Earlier this month Marketo launched a marketing automation suite designed for small businesses called Spark.  Starting at $750 per month this appears to be Marketo’s answer to less expensive competitors like Pardot, Genius, and Hubspot.

Greg has a successful history in the software business with a track record of creating winning products, brands and businesses. For over 15 years, Greg helped grow the ACT! contact management and SalesLogix CRM businesses from startups to global brands. He has a passion for helping emerging technology companies with their marketing and growth strategies.

The interview covers the following topics…

- Why Infusionsoft is the right choice for small business owners.

- How Infusionsoft differs from other marketing automation solutions that target the small business space.

- The advantage of converging CRM, marketing automation, and ecommerce in one platform.

- Why being bigger is not the main motivation for  most small businesses.

The differentiating feature of a Marketing Automation application vs. an Email Marketing application, is automation as the name implies. No longer do you have to be present to click the “send” button to fire off hundreds or thousands of email messages. Additionally, you may not even have to manually select which names to mail to as a Marketing Automation application can dynamically add and remove names from a distribution list based on segmentation formulas that you pre-establish. Most Marketing Automation tools include most all of the functionality found in Email Marketing applications described above and provided enhanced capabilities through many of the following features:

• Campaign Automation – replicate successful multi-step marketing campaigns and have them run on auto-pilot. For example, set-up a campaign that will automatically send a save-a-date email 180 days before the event, invitation 90 days before event, reminder 30 days and 5 days before event, and sorry-we-missed-you and thanks for attending messages 1 day after the event. Campaign automation is the core functionality that differentiates Marketing Automation applications from Email Marketing applications.
• Dynamic Content – automatically provide alternative content based on segmentation parameters. For example, a recipient in California could receive content on events in California while a New York recipient could receive events in New York all through a single automated emailing.
• Event/Webinar Management – manage invitations, registration, reminders and post-event correspondence; integrate with popular webconferencing programs like WebEx. Forms and Landing
• Page Management – Many solutions can create dynamic landing pages that can be pre-populated with personalized information on the user, greatly increasing click throughs and form completions. These PURLs (personalized URLs) increase open rates in emails as well. Completing personalized forms can also be supported by auto-responder functionality provided in some applications.
• Lead Nurturing – ability to manage leads overtime that aren’t ready to buy today and monitor for changes in interest. Lead Scoring – ability to apply formulas to leads based on behavior and visit patterns.
• Social Marketing – integrations with Twitter, Blogs, etc. Website Monitoring – enable your teams to see individual companies visiting the website, often in real-time. This is not the same thing as website analytics like Google Analytics. Some vendors refer to this as website caller ID.

Marketing Automation Applications Pre-Integrated with Salesforce.com (prices shown are entry level pricing disclosed by vendor; consult vendors for volume discounts and other pricing considerations based on volume and features desired)

• Act-On ($500/month)
• Eloqua ($1,200/month)
• ExactTarget (pricing not disclosed)
• Genius ($1,500/month)
• Manticore Technology ($2,000/month)
• Marketo ($1,200/month)
• Silverpop (pricing not disclosed)

Read the entire post here

Example of Dukky Landing Page for Gamefly

Entrepreneur magazine recently featured a marketing platform called Dukky which promises to generate ‘viral campaigns with print, email, social media and mobile marketing platform that will increase customer response by eight times more than traditional marketing.

While it is not a pure marketing automation play, Dukky’s solution features high level campaign management, customer landing apges, viral peer sharing and real time analytics.  Within months of launching in January 2010 it has landed more than 100 clients like Chik-fil-A restaurants and Stein Mart department stores.

“This is going to be a game-changing technology,” says Richard Birt, senior vice president of customer analytics and insights at KSL Media, an agency that buys advertising for clients. “In 30 years’ time, I consider it one of the top three groundbreaking technologies in database management.”

Dukky uses a PURL with an offer on the mailer that  requires a visit to a microsite created exclusively for the individual customer. It mirrors the direct-mail campaign and is where a coupon can be found for print out. But before the payoff, the customer is required to share more information which is then collected and tracked via Dukky’s platform. The final step is to offer a way for customer to share with friends via social media.

Other direct marketers have used these tactics together but Dukky’s value proposition is having the entire platform all under one roof.

Read the entire article.

Buyer Education

The automated email campaigns in Marketing Automation systems are a great tool for buyer education. Based on a lead’s profile, interests and responses you can engage in a dialog focused on knowledge transfer. Once the lead is ready to talk to a sales person, the conversation will be much more efficient, because the lead already knows a lot about the products that you’re selling.

Sales and Marketing Alignment

Marketing Automation lets Sales and Marketing work together more efficiently in several ways. Lead scoring provides a mechanism to indicate when leads are ready to talk to a sales person. Rather than calling every new lead and facing a high rejection rate, a sales person can now call prospects who actually want to take the call. Lead tracking gives notifications of prospect activity. And the prospect’s activity history is available, so there is more background information to prepare for the first call.

High-Efficiency AND High-Touch

Sales 2.0 is all about productivity: how can you find and develop as many qualified leads as possible. The only way to do this is to automate. And that’s where Marketing Automation comes in. It provides Marketing with the tools to have lots of one-to-many conversations at the same time, and Sales with in-depth information on the lead’s background and activities.

Measurement of All Activities That Count

Marketing Automation linking together your email campaigns, website activity and CRM system, there is an immense amount of data available to measure marketing performance. The challenge is not data collection anymore, but figuring out which reports give you the insights that you need to further optimize your Sales and Marketing processes. In Demand Generation Metrics 101 I give an introduction to metrics-driven marketing.

Click here to read entire blog posting.

Winners were determined based on feedback and reviews from salesforce.com customers, and Marketo’s mass email solution has received more than 45 reviews with perfect 5-star ratings for ease of use, value, and support.

This is one of a series of Salesforce honors as Marketo also won the AppExchange Best of ’08 Award for “Best Marketing Automation” solution.

Click here to read more.

Personalization can be a challenge due to a lack of data integration and bad data hygiene practices. If marketers can’t trust customer data, how can they use it for more relevant, personalized, timely interactions that drive revenue?

According to a new research study published by Aberdeen Group, the top two challenges with customer data include an inability to segment and target customers through customer data (50%) and a lack of trust in customer data (34%).

The study highlights customer database processes and procedures from 155 organizations to identify how top-performing organizations build trust in customer data and use this information to achieve superior performance in marketing.  Click here to download a free copy.

“Whether you want to capture more leads, qualify the strength of leads or determine the value of leads after a marketing campaign, marketing automation can help, which inevitably results in higher sales numbers,” says Stack.

According to strategist and business adviser Jill Konrath, “The only way to capture the attention of corporate decision makers is to create a very personalized message based on in-depth research of their firm.”

“Marketing-automation software additionally helps you determine if your last marketing campaign was a boom or a bust. Whether a campaign is designed for short-term results or is part of a long-term strategy, you’ll have access to real-time information about all of your company’s marketing and lead-management efforts. Analytical tools give you the ability to track campaign success or failure, and can help companies create metrics and protocols for crafting consistently effective marketing campaigns. This results in more leads, which naturally boost sales.”

Many studies show that email users look at the sender name and address when deciding whether or not to open an email. If they recognize your sender line and think well of you, they’ll likely open. If they don’t recognize you, they may delete you or mark you as spam.

Here are the four most common branding tactics that company’s use with their sender names:

1. Brand name. It’s succinct, uncluttered and easy to recognize.

2. Dot-com branding. For instance, Macy’s uses the sender name “macys.com” and Dick’s Sporting Goods uses “DicksSportingGoods.com.” This tactic accomplishes two goals: It acts like a call-to-action, reminding subscribers to visit the site; and it familiarizes subscribers with the URL, which can be extra valuable when there’s punctuation or another issue that might lead to uncertainty as to the URL, as in the two examples above.

3. Brand name plus the name of the newsletter. For instance, Wal-Mart uses “Wal-Mart Wire”. Studies have shown that open rates are often higher when marketers work their branding into their subject lines. Beginning your subject lines with the newsletter name is a secondary form of branding.

4. Brand name plus the name of their division. Hewlett-Packard, which uses the sender name “HP Home & Home Office Store.” Most divisions really are different brands, just like Williams-Sonoma is different from Williams-Sonoma Home.