Picking a New Breed Automated-Marketing Vendor

Here are several excerpts from an excellent article by my fellow Twitterer, Pam Baker, Picking a New Breed Automated-Marketing Vendor:

“New breed marketing automation provides a broader platform to deliver multichannel marketing programs which improve campaign velocity and relevance, better accountability of all marketing programs and overall improvement of marketing effectiveness and efficiency,” said Suresh Vittal, principal analyst at Forrester Research. “They are not just focused on email but multiple channels like direct mail, Web, call center and even mass advertising.”

For Jonathan Block, senior director of research at SiriusDecisions Inc., the top companies are Eloqua Corp., Vtrenz, Aprimo Inc., Unica Corp. and Manticore Technology Inc., while Vittal listed the leaders as Unica, Aprimo, SAS Institute Inc., Neolane Inc. and Alterian.

Block noted, however, that there is little to mark the difference between these companies, at least in terms of the technology itself…

“Marketing automation is somewhat commoditized at this point; vendor differentiation is more around what we call ‘essential elements’ — the overall ability of a vendor to deliver and implement their solution, including integration, training, support and best practices,” he said.

Like most technologies, there are benefits and drawbacks to using marketing automation. “A marketing-automation platform will not only streamline the campaign and lead-management process, but provide real-time visibility to both sales and marketing on the true disposition of every lead, a critical consideration in executing best practices in your demand creation efforts,” explained Block.

The major drawback is exactly what you thought it would be: money. “These solutions can become expensive,” said Vittal. But there are other marketing automation cons as well. “Marketers often tell us that they are hard to use, and lack support from their internal IT organizations. Remember, these applications need IT support that most outsourced solutions don’t require,” Vittal added.

Whether you choose an email-marketing specialist or a “new breed” marketing automation company, Vittal offered this checklist of critical vendor questions to help you determine what you need:

• How will the technology ease your pain?
• What product developments are planned?
• How well does the application manage customer data?
• What software and maintenance fees are associated with the application?
• How much will database and hardware requirements cost?
• How will the application influence human resources or business processes?
• What are the business and project management skills offered by the vendor?
• How good is the vendor at integrating external applications?

At the end of the day, you can’t live without e-marketing. But if you choose the wrong vendor or service, you may find you can’t live with it either.

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Tagged as: CRM Technology, Marketing, marketing software