New Marketing Automation Hits the Mark
FUELING GROWTH THROUGH M&A'S
Salesforce.com has made a big push to compete in the marketing automation industry, offering two solutions in Pardot and ExactTarget. One of Pardot's key features is its email marketing—in November 2015, Salesforce.com announced integration of Pardot with Gmail, a big move given the popularity of Google's email platform. Pardot's email marketing provides users with email scheduling, including autoresponders for forms and landing pages; personalized messaging with automatic segmentation and content that changes based on prospect engagement; and optimized sending that is supported by A/B testing. In addition to email marketing, Pardot also provides marketers with feedback via return-on-investment reporting that evaluates campaigns and email performance and can connect data from various marketing tools.
In 2013, Salesforce.com acquired ExactTarget, rebranding the marketing automation and analytics provider as Salesforce Marketing Cloud. In addition to marketing automation, the solution offers a range of services, including email, mobile, and social marketing. The email component enables users to execute promotional and automated campaigns, as well as personalized emails, transactional messages, and behavior-triggered messages—features that address the increasing importance of personalized marketing campaigns. The mobile marketing component also offers key engagement features: Its messaging component enables marketers to send both short message service and multimedia message service interactions, and the MobilePush solution enables marketers to manage an unlimited number of mobile apps and push messaging that is personalized and targeted on both iOS and Android devices. The depth of and emphasis on personalization in the Salesforce Marketing Cloud exemplifies how CRM and marketing automation can come together to provide marketers with data-backed solutions.
Oracle has also made a push into marketing automation with Eloqua, which it acquired in 2012. Eloqua takes a data-driven approach to marketing automation, and one of its key benefits is its integration with Oracle WebCenter Sites. WebCenter Sites enables marketers to create and manage social and interactive online content for customers, and the combination with Eloqua enables marketers to provide customers with a unified, personalized digital experience. Eloqua's marketing automation is integrated with CRM and connected to prospect intelligence and productivity tools that gather information about customer engagement—information that can then be sent to sales teams to help them improve interaction with customers.
OutMarket is a particularly interesting example when it comes to marketing automation. Originally known as Vocus, the company was acquired by private equity firm GTCR and merged with PR software company Cision in 2014. Following this merger and acquisition, Vocus was rebranded as OutMarket, and the company's small-business email marketing solution, iContact, was established as an independent company. Now, OutMarket and iContact have been rejoined under the iContact name, with a focus in particular on email marketing. The solution offers a number of key features, including segmentation to deliver timely, personalized emails, social networking capabilities that enable monitoring of real-time activity, and engagement tracking that allows marketers to quickly respond to interest signals from prospects. iContact also offers syncing with Salesforce.com, to sync records of contacts and subscribers in both systems.
While mergers and acquisitions have enabled CRM companies such as Salesforce.com and Oracle to expand into marketing automation, marketing vendors may also be looking to build their own CRM solutions. One such company is Hubspot, which, according to Lynton, has developed its own CRM system as opposed to being acquired. Hubspot's CRM system aims to provide a seamless experience with marketing, enabling users to manage content, channels, and marketing performance from a dashboard that also offers information on important company personnel. Not surprisingly, one of the hallmarks of the system is integration with HubSpot’s Marketing Platform, enabling users to easily provide sales teams with leads.
While these companies are leading the way in connecting marketing automation and CRM, many organizations still have a long way to go to optimize the data they have and make customer engagement more personalized. According to Lynton, personalization will continue to be a trend and drive marketing in the future: "It's important and it speaks to the need to really connect to your buyers and build relationships with prospects as well as customers," he says. With this in mind, it is essential for companies to look for ways to gather their various pools of customer data—whether from marketing or sales channels, or other sources—and extract crucial information from that data to optimize customer engagement. "The brilliant marketing of the future will be a marriage of data and analytics—that kind of discipline and really understanding a market, really understanding consumers, doing it in a rigorous, empirical way, and then being able to take that understanding to frame a creative challenge," Rayport says. While the rise of Big Data and marketing automation means that marketers will be using more numbers, creativity—and a human touch—is still essential to the discipline.
Assistant Editor Sam Del Rowe can be reached at sdrowe@infotoday.com.