Marketing Automation

Roundup

Marketing Automation

By Paula Bernier, Executive Editor, TMC  |  January 21, 2016

As Gartner noted in a new study released in November, digital marketing has become mainstream, blurring the lines between traditional and online marketing efforts, and making it increasingly difficult to discern between marketing and sales. That makes things more complicated in some ways, but it also has resulted in rising marketing budgets, and the expansion of marketing’s responsibilities, Gartner says.

Marketing automation tools like the ones discussed here are helping marketing and sales meet rising expectations in the age of the online and more empowered consumer.

Adobe (News - Alert)

www.adobe.com/solutions/campaign-management.html

Adobe Campaign provides campaign, offer, and personalization management capabilities for sophisticated automation and execution of marketing programs across all channels – both digital and traditional. Part of the Adobe Marketing Cloud, Adobe Campaign, encompasses everything B2C and B2B marketers need to plan, create, execute, and measure cross-channel marketing activities. Marketers can intuitively design and automate customer experiences across channels, from one-off campaigns to triggered messages, with a graphically rich interface. Users can leverage the solution to achieve top delivery rates, strengthen sending reputation, and maintain positive customer engagement with better email execution processes. As customers move across online, mobile and social channels, marketers are able to use the solution to build individual profiles that capture their interests, activities and interactions, all of which help in creating more relevant marketing experiences. Sophisticated list selections let marketers target highly focused audiences and create personalized experiences for each customer. The solution’s real-time interaction enables marketers to design and leverage marketing offers in a central place so they can easily deliver personalized messages across inbound and outbound channels in real time. And Adobe Campaign’s operational reporting allows users to easily see how well campaigns are performing, without a data analyst, and plan campaigns with a dashboard made for marketers.

Attentive.ly

https://attentive.ly

Attentive.ly empowers organizations with massive amounts of customer data with social listening capabilities, and the ability to deliver automated campaigns possessing the personalization features that today’s consumers have come to expect in marketing communications. With a plug-and-play option that easily integrates with existing CRM systems, Attentive.ly has the power to leverage existing CRM data by identifying customers, prospects, look-alike audiences, and relevant marketing opportunities identified through their social media behaviors that marketers can easily identify and act upon. The comprehensive tool allows marketers with CRM, ESP, and customer big data to pinpoint their most influential customers and advocates, triggering automated personalized messaging, streamlining real-time response, and eliminating lag time that results in missed opportunities. The social marketing automation tool is a complete solution, with all three necessary functions to provide real-time response: email-social media data matching, social media listening, and marketing automation within a single solution.

BlueConic

www.blueconic.com

BlueConic helps brands optimize cross-channel marketing opportunities through improved customer engagement. It offers a SaaS (News - Alert)-based online customer engagement platform that leverages a big data profile interaction store and machine learning to help marketers synchronize relevant communications across web, mobile, and social channels in real time. More than 70 brands currently trust the platform to solve their customer engagement, channel optimization, and permission marketing challenges, including ING, Pitney Bowes, Volvo, and others. Founded in 2010, the company is headquartered in Boston, with offices in Europe.

Bluecore

www.bluecore.com 

Bluecore’s Live Segments marketing automation software improves the process for both segmenting large promotional email lists and implementing behavioral data to create personalized communications, while automating the labor intensive processes around segmentation, data analysis and product recommendations. Live Segments enables marketers to segment email lists ranging from 1,000 into the millions based on multiple customer behavior inputs and create truly personalized, large volume email sends in a matter of seconds. With Live Segments, lists are segmented and individual product recommendations inserted in seconds, leveraging the Bluecore engine to query data and return results in orders of magnitude faster than existing technologies. Marketers can generate high volume sends that incorporate an individual’s past browse and purchase behavior in seconds, eliminating hours and days of costly manual labor. In the end, customers receive more personalized, timely email communications that drive open and conversion rates similar to those of a triggered email program.

Constant Contact

www.constantcontact.com

Constant Contact introduced the first email marketing tool for small businesses, nonprofits, and associations in 1998. Today, the company helps more than 650,000 customers worldwide find marketing success. In addition to offering a world-class email marketing product with attractive, mobile-responsive templates, image and file storage, list-building tools, contact management, and more, Constant Contact offers the only all-in-one marketing platform for small business, boasting a suite of products that span the digital spectrum in helping small businesses do more business. They include social media campaign management, online surveys, event management, and coupons and deals. Constant Contact further differentiates itself from the competition with its customer support. The company knows that time-starved small business owners need timely, friendly, free guidance. Customers can call, email, tweet or live chat with customer support representatives 7 days a week.  Constant Contact offers know-how with a personal touch to all customers in a multitude of ways, including free local seminars on marketing best practices, free webinars, and educational content on the blog. In addition, Constant Contact has an extensive network of solution providers that offer professional marketing consulting.

Infer

www.infer.com

Infer’s predictive lead scoring and prospect management platform help sales and marketing teams achieve significant lifts in win rates, lead conversions, average deal size, engagement and customer satisfaction. Infer’s technology can be used for a variety of sales and marketing applications, such as prioritizing inbound leads, conducting outbound prospecting and optimizing campaign effectiveness. With insight into the quality of prospects and customers across all of these programs, companies can leverage Infer to visualize the health of their business at any point of time. Infer’s proven predictive platform mines companies’ historical customer won/lost data from CRM and marketing automation systems, and pulls in thousands of valuable data points about an individual, the organization they work for, and their activity signals. The company’s prospect management platform then uses artificial intelligence across all of these data points to help businesses guide decision-making and improve the customer experience. Sales and marketing teams can use the platform to identify their high-value segments, review and act on intelligent recommendations, and automate next-best actions. Infer’s sophisticated fit and behavior models use advanced machine learning algorithms to predict good customers who are likely to buy, and deliver actionable insights to any application. 

Infor

www.infor.com

Infor offers a suite of marketing, sales, and service applications that deliver the capabilities mid to large-sized organizations need to drive engagement throughout the entire customer lifecycle. The suite includes: Marketing Resource Management; Social Marketing; Marketing Asset Management; Marketing Campaign Management; Real-time Offer Management; Customer Interaction Management; Sales Force Automation; Service and Big Data Analytics. By tightly integrating with back office systems, Infor automates the full demand-to-supply chain, from lead to ship, by integrating marketing and sales processes with supply chain planning, sales and operations planning, and production scheduling in real time. This vision delivers deep customer insights from data related to every customer interaction across the entire lifecycle. 

Infusionsoft

www.infusionsoft.com

Infusionsoft provides sales and marketing software for small business owners that helps them get organized, grow sales, and save time. Infusionsoft makes it easy to create a sales and marketing strategy and map out each step; centralize all customer interactions and daily activities; capture new leads and automate follow-up based on preferences and needs; identify the best leads and close more sales faster; and automate repetitive tasks like follow-up, contact management, billing and payment – all from one place. In addition to the Infusionsoft flagship product, the company has a host of other software solutions and integrations that make sales and marketing for small businesses easier. GroSocial by Infusionsoft is a social lead generation software for small businesses that helps them attract fans, leads, and customers with social promotions and contests. Unlike other social media tools, GroSocial focuses solely on small businesses and provides solutions to turn social engagement into measurable success.

Kentico

www.kentico.com

Powering 18,000 websites in 90 countries, Kentico Software delivers much more out-of-the-box functionality than comparable systems, while making enterprise-grade, integrated marketing manageable and affordable for businesses of all sizes. Kentico’s built-in marketing automation allows you to easily set up, change, and manage marketing automation workflows and their triggers. As a fully integrated marketing solution, you can use marketing automation together with content personalization, contact management, and lead scoring to maximize leads, and even integrate it with Salesforce. Kentico Online Marketing Solution helps optimize websites and achieve higher campaign ROIs. Kentico’s Marketing Automation allows users to get overviews as well as manage and report on the current state of contacts within the marketing automation workflow, while allowing users to choose from dozens of pre-set activities, conditions, triggers, and steps, or easily add custom ones.

LeaDNA Inc. 

www.leadna.com

The LeaDNA Marketing Platform is an all-in-one marketing solution that streamlines email marketing, social media management, content marketing, and direct mail marketing for a seamless experience across all digital touchpoints. By reducing data entry, automating lead follow-ups, scheduling campaigns, and visualizing ROI, the LeaDNA Marketing Platform cuts digital marketing costs, saves time and empowers your organization to make better strategic decisions. While our marketing platform engages clients and nurtures existing leads, the lead engine generates new leads and helps convert them into clients. Our lead engineers utilize demand based online marketing campaigns on search engines, social networks, display and content networks to target prospective clients based on search behavior, geography, social profile, interests, and more.

Leadspace

www.leadspace.com

Leadspace is the leading social powered B2B demand generation solution that enables companies to tap into social, internal, and external data in real time to discover, engage and understand prospects to drive increased marketing and sales performance. B2B marketers use the Leadspace SaaS solution to satisfy the full spectrum of demand generation needs – from lead list enrichment, scoring, and ranking to social targeting, web lead enhancement, and social sales prospecting. Leadspace integrates with leading marketing and sales automation platforms including Marketo, Salesforce.com (News - Alert) and Eloqua (Oracle) for a streamlined, efficient workflow. Founded by experts in web-based intelligence gathering and semantic analysis, the company is funded by top-tier venture capital firms, including Battery Ventures, JVP and Vertex. Leadspace has offices in the U.S. and in Israel.  Leadspace uses both sales input and predictive analytics to build your ideal customer profile. Then, you can refine that profile with an easy thumbs-up/thumbs-down feedback loop. Now you can effectively search for lots of new leads that look just like your ideal customer.

MaritzCX

www.maritzcx.com 

The Allegiance CX platform by MaritzCX allows organizations to see, sense, and act on the experiences and desires of every customer, at every touch point, as it happens. The platform delivers a modern approach to customer experience management: big data, cloud-based, multiple survey programs, with flexible service capability and integrated text analytics and data mining. The software integrates easily with other systems like CRM, POS and ERP so decision-makers can see the connections between customer experience, operational performance, and business results. The Allegiance platform includes Spotlight Data Mining, which helps companies easily find critical patterns in customer data. The Spotlight Data Mining module turns mountains of data into laser-focused insights in seconds and frees practitioners to spend more of their time driving change. Spotlight makes the power of data mining accessible to average business users by delivering results in clear business terms. The scalable and flexible Allegiance platform processes large amounts of data quickly and accommodates structured and unstructured data forms by using an innovative Hadoop, Elastic Search, and NoSQL-based infrastructure.  The platform turns raw data from dozens of customer touchpoints into real-time actionable insights and instantly delivers them to those who can take fast action.

Marketo

www.marketo.com

Marketo provides the leading marketing software and solutions designed to help marketers master the art and science of digital marketing. Through a unique combination of innovation and expertise, Marketo is focused solely on helping marketers keep pace in an ever-changing digital world. Spanning today's digital, social, mobile and offline channels, Marketo’s Engagement Marketing Platform powers a set of breakthrough marketing automation and marketing management applications to help marketers tackle all aspects of digital marketing from the planning and orchestration of marketing activities to the delivery of personalized interactions that can be optimized in real-time. Marketo's applications are known for their ease-of-use, and are complemented by the Marketing Nation, a thriving network of more than 550 third-party solutions through our LaunchPoint ecosystem and over 50,000 marketers who share and learn from each other to grow their collective marketing expertise. The result for modern marketers is unprecedented agility and superior results.

Microsoft

www.microsoft.com

In November the company announced that Dynamics CRM 2016 is now available, and called it the most comprehensive release ever of the product. Available both as CRM Online and via an on-premises model in 130 markets and 44 languages, Dynamics CRM 2016 is focused on empowering employees to deliver the optimal experiences to customers, as well as engaging customers across all channels. It leverages advanced analytics and machine learning capabilities of the Cortana Analytics Suite to preview the first intelligent, adaptive processes for sales, customer service and social. It allows for  

intelligent selling with cross-sell recommendations so sales reps can predict which products and services a customer will need during the sales cycle. Intelligent customer service with knowledge articles recommendations empower service agents with answers to questions so they can more effectively resolve customer cases and solve problems on the spot. It offers intelligent social with machine learning capabilities powering sentiment analysis, as well as the ability to process significant streams of data to detect social posts that are most likely to be customer service cases or new leads. 

Neustar

www.neustar.biz/services/customer-intelligence/lead-intelligence

Automation software empowers companies to deliver targeted campaigns across all of their channels. But a campaign is only as strong as the customer data it relies on. Neustar’s Decision Navigator enables organizations to implement operational intelligence to automate customer interaction and marketing activities. Through flexible analytics and automation, customers can define adaptable business strategies to fortify real-time decision making and improved data management. Cleansing customer and prospect data in real time by verifying contact information and scoring prospects, before storing, enables customers to focus on leads with a higher propensity to buy and clean up your CRM database in the process. Elements include: Real-time Intelligence via API to support real-time customer level decisioning, as well in batch mode to bulk-process large volumes of data; Enriched Data, utilizing Neustar data and analytical services as well as customer and third-party data assets; The ability to transform data into action by implying custom business policies, rules, segmentation and predictive analytics; Not limited to one business application, can be used across entire organizations, i.e. for risk and marketing.

Nimble

www.nimble.com

Nimble is a simple, smart social sales and marketing CRM for individuals and teams in small, medium, large, and enterprise companies.Nimble brings together contacts, calendars, communications and social signals into one simple platform. Nimble delivers context and insights on people and companies wherever users work with our family of products including our SaaS App, iOS, Android (News - Alert) mobile apps and our new Smart Contacts browser plugin. Its Group Messaging feature allows users to send personalized group messages to any segment of your contacts from your own email identity. This makes each outreach appear as a sincere one-to-one contact rather than a mass email blast. Users can add custom email templates to personalize a message and track success in the reporting dashboard. Users can see open rates and track clicks. Seeing who and how many times opened emails helps organizations send follow up messages or tag a segment of their recipients. 

Office Interactive

www.officeinteractive.com

Office Interactive is an integrated sales and marketing automation platform offering an engaging and user friendly interface, data visualization, and a suite of digital marketing features. There is a huge opportunity for traditional and mid-sized businesses, along with agencies and other organizations to benefit from marketing automation technology. Office Interactive addresses three pain points in adopting a MAP: price, integration, and usability. The Office Interactive platform is modular, meaning that organizations can build on different features depending on their needs (whether it's email marketing, social media management, SEO, landing page management, marketing automation, CRM, and more). Office Integrative is built to support both B2B and B2C client needs. Integration with external platforms such as Salesforce, Magento E-commerce, Google (News - Alert) AdWords, and Google Analytics comes standard with Office Interactive. The mobile app for iOS and Android includes features such as a business card to lead, lead tracking system for geo-locating nearby leads, contacts, calendar, and task sync up and full sales management on the go. The next generation of Office Interactive products will be incorporated into wearable devices empowering the millennial workforce.

Salesfusion

www.salesfusion.com

Salesfusion is a marketing automation solution designed to help marketers create, manage, and analyze marketing tactics and campaigns – including all common core marketing automation functionality. The platform includes email and nurture marketing, landing pages and forms, advanced lead scoring and management, campaign management, website tracking and analytics, social media integrations, event management, and analytics dashboards. Salesfusion is built on a CRM-style, contact-centric relational database with pre-built, native integration to the industry’s leading CRMs including Salesforce, InforCRM, Sugar, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and Sage. This unique architecture creates a bi-directional workflow between sales and marketing. This enables leads to be automatically pushed into the CRM and routed to the right salesperson. Additionally sales can send them back to the marketing team for further nurturing if the lead isn’t ready to buy. With all campaign data tracked from lead creation through to close, marketers can report metrics and ROI. All data is stored in Salesfusion’s private cloud network, which is housed in two facilities in Atlanta and London.

Salesgenie

www.salesgenie.com

More than just a lead generation tool, Salesgenie gives users everything they need to grow their businesses with new customers. Business owners and sales and marketing professionals use Salesgenie every day to find and manage sales leads, research detailed profiles, create marketing lists, enhance their current customer data, create and send effective marketing and advertising campaigns, and execute calling campaigns. Salesgenie invests more than $30 million annually and employs more than 500 full-time researchers to ensure that its data is as up to date and accurate as possible. Users can target their ideal prospects by using a wide variety of demographic, firmographic, and geographic search selections. Seven databases are available: U.S. Businesses, U.S. New Businesses, U.S. Consumer, U.S. New Movers, Canadian Businesses, Canadian New Businesses, and Canadian Consumers.

SAP

www.sap.com

Powered by the SAP HANA platform, the SAP Digital for Customer Engagement solution brings together the data to deliver the insights that sales and marketing teams need for compelling engagements with customers and prospects. Tools for customer analytics, contact intelligence, and customer segmentation and targeting can help these professionals execute business strategies more effectively. The solution provides a single, consolidated view of customers and prospects across multiple channels and data sources (including SAP, non-SAP, social media, web-based intelligence, and email systems). Sales and marketing teams can use this information to categorize customers and prospects by current and potential value and better understand the dynamics of those relationships. SAP Customer Engagement Intelligence also makes it possible to analyze large amounts of real-time data at different levels of granularity using business value metrics and key performance indicators such as loyalty, buying power, profitability, and sentiment. Advanced statistical algorithms help detect correlations in the behavior of customers and prospects that suggest likely buying propensity or risk of loss to a competitor. Sales and marketing professionals can use this information to individualize product recommendations and enhance the company's competitive edge.

SharpSpring

http://sharpspring.com/ 

SharpSpring offers a full suite of marketing automation software and services, at a fraction of the cost of competing solutions. The platform has built-in CRM, as well as full integration with major CRM solutions from providers such as Sugar and Salesforce. SharpSpring is universally compatible with any CMS, and offers hundreds of application integrations through the Zapier set up. The company says it was a pioneer in integrating call tracking in its marketing automation platform, enabling users to track any lead, whether they come by phone or form, giving an accurate view of end-to-end ROI without duplicating efforts or struggling to marry data from multiple platforms. VistitorID helps identify anonymous web visitors to increase leads. SharpSpring services hundreds of marketing agencies and thousands of businesses around the world. It offers an agency pricing model for marketing agency partners, resulting in its ability to deliver a solution at a tenth of the cost of the competition. SharpSpring also provides its clients with a dedicated account manager, unlimited support, and a white label/rebrandable platform, and single sign-on to make dealing with multiple clients easy.

USAWeb Inc.

www.USAWeb.net

USAWeb Inc. specializes in developing usable web and mobile applications. LeaDNA is an all-in-one marketing automation platform that streamlines lead generation, management, and nurturing while integrating email marketing, social media management, online content management, and direct mail marketing tools into a single and seamless platform. By reducing data entry, automating lead follow-ups, scheduling campaigns, and visualizing ROI, LeaDNA cuts digital marketing costs, saves time, and helps organizations make strategic decisions through data visualization. LeaDNA's small business suite, Office Bird, helps entrepreneurs streamline their online presence and visibility by offering a central website management, social media marketing, and email marketing platform.

VanillaSoft

www.vanillasoft.com

VanillaSoft brings together the very best of CRM, lead management, and sales-by-phone tools into one powerful, queue-based lead management solution for inside sales teams, call centers, and other sales-by-phone professionals. VanillaSoft’s intuitive and easy-to-use queue-based lead management software allows our customers to see increased productivity, higher contact rates, and sales accountability tools like no other. Key features include: queue-based priority lead routing; auto dialing: progressive and preview; logical branch scripting; email drip lead nurturing, mass email; email templates; inbound web lead capture; lead scoring; lead nurturing email drip campaigns; voice drop of pre-recorded voice mails; and contact routing based on opened email triggers. In addition to these features, VanillaSoft provides essential features that help managers manage their agents. Management level users have access to a call activity dashboard, web reporting, call recording, and live monitor and eavesdrop features.

Workfront

www.workfront.com

Workfront helps to reduce marketing team stress by providing a single software tool where employees at all levels can collaborate in the context of work and gain complete visibility into the work that is being done. By having a single application where work is assigned, prioritized, and managed, managers can track work progress at a glance, team members can better plan their work, and all collaboration is done in the context of the work. This type of work organization can help employees get more done and have more time to get back to what marketers love, being creative.

Yodle

www.yodle.com 

Yodle helps local businesses to find and keep their customers simply and profitably. Yodle delivers a comprehensive platform that makes online marketing easy, affordable, and transparent for its more than 50,000 local business clients. Yodle's flagship product, Marketing Essentials, includes a comprehensive desktop, mobile, web and social presence, reviews and offer management, and email campaign automation. Marketing Essentials can be supplemented with Yodle Ads, Yodle's proprietary and optimized paid search technology. Also offered by Yodle is Lighthouse 360, which automates many of our clients' daily consumer interactions or office routines such as appointment reminders, leading to improved operational efficiency and business results. Additionally, Yodle offers Centermark, intended to meet the unique marketing challenges of networked businesses helping them to unify, scale, and optimize their local and national strategies.

Zapier

https://zapier.com/

Zapier connects more than 350 of the applications clients and prospects already use, so they can work together automatically. It can automatically copy information from forms into a CRM, create invoices from sales, add new customers to a client’s email list, notify users of important events and more. Users can make their favorite programs do anything they want, without writing any code. And, users never have to waste time copying data between programs again. Zapier automates all of those tedious business tasks in the way that teams need, so users can focus on doing their best work and letting their programs take care of themselves. It takes just a few minutes to connect programs and tell Zapier what to do, and then it’ll do the work in the background, saving time and money users would otherwise have spent on tedious tasks. 




Edited by Kyle Piscioniere
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