Tech Solution: Marketing Campaign Management Software

Many business people say marketing is as much an art as it is a science. Today's marketers must devise complex-but-agile customer communication strategies--often with limited resources--to get their message across, and they rely on an array of tech solutions aimed at taking much of the artistic guesswork out of marketing. Campaign management and marketing automation solutions improve response rates and revenues, ease the workload of creating sophisticated, timely, personalized campaigns, adjust campaigns and communication channels in real time, and enable marketers to take advantage of customer analytics.

Aprimo's Campaign Management and Email Marketing
Delivery Model: Web-based
Price: Sold as a separate application from Aprimo's Marketing suite, the price range is $15,000 to $40,000, depending on modules included.
Business Benefits: Provides marketing departments with an application to manage the processes of designing and running a marketing campaign, including segmentation, campaign production, and email campaigns, and to communicate relevant information to customers and prospects while receiving feedback information to adjust and improve effectiveness.
Capabilities/Functionality: An application within Aprimo Marketing, the company's Enterprise Marketing Management suite, Campaign Management and Email Marketing includes a campaign manager enabling marketers to design, build, and execute high-volume,
multichannel B2C and B2B direct marketing campaigns. A dialogue manager provides a graphical environment to build and execute multistep, multichannel, triggered campaigns, and it accepts campaign groups from segmentation. A Web-response tool provides response management capability through the use of inbound Web forms, and enables marketers to communicate email marketing notification requests internally and externally.
Contact: Aprimo Inc. at 1-317-803-4300; email at info@aprimo.com; or visit www.aprimo.com

Unica's Affinium Campaign
Delivery Model: installed software
Price: Sold separately from Affinium Suite, Affinium Campaign prices vary based on modules added, customer IT technology already in-house, number of users, and customer records and databases; installation averages $250,000 and up.
Business Benefits: Enables organizations to control inbound and outbound marketing campaigns and customer interactions in real time. This proprietary software also allows marketers to manage multichannel, multiwave segmentation campaigns throughout an organization's customer touch points.
Capabilities/Functionality: Affinium Campaign was created as an interaction management solution for designing, executing, and analyzing transactional, real-time, event-triggered, and batch communications. The application fully integrates into customer analytics and predictive models for improved targeting. The software comes with One-to-One Optimization, so marketers can identify, distinguish, and reach customers more efficiently. Affinium Campaign includes an intuitive Web interface with simplified visual selection capabilities, a library of predefined reports, and tailored packaging of functionality for differing user roles and responsibilities. Finally, automated response tracking functionality is provided for closed loop reporting.
Contact: Unica Corp. at 1-781-839-8000; email at unica@unica.com; or visit www.unica.com

SAS Marketing Automation
Delivery Model: installed software
Price: SAS Customer Interaction solutions (Marketing Automation is one) start at $150,000 for up to 1 million customer records.
Business Benefits: SAS Marketing Automation helps companies improve response rates and revenues via a platform that integrates analytics, data management, and business intelligence. Marketing departments can create campaigns, coordinate campaign activities throughout the organization, integrate with fulfillment channels, and segment customers for specifically targeted audiences.
Capabilities/Functionality: A part of SAS's Customer Intelligence solutions family, Marketing Automation incorporates Campaign Studio, a Web-based application that allows campaign managers to graphically create multichannel, multistage campaigns. In addition, Campaign Studio lets product or segment managers synchronize their activities with the campaign management team. Integration functionality allows Marketing Automation to drill into customer databases, fulfillment channels, and other enterprise back-office systems. Marketing Automation distributes information via Web reports, OLAP analysis, email, and SAS-generated tables and charts in Microsoft Office.
Contact: SAS Institute at 1-800-727-002; email at contracts_support@sas.com; or visit www.sas.com

Contact Editorial Assistant Colin Beasty at cbeasty@destinationCRM.com