Here are several excerpts from an excellent post by David Baker, VP of eCRM Solutions at Razorfish, Where Is Marketing Automation Going?:
Today we have a wide variety of options to support email marketing and service functions for our companies. I typically categorize these email companies into four categories: small business, specialty applications, enterprise solutions and then marketing automation.
The small business applications are the ones you know and love: cheap, easy to use and all available through hosted systems. While they won’t work in a high volume production world and aren’t supported well if you have heavy data or integration needs, they will solve problems for 70% of the marketers in the space.
The specialty applications are those that are designed for niche industries such as not-for-profit and call center support. Their value is predicated on wrapping the email automation functionality in a subset of services that support niche needs: fund-raising, managing ecommerce, managing call center inbound/outbound requests, inbox queing, routing.
The enterprise space is the one most on this distribution list know well. They are set up to support larger organization with heavy data needs, providing high volume sending, advanced personalization and more advanced workflow/production environments. They offer both hosted (Saas models as we like to call them) and on-premise solutions (or licensed software).
The marketing automation space is what is most intriguing to me these days. The emergence of the middleware Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM) space is merging to support email operations on both a systematic way (event-driven, lifecycle-driven and workflow-driven), but also opening up their interfaces to support full campaign management controls; cross channels. They are merging into the Interactive space to support the need to rapidly deploy forms and Web pages, manage digital assets and provide campaign control that supports print, mobile and email, along with e many other core functions. These systems rely on heavy data management for targeting and rules-driven programs. They’ve invested heavily in aggregating data from the Web, commerce, retails systems, third party data and providing real-time analysis (modeling) that helps make marketing decisions.
What’s prevented these companies from really making a dent in the enterprise email marketing space is the lack of infrastructures to support deliverability and the lack of a user interface and workflow engine that is intuitive and flexible enough to support a high-production email environment.
Why I get so excited about this space is, these companies are investing in building out these tools and even though they aren’t as efficient to use in a production environment, the value they bring in campaign management (cross channels), access to data and multichannel analysis will bridge this production gap over time.
I’m excited to see some of these advances. The space began as an enterprise CRM world, and then evolved into what I call a world of point solutions, solving disparate business needs with many applications. All the indicators are there that dictate a shift in the market. Not sure if the Microsofts, SAPs, Unicas, Siebels (aka Oracle), Aprimos make the commitment to bridge these gaps or if the Alterians, Eloquas, Neolanes of the world will capitalize to take market share from these enterprise companies, but I do believe it will shift how you look at email tools and platforms in the next few years.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Nice summary. There’s such a proliferation of other sales and marketing technology as well as CRM. It’s hard for marketing/sales people to keep on top of it all. But if they can take time to look up, it’s worth keeping an eye on it because it makes all sorts of things possible you can’t do manually. Or at least not cost-efficiently. Kate