Marketing Automation

ROUNDUP

Marketing Automation

By Paula Bernier, Executive Editor, TMC  |  January 12, 2015

The benefits of automating marketing to more effectively reach a broader audience with more relevant messages are becoming better understood. And a growing number of companies are now leveraging these tools and processes to drive new revenues.

Here is a collection of some of the leading companies offering marketing automation solutions.

Adobe

Adobe Campaign provides best-in-class 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 acheive 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

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

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.

Constant Contact

Constant Contact helps small businesses do more business. The company has been revolutionizing the success formula for small businesses, nonprofits, and associations since 1998, and today works with more than 600,000 customers worldwide. Constant Contact offers the only all-in-one online marketing platform that helps small businesses drive repeat business and find new customers. It features multi-channel marketing campaigns (newsletters/announcements, offers/promotions, online listings, events/registration, and feedback) combined with shared content, contacts, and reporting; free award-winning coaching and product support; and integrations with critical business tools – all from a single login. The company’s extensive network of educators, consultants/resellers, technology providers, franchises, and national associations offer further support to help small organizations succeed and grow. Through its Innovation Loft, Constant Contact is fueling the next generation of small business technology.

Infor

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

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

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. 

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

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 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 (News - Alert). 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.

Neustar Inc

Neustar's customer intelligence solutions help you confidently know and prioritize your customers across your marketing funnel to improve lead quality, segment into high performing audiences, and discover new market opportunities. Improving lead quality starts with your ability to identify and verify leads in real time for accuracy and compliance, including weeding out any fraudulent or malicious leads. Once you know if a lead is contactable, increase your marketing returns by segmenting top performing customers and prospects based on your business drivers – whether it is identifying high-indexing customer segments for more effective targeting or personalizing customer dialogues to drive conversion. Using Neustar's best-in-class solutions will enable you to identify your highest value leads and increase the return on your marketing investments.

MaritzCX

The Allegiance (News - Alert) 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.

Oracle

Oracle Marketing Cloud provides marketers with a comprehensive suite of tools to unify customer data, engage the right audience, and analyze performance of their marketing efforts. Built on open platforms and modern web standards, Oracle Marketing Cloud helps marketers tap into a vast ecosystem of data providers, advertising and media partners, and hundreds of pre-built integrations to unify their marketing resources that power customer engagement. Oracle Marketing Cloud consists of best-of-breed technologies, including B2B (Oracle Eloqua) and B2C (Oracle Responsys) cross-channel marketing solutions to orchestrate consistent customer experience across channels; a content marketing solution (Oracle Compendium) that ensures content is delivered within the right context of the customer experience; a data management platform (Oracle BlueKai) for access to the most comprehensive set of third-party data for look-alike modeling; and social relationship management from Oracle SRM for social listening, engagement, monitoring, and publishing. Oracle Marketing Cloud empowers marketing leaders to receive the most comprehensive view of customer interactions and orchestrate the right experience for each individual customer, helping attract ideal customers that spend more, stay loyal, and become brand advocates. Most importantly, it helps the largest companies deliver customer centricity and marketing simplicity on platforms that are enterprise ready.

Salesfusion

Salesfusion Marketing Automation helps companies deliver more revenue with smarter marketing. According to analyst firm Sirius Decisions, as much of 70 percent of the buying cycle may be self directed and complete prior to sales engagement. Salesfusion helps marketing and sales teams participate in and measure this digital conversation and deliver more lead-to-revenue results by communicating with the right leads at the right time with the right message. Salesfusion’s platform also enables customer care teams to make a meaningful impact to revenue by using customer nurture programs to send pro-active, specific messages to nurture and identify areas of need or interest for current customers. The Salesfusion platform includes out-of-the-box native integrations to Salesforce, Microsoft (News - Alert) Dynamics CRM, Saleslogix, Sugar, and Sage CRM. From landing pages and e-mail templates to lead scoring and predictive analytics, the Core Package includes everything the marketer needs to execute and measure multi-channel strategies. The Performance Pack adds on additional tools for advanced integrations.

Salesgenie

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

Powered by the SAP (News - Alert) HANA platform, the SAP Customer Engagement Intelligence 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

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.

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 Inc.

VanillaSoft is a queue-based lead management platform built specifically for sales by phone. While traditional CRM solutions provide features for account/order management, and customer service functions, VanillaSoft provides the lead generation and nurturing tools for successfully managing and closing new business. VanillaSoft’s queue-based lead management platform helps clients improve productivity, achieve deeper list penetration, gain greater management control, and increased speed to lead. Productivity-enhancing features such as logical branch scripting, VoIP, progressive and preview dialing, and message drop help VanillaSoft clients realize up to a 400 percent increase in average sales calls per hour. Deeper lead penetration features including flexible data querying, lead scoring, and integrated e-mailing help VanillaSoft clients improve number of call attempts per lead with many customers reporting an average of seven follow up call attempts per lead. Users experience a decrease of 30 percent in lead decay rate with VanillaSoft. Faster speed to lead is possible with VanillaSoft thanks to lead capturing and nurturing features and automatic lead distribution functionality. Sales teams using VanillaSoft report that the majority of all leads are contacted within the first 5 minutes. VanillaSoft is a TMC CUSTOMER Magazine 2014 Product of the Year Award winner and a 2014 Communications Solutions Product of the Year Award winner.

Zapier

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 Maurice Nagle
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