by admin on August 22, 2010
Last week IBM announced that it will purchase marketing automation software maker Unica for roughly $480 million. IBM is a Unica customer and shares a number of clients like Nordstrom’s and Best Buy.
Unica now joins IBM’s stable of recent acquisitions to join it’s WebSphere platform like…
IBM’s stated goal is “to help customers generate a consistent and relevant cross-channel brand experience to promote cusotmer loyalty and satisfaction”. Adobe gave a similar rationale after purchasing web analytics provider, Omniture and content management vendor, Day Software.
So what does all this all mean for the marketing automation space?
- Marketing automation is a key function to the overall enterprise software environment. Aprimo CEO, Bill Godrey put it best when he said, “…this acquisition validates our position that marketing must become a top priority for businesses and is in the midst of a revolutionary change. The market for marketing solutions and integrated marketing software is hot and growing.” IBM is one of the most respected technology companies in world and they clearly see the value that marketing automation adds to their services business.
- Consolidation will continue in the marketing automation. The marketing automation space is crowded and it makes sense for smaller companies to merge in order to get economies of scale. Also, look for larger software companies like SAP, Oracle, Salesforce.com, Netsuite, or Microsoft to aquire a marketing automation company to complete their product line.
by admin on August 14, 2010
CRM expert David Taber provides some good perspective on how to properly track leads in his recent article, How to Improve Your CRM Lead Tracking.
Taber notes that almost every CRM system can track a lead source through conversion and close. While this sounds good on paper, most customers don’t make their first purchase as a result of one marketing tactic (email, trade show, banner ad, etc). This is even more true for B2B transactions that require a complex sales process. Taber advocates creating campaigns to keep track each time there is a customer touchpoint….
In B2B companies, it’s not at all unusual to have at least one outbound e-mail a month to every lead or contact in the system. And hopefully there will be some customer response, such as registering for a Webinar or doing a download. Every single one of these actions or responses is recorded as a separate campaign member “event.” If you’ve got long sales cycles or long-running customer relationships, a contact’s campaign history can grow to 100 records or more. This gives your sales reps tremendous insight into the state of the customer’s knowledge (and hopefully the evolution of their interest/attitude) before they pick up the phone.
More importantly, these records provide the basis for much more intelligent CRM automation. Each lead and contact will have a more detailed profile, so marketing can segment them better. You also have a record of what each individual has done over time, so your marketing automation system can do a much better “behavioral scoring” of the lead for filtering and prioritization. If you have a customer support solution-suggestion system, it will have much more complete keywords to narrow the documents it suggests in your customer self-support portal.
I agree with David’s article and thought it would be fun to show some screen shots of Salesforce campaign structure.
Here is an example of campaign detail.
You have the ability to nest campaigns under a master campaign like this.
Here is an example of how Salesforce tracks campaigns at the lead and contact level.
This all leads to a handy dandy marketing ROI report that can be segmented various ways.
Read entire article, How To Improve Your CRM Lead Tracking
Learn more about Salesforce Campaign Management