Posts Tagged ‘Demand Generation’

Marketing Automation Buyer’s Guide to Email Deliverability

Wednesday, September 15th, 2010

Email Deliverability is a hot-topic today as marketers seek to fine-tune their outbound messaging and engage customers with mass email campaigns and lead nurturing programs. Before making a purchase decision for a marketing automation platform, buyers should know the basics of email deliverability, as it will have a direct impact on the success or failure of their marketing programs and ROI.

The list below is composed of technology and usability items that we believe are a base-line for achieving increased deliverablity rates from your email marketing campaigns.

(more…)

Know Thy Customer

Tuesday, September 14th, 2010

For a while now we’ve all heard plenty about how the emerging trend in marketing is moving towards “content marketing” or the creation of custom pieces aimed at generating a relevant engagement at a specific point of time.

What I’ve found lacking in the discourse, however, is a real pragmatic approach to leveraging this for marketing purposes.  Part of the explanation for this is certainly that it’s not an easy thing to do.  It is, however, possible to apply a methodology for content creation that will consistently outperform traditional approaches.

Over the coming weeks I will begin to breakdown the evolving approach I’ve seen work for a number of clients.  As a starting point, I’ll focus on getting to know the customer.  This is the key starting point for any content strategy.  If you don’t understand what makes them tick you can’t consistently generate interesting perspectives.  There are a lot of very tactical, very actionable steps you can take.  In fact… there are at least 15 of them!  Some of these will certainly be familiar, but on the whole hope you will take away some nuggets and a plan on how to string them all together to greatest effect.

(more…)

7 Must-Follow Marketing Automation Blogs

Monday, September 13th, 2010

For the benefit of our readers, we have assembled a list of our most-read blogs that provide marketing automation best practice advice, tips, tricks, and industry news. We normally follow these blogs actively and believe them to be the most important and up-to-date group of expert bloggers covering  the field of marketing automation:

  • LeadSloth : Covers all aspects of marketing automation (including best practice advice, tips, tricks, webinars, and news) with the most up-to-the-minute and non-biased reporting in the space. Follow LeadSloth on Twitter for the most up-to-date events announced in the marketing automation space: @leadsloth
  • Customer Experience Matrix : Managed by David Raab, this blog’s focus is mostly centered around industry news within marketing automation and complementary spaces like web analytics, email marketing, and SEO. David has covered the industry for a long time and is possibly the most knowledgeable (and objective) blogger in the field.
  • Marketing Consiglierie : Allinio’s corporate blog is filled with marketing events/conference news, and general best practice help and advice for those starting out. Allinio is a consultancy dedicated to helping organizations maximize their marketing automation investments.
  • Marketing Interactions : Ardath Albee does a great job of providing nuggets of wisdom in every blog post. Aside from marketing automation topics, this blog covers social marketing, sales process, email marketing and content-writing.
  • Digital Body Language : Steve Woods, CTO of Eloqua, is a visionary in the space of demand generation and marketing automation. Ths blog updates very frequently with great advice for all levels of marketing automation users.
  • The Funnelholic : Covering online marketing, b2b marketing, b2b sales, lead nurturing and general marketing automation trends and events. Insightful and regularly updated.
  • DemandGen Report : You may have to wade through the vendor-sponsored content, which is often hard to distinguish from the regular editorials, but this site provides well-written and informative articles, covering industry news from all the vendors in the space.
Marketing Consigli

The Value in Free Marketing Automation

Tuesday, July 6th, 2010

End the Status Quo in Marketing Automation

Last week marked a dramatic turning-point for us at LoopFuse and the general Marketing Automation sector, with the unveiling of our Free Marketing Automation offering, FreeView. The release of FreeView and a new low-cost, zero-risk pricing model, marks an almost year’s-worth of work in  planning and infrastructure investment geared to accelerate the adoption of Marketing Automation.

The Value to Marketers

While most in the industry often reference a Forrester report claiming 5% penetration in the Marketing Automation sector, the unusual thing is that no one seems to wonder (publicly) why the rate of growth isn’t much higher given the value Marketing Automation provides.

So allow me to rain on the price-gouging parade. Many of our competitors would have you convinced that Marketing Automation is reserved for marketers with million-dollar budgets, dedicated staff to manage the tools, and a bus-load of expensive professional services representatives to “help” them manage it. “Oh, marketing automation is much too complex for you mere mortal marketers…”, the million-dollar-quota sales-rep claims. In many ways, our competitors are distorting the market by projecting their own enterprise-sales commission structure on to you. The model works for them, at the cost of the consumer (your arm, and your leg). In a market with single-digit penetration, and many competitors continuing to follow Eloqua in to the realm of pricing-out the masses, it is evident that many marketers are simply priced-out of the market. And so now the high price barrier to entry for marketers wanting to adopt marketing automation is lowered to ZERO.

The benefits to marketers under this innovative model are clear:

  • Zero-Risk: Sign-up and use a full-featured marketing automation product for FREE. Forever.
  • Easy-to-Use: A complete wizard-based user-interface will have you up-and-running in minutes, identifying high-quality leads, sending email campaigns, and tracking lead conversion rates.
  • Help at your fingertips: Our comprehensive knowledge base and community site is backed by LoopFuse support staff and community members exchanging ideas and best-practice advice.

The value in “free, forever” to marketers is clear with a zero-risk, easy-to-use, supported, and proven product.

The Value to Partners

As individual marketers benefit from a free offering, so do our Partners. The benefits are actually much more clear to partners, as they are now able to fully-implement a customer for FREE and not have to worry about the product vendor affecting their pricing structure. To a Partner, the relationship becomes pure-profit, and not revenue-sharing, as our competitors would enforce.

Last week, the status-quo of distorting the market with overpriced products ended. Marketing Automation is now open to any and every marketer, to use it for Free Forever. No strings attached, no bait and switch, no credit cards required. Just Sign-up and you’re ready to go in minutes.

Thoughts on the announcement, by others:

The Future of Marketing Automation

Wednesday, June 16th, 2010

Over the last couple of years, particularly in the marketing space, nothing has been hotter than the marketing automation space.  The promise of doing more with less, speeding response times, and focusing sales efforts on the most likely prospects have held wide appeal during these lean times.

Looking to the future of the space, however, I think the near term promise is going to have less to do with the automation and more with the data capture.  As digital begot social, and social continued to fuel the adoption of digital it cumulatively is changing the face of marketing.

When the current crop of marketing automation tools was built email marketing was pretty much the centerpiece of an online strategy.  Connect an outbound email to eventual web site behavior and you really had something.  Largely this really is no longer the case.  Email is rapidly approaching extinction as an acquisition vehicle.  Today you need more diversity in your mobile mix that equally represents web, search, email, display, social syndication, social engagement, and some cases mobile.

One of the most intriguing early features of marketing automation was the ability to spot and track the behavioral trends of customers.  Steven Woods over at Eloqua did a great job of describing this in his book Digital Body Language.  As digital volumes grow his perspective becomes more and more relevant.  The challenge now lies in figuring out how to do this in the multi-channel, digital world.

The future of marketing, all marketing, lies in the ability to craft relevant offers to much smaller audiences.  What will fuel this is the ability to capture integrated customer profiles that span all the relevant channels.  Customers are sharing more data than ever before and the smart marketer will use that to inform their creative, improve their offers, and begin a dialog with their customer.