, Johnson & Johnson, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, and NCR have used the MakesBridge platform. Key features include outbound email, multi-step nurture campaigns, landing pages and forms, lead scoring, and Web visitor tracking (enabled by VisiStat). The direct mail production tool is especially appealing to small businesses and is enabled through integration with Cloud2You, a Salesforce.com App Exchange partner. The platform also includes a solid campaign engine and a unique automated URL labeling tool. MakesBridge’s pre-installed automation routines, called Push Play modules, are designed by seasoned sales and marketing experts with specific areas of expertise in various industries and enable users to customize the solution based on their needs. The sales automation module is used by some MakesBridge customers as their primary CRM system. It can also be integrated with Salesforce.com, NetSuite, Google Apps, or Capsule CRM, and is targeted to small companies as well. On the service side, the company offers an affordable Concierge Service to prepare marketing campaigns.

In February 2012, MakesBridge announced its integration with Salesforce and data.com as well as the release of its latest Push Play Module(TM) Lead Catcher(TM). These recent innovations are designed to allow companies to maximize the value of advertising investments in Google AdWords, LinkedIn, and other online marketing programs.

Marketo www.gleanster.com/vendors/marketo

“Marketo uniquely provides easy-to-use, powerful and complete marketing software that propels fast-growing small companies and global enterprises alike. Marketo™ marketing automation and sales effectiveness software – including the world’s first integrated solution for social marketing automation – streamlines marketing processes, delivers more campaigns, generates more win-ready leads, and

dramatically improves sales performance. With proven technology, comprehensive services and expert guidance, Marketo helps thousands of companies around the world turn marketing from a cost center into a revenue driver.”

GS: In May of 2013, Marketo became the second marketing automaton company to file for an initial public valuing the company at 6 times revenue. Both the Elqoua and the Marketo IPOs helped to validate the marketing automation industry, but they also set the stage for the next likely milestone- consolidation. What the Marketo IPO really means is that Marketo would be a natural acquisition target for a large suite provider like SAP, Microsoft, IBM, or Salesforce.com. Oracle’s acquisition of Eloqua left gaping holes in their competitor’s portfolios and they are likely to be filled sooner rather than later. That being the case, it’s fairly safe to assume Marketo may not be Marketo by the end of the year.

Over the last year, Marketo has placed heavy emphasis on growth in the Enterprise, and with about 50% penetration across all marketing automation providers, there is certainly plentiful opportunity for continued growth. Historically, Marketo is known to have one of the most sophisticated AND user friendly interfaces compared to Eloqua, Silverpop, and Pardot. But users report the landing page and email editors are a bit clunky. Marketo has also taken some hits with respect to support and professional services. Users report long queue times or recommendations to engage third-party developers. Marketo is definitely a tier 1 short-list contender.

Microsoft MarketingPilot www.gleanster.com/vendors/marketingpilot

“MarketingPilot is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation that operates within the rapidly growing $2.5 billion marketing automation software sector where we’ve been developing integrated software for marketing departments and ad agencies since 2001. Our goal is to provide our clients with an integrated suite of tools to help them manage and execute all their marketing campaigns and activities. Marketers choose MarketingPilot to improve their execution, customer insights, time-to-market, operational efficiency and marketing performance.”


http://www.gleanster.com/vendors/marketo

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GS: MarketingPilot began life as an operations management tool for mid-size direct marketers, with features for project management, list and media buying, source code tracking, expense capture, and vendor management. It has since expanded to encompass an extremely broad range of marketing capabilities, including lead prioritization and scoring, and may have the most extensive list of marketing resource management capabilities of any vendor under the sun. MarketingPilot appears to be in continuous development mode, releasing frequent platform updates. In October 2012, MarketingPilot was acquired by software giant Microsotft. MarketingPilot has a comprehensive vision for Integrated Marketing solutions that aligns closely to Microsoft’s vision. Its Integrated Marketing Management solutions are designed to enable marketing organizations to better understand customers, manage and streamline marketing operations and create automated multi-channel marketing campaigns. In addition, MarketingPilot’s product suite is built on Microsoft technologies available both in the cloud and on-premises.

MindMatrix

“Unique to the industry, MindMatrix offers Next-Generation Marketing Automation Software on a single unified platform for Sales and Marketing. Our solutions offer a complete integration of the two key functions, helping our clients achieve the maximum benefit from their investment in sales and marketing. MindMatrix’s Marketing Automation Software — AMP brings about total sales-marketing alignment so you can enjoy the benefits of a perfectly-aligned, tightly connected sales and marketing process. While most marketing automation solutions focus on marketing, AMP is the single marketing automation software that provides solutions for both marketing as well as sales.”

GS: NGleanster analysts have not briefed with MindMatrix.

Mintigo

“Mintigo is a Marketing Intelligence Platform that removes the guesswork, finding the best way to engage prospects with targeted campaigns. Only Mintigo has an InterestBase™ that constantly monitors your total universe of prospects, looking

for the messages that will resonate today. By targeting business needs & interests, marketers break through the noise to generate more clicks, more shares, and more pipeline.”

GS: NGleanster analysts have not briefed with Mintigo.

Net-Results www.gleanster.com/vendors/net-results

“Net-Results delivers a real-time lead management solution for organizations and provides deeper data analysis than any other solution. This allows sales and marketing teams to uncover hidden opportunities, accurately identify decision-makers, and deliver powerful, targeted, real-time responses and offers to potential customers.”

GS: Net-Results is a full-featured marketing automation solution for small-to-midsize businesses. Like most vendors serving the small business sector, Net-Results focuses on ease of use, striving to provide an intermediate step between the simplicity of email-only systems and the complexity of full-blown marketing automation. With drag-and-drop campaign management and integration with all major CRM players including Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, and Microsoft Dynamics, it’s tough to beat the $360 per month starting price. The product is not modularized, which is nice for the small business looking for a full featured and comprehensive lead management platform. Pricing is tiered by page views and monthly email volume. Unlike many lead management platforms targeting small business, Net-Results has an out-of-the box plug-in for Wordpress, a defacto standard for small and midsize company websites. Additionally, the platform contains a unique feature called “web form mapping,” which allows users to capture data from existing web forms and landing pages. It’s a nice feature that ensures a small business isn’t spinning cycles re-doing work that has already been done.

NetSuitewww.gleanster.com/vendors/netsuite

“NetSuite Inc. is a leading vendor of cloud computing business management software suites. NetSuite enables companies to manage core key business operations in a single system,


http://www.gleanster.com/vendors/net-results

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which includes Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Accounting, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and Ecommerce. NetSuite’s ‘real-time dashboard’ technology provides an easy-to-use view into up-to-date, role-specific business information.”

GS: NetSuite’s web-based CRM solution, NetSuite CRM+, delivers a broad set of capabilities for sales force automation, marketing automation and customer service and support, as well as a number of other functions that aren’t typically included in traditional CRM products such as partner/channel management, order management, ecommerce, and financial accounting. The software enables companies to create, execute and track multi-channel campaigns in real-time and make adjustments on the fly based on campaign performance and marketing effectiveness. It allows companies to capture leads from multiple sources including websites, direct mail and tradeshows. The software offers a solid set of email marketing capabilities as well, including target group creation, e-mail merge, sophisticated data cleansing and de-duping, and wrap-around performance measurement. Other marketing automation capabilities include keyword and SEO tracking, and web to lead forms. A key benefit of NetSuite CRM+ is that it can integrate with the back office (order management, order fulfillment and financials), allowing companies to follow customers through the entire customer lifecycle.

OfficeAutopilotwww.gleanster.com/vendors/officeautopilot

“OfficeAutopilot is the flagship product of MoonRay, a privately owned and funded California corporation. It was launched in 2006 to solve challenges faced by small and mid-sized companies (like ours) that we just couldn’t otherwise seem to solve. By integrating your contact management, payment processing, automated marketing, task management, affiliate management (and much more) OfficeAutopilot makes an otherwise tangled mess of technology into a simple and powerful platform that’s built for your growth.”

GS: OfficeAutopilot is an all-in-one sales and marketing solution for small-to-mid size

businesses. Integrated contact management and full marketing automation capabilities provide a comprehensive solution for the small business at a competitive price (starting at $297/month). OfficeAutopilot competes heavily with all-in-one offerings like Infusionsoft. The solution is particularly relevant for small businesses with e-commerce websites because it includes a web payment processing feature.

In March 2012, OfficeAutoPilot announced a handful of new features, most of which focus on making the solution more accessible to a company’s affiliates. Affiliates are now able to track which of their promotions are driving the most traffic, leads and sales. In April 2012, OfficeAutoPilot expanded its professional services offerings and improved its tools for building forms and creating emails.

Optify www.gleanster.com/vendors/optify

“Optify provides an indispensable demand generation solution for sophisticated B2B marketers. Optify helps you generate more high quality inbound leads, nurture more demand from your existing leads, and track the impact of all of your marketing programs in one place.”

GS: Starting at $99/month, Optify is a compelling solution for small-to-midsize businesses. Optify takes a bit of a different approach than traditional marketing automation providers like Marketo and Eloqua. The solution includes many web-centric features, like keyword suggestions, website optimization, visitor analytics, link management, social media marketing, as well as traditional lead scoring capabilities.

In June 2012, Optify announced the introduction of closed-loop email marketing to its inbound marketing suite. As part of a tightly integrated solution, the new email marketing capabilities will allow Optify customers to view, track and analyze all of their online marketing and email campaign results in a single dashboard. The dashboard is built on top of the ExactTarget Embedded email delivery platform, an enterprise-class email platform with industry-leading deliverability rates.

The new email marketing solution is the first in a series of what Optify calls “middle-of-the-funnel”


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lead nurturing, which can be thought of as getting demonstrated leads to a point where they are ready to buy. Marketers can now use email to follow up and engage with the inbound leads they drive with SEO and social media. The tight integration of email with Optify’s website visitor intelligence give sales the ability to see which prospects are interested based on their website research activity. While the inbound email marketing solution is designed for B2B companies, the vendor is positioning it as beneficial to digital agencies, as well, since more companies are outsourcing social media, website design, and SEO.

Oracle Eloqua http://www.gleanster.com/eloqua

“Oracle Eloqua is the marketing system of record for modern marketers. The company’s cloud software, professional services and education programs provide marketers with the technology and expertise needed to help marketing drive revenue. More than 100,000 global users from companies both large and small, rely on the marketing automation power of Eloqua to improve demand generation and lead management while driving more qualified leads. Eloqua’s customers include AON, Dow Jones, ADP, Fidelity, Polycom, and National Instruments. The company is headquartered in Vienna, Virginia.”

GS: Eloqua is the largest and most established enterprise class marketing automation vendor. In August 2012, Eloqua was the first marketing automation provider to file an initial public offering. Then in January of 2013, Oracle acquired Eloqua for 4.8 times revenue. The acquisition raised questions from Eloqua’s clients that used Salesforce.com; would Oracle continue to play nice with external vendors? To date, Oracle has assured the market that their intent is to support all platforms to foster the prolonged growth and adoption. Oracle plans to use Eloqua as the “centerpiece of Oracle’s cloud” to target the modern customer who is always connected, always aware, and always sharing.

Eloqua offers a feature rich and robust platform with scoring, lead prioritization, email marketing, multi-channel behavior analytics, reporting, and integration with all major CRM providers. For

enterprise organizations looking for sophisticated and scalable marketing automation tools, Eloqua is without question a short-list contender. The robustness of features do come at a cost. Users report challenges learning the tool and companies report challenges retaining good power-users after they are taught. Both Eloqua and Marketo power users are in high demand and quality comes at a cost. Managed service programs are available but these can also be quite costly. Although, relative to other marketing technology investments the cost of implementing a marketing automation tool with fully outsourced managed services is minimal given the opportunity for return (barring organizations do more than flip the switch on the technology.) The fact is, a Marketing Resource Management or Content Management solution can be millions to implement and take years to roll out; compared that to a price-tag of $300-400k for marketing automation and it puts things in perspective. For enterprise marketers, know that the Top Performers that get the most value out of Eloqua often devote dedicated resources to managing the solution. That’s to be expected in a large enterprise environment. It may also be a good idea to consider a VP of Demand Generation or Chief Revenue Officer to manage ongoing optimization of the tool and alignment between marketing and sales.

Pitney Bowes Business Insight www.gleanster.com/vendors/pitney-bowes-business-insight

“Pitney Bowes Business Insight is a software and services company that provides solutions to help organizations acquire, serve and grow relationships with customers and citizens. These solutions enable lifetime customer relationships by integrating data management, location intelligence, sophisticated predictive analytics, rules-based decision making and cross-channel customer interaction management to increase the value of every customer communication while also delivering operational efficiencies.”

GS: Pitney Bowes acquired Portrait Software in July 2010 and Portrait is now part of the Pitney Bowes Business Insight group (PBBI). In particular, the Portrait Customer Interaction Suite contains some marketing automation functionality insofar that it provides


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outbound campaigns and real-time interaction management. Portrait has a strong focus on deploying predictive models into workflows, and its advanced analytics prowess has been added to PBBI’s Data Quality and Customer Communication Management solutions portfolio. The uplift modeling component of the suite helps users predict the change in behavior of a single individual and target only those customers who are likely to react favorably to a marketing message. Another analytics tool for predicting customer behavior is Portrait Miner. It offers robust 3D data visualization and rapid modeling automation capabilities that help users predict profit-impacting behaviors and propensities, including customer churn, cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, campaign planning and segmentation, customer satisfaction and loyalty, and customer lifetime value. The Portrait Customer Interaction Suite also includes a back end application that delivers best-next-action recommendations in real-time during each customer interaction.

PUBLITRAC www.gleanster.com/vendors/pardot

“PUBLITRAC is an online marketing software that makes it easy to measure, manage and automate your multichannel marketing campaigns. What PUBLITRAC provides is a way to easily transform your website/marketing campaigns into a well-oiled marketing machine that produces quality leads that convert more easily into sales and revenue for your business.”

GS: PUBLITRAC is a CRM and marketing automation solution designed for small-and-midsize organizations. The company almost exclusively targets retail, professional services, non-profits, health and social services, and consumer package goods.

RedPoint

The RedPoint Convergent Marketing Platform™ (CMP) is the only fully integrated, all-in-one marketing platform available today. It provides all of the functionality necessary to receive raw data and, in turn, utilize that data to deliver highly targeted and timely cross channel communications, all in one cohesive platform.”

GS: Gleanster analysts have not briefed with

RedPoint Global yet.

Right On Interactive http://www.gleanster.com/vendors/right-on-interactive

“As the leading customer lifecycle marketing automation software provider, Right On Interactive (ROI) sees great success in helping businesses strategically engage prospects and customers and move the right relationships forward. ROI Customer Lifecycle Marketing™ solutions visualize individuals and companies in the customer lifecycle, allowing businesses to maximize marketing effectiveness, increase sales efficiency, improve customer communications and, as a result, drive more revenue.”

GS: Right On Interactive rebranded earlier this year to position itself as a marketing automation alternative focused on “customer lifecycle marketing.” The company originally marketed its software — formerly called 5Buckets — as a multi-channel output generation tool designed to complement conventional marketing automation systems. It has since expanded the product’s functionality and renamed it ROI Customer Lifecycle Marketing. Users find the patent-pending ROI Customer Lifecycle Map to be particularly valuable because it visualizes where each prospect and customer resides in the customer lifecycle based on their profile and engagement scores. The platform is also designed to provide data management, segmentation, campaign design, and lead scoring.

Sales Engine International http://www.gleanster.com/vendors/manticore-technology

“Sales Engine International is a B2B integrated marketing and sales acceleration company. The company has created a Managed Marketing Services model around Sales 2.0 and the most common executional failure points that organizations experience. Companies enthusiastically embrace the Sales Engine model as they’ve discovered “it takes a village” of fractional people to achieve the promise of marketing automation on their own. Clients come to Sales Engine to help them FIND, CONNECT


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with, and ENGAGE their prospects. The company implements and relentlessly executes a sales acceleration engine on behalf of its clients, leveraging world-class marketing technology, award-winning creative services, and the strategic direction of senior sales and marketing executives.”

GS: In June 2012, Manticore and Sales Engine International, a B2B integrated marketing and sales acceleration company, announced a merger agreement. Effective May 31, 2012, Manticore and Sales Engine—partners and mutual clients since 2009—have merged to form a new company that will operate as Sales Engine International. SEI is unique because the company offers a turnkey full service solution- from technology, to creative, to execution.

Salesforce.com (Pardot) www.gleanster.com/vendors/pardot

“Introducing the full-featured marketing automation system that’s easy to use. Pardot’s platform features CRM integration, email marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring and grading, social posting, and ROI reporting to help marketing and sales teams work together to generate and qualify sales leads, shorten sales cycles, and demonstrate marketing accountability.”

GS: Salesforce.com acquired ExactTarget (ET)in 2013 bringing with it the former ET acquisition of Pardot. Pardot is a robust and intuitive marketing automation solution that gained impressive momentum in the years prior to its acquisition. Some power users report navigation and user interface challenges that could likely be fixed with simple UX design work. Pardot is known for aggressive and accessible pricing, rapid implementations, and quick time to value. The company was laser focused on small-and-mid market adoption before getting acquired, but recently started gaining traction in the enterprise. The drag-and-drop capabilities are slick but users still report initial challenges navigating the tool. A library of pre-designed templates for email and landing pages make short order of getting campaigns out the door. Pardot isn’t as strong as comparable tier one competitors with respect to social media marketing campaigns. Pardot is a good fit for organizations that are

new to marketing automation and just need basic functionality to get up and running quickly.

SalesFUSION www.gleanster.com/vendors/salesfusion

“SalesFUSION is an enterprise B2B marketing automation software platform designed to support the business, technology and process needs of B2B marketers. SalesFUSION is the only marketing automation software built on top of a traditional CRM database. As such, we specialize in integrating key marketing and lead generation processes to your installed CRM system.”

GS: SalesFUSION won a THINKstrategies Best of SaaS Showplace award in the summer of 2012 for helping clients generate more Ieads. In November 2012, SalesFUSION announced a strategic partnership with Demandbase. Demandbase will enrich SalesFUSION’s website tracking tool with real-time business information about SalesFusion client Website visitors--including company name, industry, size, location, revenue and nearly 40 other attributes—via Demandbase’s Real-Time Identification Service.

In October 2012, SalesFUSION launched FUSIONcast, a fully integrated webinar campaign management solution within the SalesFUSION event management platform. FUSIONcast connects to both GoToWebinar and Webex and enables users to build, track and manage their webinar lead generation campaigns right inside the marketing platform, while connecting the webinar metrics to their installed CRM system. As part of the product launch, SalesFUSION partnered with WebAttract, a webinar demand creation and management consultancy focused on helping companies produce high-impact webinar lead generation campaigns. WebAttract will provide webinar demand creation, audience recruitment and general program consulting to SalesFUSION clients leveraging the FUSIONcast product.

SalesOptima www.gleanster.com/vendors/salesoptima

“SalesOptima is ideal for anyone or any business that doesn’t need a complete CRM software application. Our fully integrated, web-based contact manager contains all of


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the tools necessary to run a small business. Your homepage will offer convenient access to all of your contact information so that you can seamlessly manage and interact with your contacts. It’s accessible from any computer or mobile device, so you’ll never be stranded without all of your vital business information.”

GS: SalesOptima isn’t really a marketing automation platform. It’s actually more like a CRM tool with added functionality for sales optimization, email marketing, google synch, web-to-lead capture, and scheduling. Pricing starts at just $19/user/month and goes up to $64/user/month scaling variety of more and more robust features.

Silverpop www.gleanster.com/vendors/silverpop

“Silverpop is the only digital marketing technology provider that unifies marketing automation, email, mobile, and social. Its customers achieve superior Return on Relationship by uniquely engaging each individual based on their behaviors and then automating personalized experiences that increase revenue, improve ROI, and deepen brand loyalty. Silverpop’s commitment is to offer a platform that is complete, not complex-so that marketers from any size organization can easily achieve digital marketing success.”

GS: An enterprise class email and marketing automation solution, Silverpop is a great option for companies looking for a soup-to-nuts digital marketing solution. Silverpop helps marketers succeed in a “mocial” world, a term it uses to describe the convergence of social, mobile, local and email.

In September 2012, Silverpop announced several updates to Engage which incorporate behavioral elements into some of its core features. The enhanced dynamic content and lead scoring capabilities give customers additional opportunities to increase engagement and drive more revenue through more personalized campaigns influenced by buyer behavior. Silverpop also announced a significant enhancement to its Social Sign-In feature, built through a partnership with Janrain, a leading provider of social identity and user management solutions. Silverpop customers will now be able

to collect email addresses when an individual registers for an offer using existing LinkedIn credentials-an important development for B2B marketers, who are more interested in interacting with potential buyers via their professional vs. personal email addresses and want to target communications based on recipients’ professional backgrounds.

Silverpop reported significant, year-over-year new business growth in the first half of 2012. The company experienced a 40 percent increase in closed new business and more than doubled its new Professional Services contracts as compared to the first half of 2011. Silverpop now powers the marketing campaigns of more than 5,000 brands.

Sitecorewww.gleanster.com/vendors/sitecore

“Sitecore is a global software company committed to developing products that solve real world problems and deliver demonstrable results. Our customer experience management platform combines proven web content management with customer intelligence to create a single view of a customer that drives meaningful interactions, increases conversions and builds lifetime customers.”

GS: Sitecore markets its offering as “content management” but in reality, it’s more like a hybrid between web content management and marketing automation. In fact, for the better part of the last decade, Sitecore has been three steps ahead of the market with respect to platform capabilities. In addition to the core Content Management offering, Sitcore offers what they call a “Digital Marketing System” which includes email marketing, automation, analytics, print studio, and sales intelligence. Part of this offering also includes lead scoring for website visitors. An educated guess on the future of marketing automation would suggest the entire industry may be on a collision course with web content management. Clearly the website plays an integral role in lead capture and inferring prospect intent, so marketing automation capabilities are a natural augmentation to optimize the website. Sitecore is a great option for companies also evaluating how to make content management more accessible to


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marketers.

Teradata Applications (formerly Aprimo)www.gleanster.com/vendors/aprimo-a-teradata-company

“At Teradata, we’re focused on delivering the tools you need to win. With our cloud-based and on-premise Integrated Marketing Management software, you’ll be able to more effectively execute innovative and successful marketing campaigns across both digital and traditional channels. There’s more. Our marketing software helps you streamline your marketing processes, no matter how complex they may be. It also boosts your marketing ROI, all while engaging with customers in real time, so you can better understand what’s really important to them. Ready to start gaining a competitive advantage? See how our Marketing Automation software can leverage your marketing plans into a winning strategy.”

GS: Teradata re-branded the Aprimo to Teradata Applications in 2013. Aprimo earned a reputation as a leading solution provider of automated integrated marketing operations for large enterprise organizations. Teradata’s CRM solutions have been enhanced and rebranded as products within Aprimo’s Integrated Marketing Management (IMM) suite, which includes offerings for marketing operations, multi-channel campaign management, analytics, and data management. Aprimo’s native lead management capabilities we clunky before the acquisition- in fact one might go so far as to say that the capabilities existed but they simply weren’t at par with tier one marketing automation providers. What sets Teradata Applications apart from every other solution on this list is the broad and robust portfolio of products that address all facets of enterprise marketing. In fact, very few competitors can come close to the robustness of capabilities, or impressive list of globally known brands leveraging these capabilities.

In June 2012, Aprimo and Teradata announced the acquisition of eCircle, a European business focused on digital marketing. eCircle’s digital marketing solutions will be combined with Aprimo’s integrated marketing services to enable marketers worldwide to deliver highly

targeted, consistent and personalized digital marketing campaigns that are integrated across all channels. Customers can leverage Teradata’s data warehousing and analytical tools, which offer a similar infrastructure as eCircle’s solutions, to further optimize the customer experience. eCircle will also remain available for purchase standalone.

TreeHouse Interactivewww.gleanster.com/vendors/treehouse-interactive

“TreeHouse Interactive delivers enterprise-class hosted solutions to marketers and partner program managers. The company provides both marketing automation and partner relationship management (PRM) solutions to accelerate company performance. TreeHouse supports organizations ranging from start–ups to Global 1000 companies.“

GS: The TreeHouse Interactive Marketing View platform offers a highly robust and feature rich platform for large enterprise organizations. But, TreeHouse customers range from small-to-midsize to the large enterprise. The platform offers advanced marketing automation capabilities for both B2B and B2C organizations, and its refreshingly intuitive to use – especially for organizations with some prior experience with Marketing Automation tools. Marketing View is packaged as a comprehensive marketing automation platform, but more advanced web analytics capabilities (TreeHouse Reveal) and advanced Salesforce.com integration are sold as separate modules (Note: these modules are included for organizations with >50,000 contacts). Core differentiators include an intuitive form creation and customization engine, comprehensive data/contact management tools, advanced CRM integration, and event management. TreeHouse is one of the only marketing automation solution providers to also deliver out-of-the box partner relationship management capabilities (Reseller View) which can extend Marketing View into the partner channel, making TreeHouse Interactive ideal for large enterprise organizations with channel and partner relationships.

In November 2012, TreeHouse announced that its Reseller View™ PRM system is now available


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on the Microsoft Dynamics Marketplace. With this development, Microsoft Dynamics CRM users will have access to the complete partner management capabilities offered in Reseller View. This update reportedly makes Reseller View the only PRM offering to have standard integrations with salesforce.com, Oracle and Microsoft out of the box. In September 2012, the company announced its Marketing View™ marketing automation system has new nurturing capabilities through deeper Salesforce(CRM) Sales Cloud CRM integration, improved event management, and enhanced content marketing capabilities.

True Influencewww.gleanster.com/vendors/true-influence

“True Influence is the world’s most accurate and fastest-growing online lead generation company, helping B2B decision makers and sales and marketing professionals to generate the right leads at the right time in the right volume. Founded in 2008, True Influence understands that effective sales and marketing efforts require the most in-depth and accurate prospect data combined with their proprietary Relevance Engine to generate the right leads at the right time in the right volume.”

GS: In September, True Influence announced the commercial release of LeadPAC, its behaviorally targeted, self-service email prospecting platform. LeadPAC is based on a cost-per-click (CPC), pay-for-performance delivery model, which means users only pay for responses. While LeadPAC is not a full-fledge marketing automation solution, what makes this product so unique and especially useful for SMBs is its simplicity. Users don’t need to worry about managing details such as importing and refreshing lists, spacing their mailings over time, and tracking which segments respond best because these functions are already included. All users need to do is first select an audience from True Influence’s database of 20 million B2B business contact records (prospects come through the vendor’s partnerships with major consumer and business list vendors), then define the email to send, and last define the campaign start date and weekly spending limit. LeadPAC reviews each campaign for content, reasonableness and compliance with anti-spam

regulations, and delivers a list of responders to users on a regular basis. The list can be loaded into any marketing automation system or remain in True Influence’s own marketing automation product, which enables users to run multi-step nurture campaigns, apply lead scores, and synchronize data with Salesforce.com.

Velocifywww.gleanster.com/vendors/ibm-unica

“Velocify is a market-leading provider of cloud-based intelligent sales software, designed for high-velocity sales environments. Velocify helps sales teams keep pace with the speed of opportunity and improve conversion rates by driving rapid lead response, increased selling discipline, improved productivity, and actionable selling insights.”

GS: Velocify, formerly known as Leads360, markets their solutions as “intelligence sales software”. That’s because the technology isn’t marketing automation (by the most basic definition), its sales automation designed to deliver repeatable processes that can systemically accelerate performance through rapid lead response, increased selling discipline, improved sales team productivity, and insights to maximize revenue. But the Velocify LeadManager provides sales specific capabilities that look suspiciously like marketing automaton; lead nurturing, efficient opportunity routing, and lead prioritization. Velocify addresses the unique industry requirements for a handful of industries including Finance, Mortgage, Insurance, Education, and Technology. Velocify is a powerful tool to use in conjunction with or, in some cases instead of, a marketing automation solution.

Venntive

“Venntive is a powerful suite of marketing, sales, social media management, and collaboration tools that provide businesses and individuals with everything they need to build their brands online. No third-party plugins or applications necessary. Venntive is the most comprehensive business solution on the market.”

GS: Gleanster analysts have not briefed with Venntive.


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Lead Authors

Ian MichielsPrincipal Analyst

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Related ResearchRecently published Gleanster reports that may be of interest to senior industry practitioners include:

Revenue Performance Management Benchmark

Targeting B2B Buyers on Social Media

Linking Inbound Marketing to Sales Results

Set-and-Forget Nurture Marketing

The Future of Marketing Analytics and the Power of Big Data

Quantifying the Value of Social Media Engagement in B2B Marketing

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http://www.gleanster.com/reports/reports/revenue-performance-management-the-evolution-of-marketing-automation

http://www.gleanster.com/reports/reports/targeting-b2b-buyers-on-social-media

http://www.gleanster.com/reports/reports/linking-inbound-marketing-to-sales-results

http://www.gleanster.com/reports/reports/set-and-forget-nurture-marketing

http://www.gleanster.com/reports/reports/the-future-of-marketing-analytics-and-the-power-of-big-data

http://www.gleanster.com/reports/reports/quantifying-the-value-of-social-media-engagement-in-b2b-marketing




2013 Marketing Automation Benchmark Report

Marketing

Transcript of 2013 Marketing Automation Benchmark Report