Chapter 20

Top Ten Cross-Channel Marketing Vendors

Cross-channel marketing vendors can help you manage every form of marketing within your company, from small to large. In addition to the actual CRM, CRM software packages can also help you control, manage, and implement entire marketing campaigns.

The software vendors listed in this chapter have the more robust offering when it comes to driving interaction with current, former, and future customers. It's imperative that a marketing system is either integrated directly into your social CRM solution or offered as part of the software purchase. Marketing automation is part of an overall CRM strategy and should be used as an add-on to your customer relationship management strategy as a company.

At the enterprise level, pricing can vary widely based on your company's needs. For pricing information for products from any of the vendors mentioned here, please contact the vendor.

Eloqua

Eloqua tends to stay in the B2B space but has recently been moving into more of the consumer products and B2C marketing world. They were among one of the first B2B marketing automation products and still remains one of the largest in the world of revenue and employees. Although Eloqua probably doesn't fit the small business world, it does fit the mid-size to large marketing space.

Raab Associates recently published a Marketing Automation report that states Eloqua's strengths as “an advanced feature set including complex segmentation, real-time interactions, rule-driven content for email and Web pages, precise control over sales synchronization, extensive project management, detailed assignments and a fully extensible data model.” As you can tell, a ton of stuff.

HubSpot

HubSpot has reigned as one of the top social and digital marketing platforms for small business over the last couple of years. HubSpot offers excellent training on their products and marketing solutions. They create content that drives customer interaction and marketing automation success. The software vendor boasts that more than 6,000 companies in 45 countries use their software to attract leads and convert them into customers.

Their features include blogging support, social media monitoring and management, search engine optimization, lead-generation tracking, lead management, e-mail and marketing automation, analytics, and apps for third-party support.

Marketo

Marketo has been around since 2008 and usually aims to the small- or midsized marketing programs, as shown in Figure 20-1. However, the company is pushing into the corporate space as this book goes to press.

Marketo has an extremely robust platform that helps companies large and small track and manage leads for a variety of lead-generation strategies from e-mail to social CRM.

According to Raab Associates, “Marketo's major strength is its ease of use. Other particular strengths include integrated content testing, posting social media behaviors to the activity history, multiple scores per lead, and an API service for third-party support.”

Figure 20-1: Marketo has been focuses on small- and mid-sized business but is moving into the corporate space, too.

Net-Results

Net-Results originally started as a web design firm that launched a variety of software products over the past decade. The company caters mainly to the small business world. If you're a small business owner looking for some advanced capabilities but would rather not deal in the Responsys or Marketo world, Net-Results is for you.

The Net-Results software boasts a pretty robust feature set that deals in lead scoring, unlimited segmentation of data, lead nurturing, e-mail marketing, list management, and CRM integration (just to name a few).

Experian CheetahMail

If you're looking for services and support to drive your digital marketing efforts, CheetahMail is for you. If you're looking for software that helps with building and creating a campaign, CheetahMail boasts one of the largest client services teams in the world and gives you the technology, too. Like Responsys and ExactTarget, CheetahMail is also recognized by Forrester as one of the top e-mail marketing vendors. The company also caters to the retail market, working with 75 of the 500 top Internet retailer vendors.

The company prides itself on its ability to service marketers with a full range of marketing services and capabilities, including digital marketing support, consumer data, and data management. Experian CheetahMail is also a valuable vendor mainly because it has built into the Experian structure, which gives the customer access to a variety of different tools offered by the company.

Neolane

Neolane is truly a cross-channel marketing platform, which allows users to organize and track one-to-one lifetime conversations with customers. More than 350 of the world's leading companies use the cross-channel marketing software.

Look into Neolane if you want highly sophisticated campaign management software. Neolane software can handle more of the financial, content management, employee interaction, and publishing controls than any other system on this list. However, even with a robust system Neolane makes it easy to use their software.

Silverpop

Although Silverpop caters more to the e-mail marketer, the company does offer robust marketing automation software. Mainly focused on the B2B market, Silverpop's capabilities allow markets to efficiently manage leads and drive qualified sales opportunities through scoring and nurturing campaigns. Silverpop boasts a fully integrated suite of digital marketing solutions from social media to landing page management.

With the purchase of Vtrenz in 2007, Silverpop entered the marketing automation space and released a product called Engage 8. According to Raab, “Silverpop has strong email capabilities and supports powerful multi-step campaign flows, split testing and controlled user rights. However, they do limit their ability when it comes to project management.”

Responsys

Responsys was founded in 1998 to provide software that would enable marketers to design, execute, and manage e-mail campaigns. Fast-forwarding to 2012, their Interact Suite provides marketers with a powerful, comprehensive set of applications to design, define, execute, and manage cross-channel marketing.

The company has built a reputation around the concept of “new school marketing,” which reflects on the changing attitudes and behaviors of consumers using digital technology. This will give you a better idea of what they mean, straight from the Responsys website, “They fast forward through TV commercials. They've put down the newspaper. Old school marketing as one-way communication. The old power channels were TV, radio and print. Today the consumer has more options. Period.” This is the new school of marketing. The website, shown in Figure 20-2, drives home the point.

Figure 20-2: Responsys has been around since 1998, but stays focused on the new school of marketing.

SalesFusion

Primarily a B2B sales automation tool, SalesFusion was officially launched in 2007 as an integrated marketing CRM solution designed to automate the entire lead-to-sales process. First Reef, LLC owns and operates SalesFusion.

If you're looking for lead generation and marketing automation software that's built extremely close to your CRM, SalesFusion may be for you. SalesFusion product features include e-mail marketing, landing pages, website visitors, lead scoring, social media, and event management (only to name a few).

ExactTarget

ExactTarget is global software as a service leader serving thousands of customers from London to Seattle to Melbourne, as shown in Figure 20-3. If you're looking for a system to run major marketing campaigns from social to mobile, this might be the technology for you.

The company has also been ranked as one of the top marketing automation software developers in the world and named time and again, by Forrester Research, as the industry's producer of the foremost cross-channel marketing software. Forrester found that ExactTarget's Interactive Marketing Hub product “brings the strongest current offering this year with intuitive campaign management, scalability, automated predictive models, collaboration tools and an open source technology platform that supports third-party developers. (Disclaimer: ExactTarget is Kyle Lacy's employer at the time of writing this.)

Figure 20-3: ExactTarget is a global software as a service leader.