Will Marketing Automation Be Free?

Today Genius.com announced a free version of their Marketing Automation system. Only about a month ago, Loopfuse also started offering a free version of their Marketing Automation system. What does this mean for companies interested in adopting Marketing Automation?

How Much Is Free?

Let’s first look at the features of the free versions:

Loopfuse Genius.com
Users unlimited 5
Emails / month 5,000 2,500
Contacts 2,500 3,000
Pageviews / month 100,000 unlimited
Support community-driven community-driven

So these offerings are closely matched. Both are meant as ‘freemium’ offerings. They are great for small companies and small initial projects, but they’re too limited for normal projects. Companies will have to upgrade to the paid version as their initiatives grow. And of course, that’s what Loopfuse and Genius.com hope for.

Why Free?

Why are they doing this? Loopfuse gives as the main reason that adoption rate of Marketing Automation is still very low (5-10%), and that a disruptive offering is needed to get the remaining 90-95% on board. This is supported by the main trends in the Marketing Automation market:

  • The product scope of all marketing automation vendors is quite similar
  • There is severe competition (30+ vendors)
  • Land grab is common, where vendors lower prices to get customers on board
  • Industry consolidation is starting (Market2lead acquired, LeadGenesys refocused)

My take: even though your project may be too large for these free versions, you may get a better deal for paid versions from whichever vendor. Just realize that this may not be a sustainable situation. Some vendors will sell below cost to gain market share, so higher prices or acquisitions may follow.

Will Other Vendors Follow?

Because the cost of offering a free version is low, other vendors may also want to create a free offering. But it’s not without its challenges. The key to success of a freemium model is to make the free version functional enough, while making premium version attractive enough so that a significant percentage of users will upgrade. Some of the other challenges:

  • The gap between the free and paid versions may be too big
  • ‘Free’ customers may lack the expertise to be successful
  • There may be too much cost in the vendor’s business model (e.g. expensive sales teams)

Loopfuse has published pricing for their paid products, and they have a low-overhead sales model. Also, their founders came from Red Hat, which has a very similar strategy of offering both free and premium products. Few other vendors are in a similar position, so my prediction is that free versions are not going to be a trend.

So What Does It Mean For You?

If your company is looking to adopt Marketing Automation, count on paying for your Marketing Automation system. Either you will go over the limits of the free version, or you will require support. Instead of focusing on free or cheap, choose a vendor that you trust, that best meets your requirements, and that provides excellent support.

Does that mean that these free versions are irrelevant? No. It’s great to try out marketing automation without the limits of a trial period or for small projects. Also, it may be a good solution for small and savvy organizations. But the overall impact on the market will be limited. So I don’t think it’s going to be a general trend. What is your take? Please leave a comment with your prediction…

Email Newsletters: a Best Practice That Needs to Die

DemandBase has just announced a webinar series called B2B Marketing Best Practices that Need to Die (I will present one of the sessions). Today, I’m working on my presentation for Monday’s lead nurturing webinar 7 steps to finding untapped revenue in your marketing database, where I’m presenting real best practices.

That made me think: in lead nurturing, are there any common “best practices” that are actually ineffective? Yes! For example, the monthly newsletter.

Today’s prospects are “crazy-busy” and “frazzled” according to Jill Konrath in her new book SNAP selling. I totally agree. If you send prospects an email, it better be relevant. If not, your email will be ignored, deleted or – worse – flagged as spam.

Monthly newsletters were a best practice in the early days of email marketing. They were designed to “stay in touch” and offer something of interest to everyone. In other words: it tried to be everything to everyone!

Newsletters break the primary rule of effective email marketing, that is: you need to segment your list to make messages relevant. A monthly newsletter is undifferentiated, and won’t please anybody. Instead, create unique messages for smaller segments of your database.

If you’d like a response to your email, you need to have a call-to-action. That works best if you have only 1 call-to-action per message. Again, this is where newsletters often go wrong: they try to promote a webinar, a whitepaper, and a new product, all in the same message. The result: terrible response rates for all of these call-to-actions.

Instead, segment your audience, figure out what they’re interested in, and send them targeted emails with only 1 topic and 1 call-to-action. And stop sending that monthly newsletter.

Learn How to Create Effective Lead Nurturing Campaigns

To learn more about creating effective lead nurturing campaigns using real best practices, please attend Monday’s webinar 7 steps to finding untapped revenue in your marketing database, hosted by Act-On Software.

Click here to view the webinar recording »

Assessing The Value of Your Lead Database

This Wednesday I’m presenting a webinar called “Search and Rescue” for your lead database, hosted by Loopfuse. It presents a 7-step process to generate revenue from existing leads, who were previously assumed “lost”.

Part of this process is assessing the value of your existing leads. Unfortunately, there is no exact answer for this. However, there are 7 questions that you can ask to get a feel for the value of the leads in your database.  See the video below for more details.

To get the full story, view the webinar: http://www.loopfuse.com/resources.php

View the Webinar now »

Webinar: Using Segmentation & Personas to Increase Conversion by 50-400%

Live Webinar: Tuesday July 27th, 2010, 11am PDT/ 2pm EDT (recording available)

Segmentation of your database and development of personas allow you to develop the right messages, content and offers. This will dramatically increase the effectiveness of your lead nurturing campaigns. This 30-minute webinar presents a step-by-step approach to segmenting your database and developing personas for your most important target groups.

The following questions will be addressed:

  • Do segmentation and personas really increase conversion?
  • How many segments should I create?
  • Do I segment my database by title, influence, industry, or something else?
  • Which personas should I develop?
  • How can I develop an insightful persona quickly?
  • I have created segments & personas, what now?

In 30 minutes you will get practical tips that can result in conversion improvements ranging from 20% to 400%. I hope you can make it!

Click Here to View the Recording of the Webinar

Hubspot Review

UPDATED REVIEW: My earlier review of HubSpot’s Inbound Marketing software was more than 1 year old and the software has evolved a lot: time for an update!

I see two clearly distinct target groups for HubSpot:

  1. Small business owners
  2. Marketing departments at mid-size companies

Both groups will use HubSpot to generate more inbound leads, but they have vastly different requirements. Small businesses usually have no dedicated marketing resources, are less tech-savvy, and often don’t have a CRM system. Mid-size companies have dedicated marketing people, an IT department, a CRM system, and generally more sophisticated requirements. HubSpot can serve both audiences, but in a different way. But – just like any other SEO & Social Media tool – HubSpot will only deliver results if you put a fair amount of time into creating and promoting content: compelling content is what makes the HubSpot engine hum.

Small Businesses

Until recently, it was hard for small businesses to be effective with online marketing because the tools were fragmented: you had to hire someone to do your website, get email marketing somewhere else, hire a search engine optimization (SEO) consultant, and figure out this social media thing. HubSpot provides an attractive package that includes all of this: not just software, but also advice.

Their website management system (CMS) is fairly basic, but it includes everything you need: the pages are search engine optimized from the start, it includes a blog and registration forms, and there are social media integrations. If you’re really picky about the design or have advanced technical requirements, the HubSpot CMS may be too basic for you. In that case you can consider HubSpot Medium, which allows you to add tracking keys to your own website.

In addition to the website, HubSpot offers a range of SEO tools for keyword discovery, keyword selection, rank tracking and more. Social Media is also covered: you are notified of relevant online discussions on Twitter, LinkedIn and other locations, so you can join the discussion; there are ‘follow-me’ buttons in email and on your website; and you can find prospect’s social media profiles. With the improved Lead Manager, you could even use HubSpot as your CRM system. You can use basic email marketing to stay in touch with your prospects or create some drip campaigns. And finally, reporting and analytics show the business results of your activities.

Overall, if your business lends itself to online marketing but technology has been a challenge for you, HubSpot will be a good fit. You’ll have a big chance of success if you reserve 20-25 hours to get started, and enough time each week to write at least 2 blog posts (again, this is true for all SEO & social media tools).

Mid-size Businesses

The story for mid-size businesses is less clear-cut. First of all, many mid-size businesses will choose to host their own website, either because migration is too big of a task, or because they have specific requirements. HubSpot’s Medium and Large products give you the option to keep using your own site. These editions also make it possible to integrate with Salesforce.com and – through partners – with other CRM systems. The result of this integration is that you get great end-to-end analytics, for example: you’ll see how much a particular search keyword contributes to revenue.

If you’re a mid-size company, search Engine Optimization and Social Media are really the key features that you’ll use HubSpot for. If you compare it with stand-alone SEO & Social Media tools, you may say it’s expensive. However, it’s a fully integrated solution with unique end-to-end reporting features: you won’t get this level of integration when using a combination of stand-alone tools. And when you compare HubSpot’s monthly cost to hiring a SEO and a Social Media agency, it’s not so expensive at all.

Where small businesses will be okay with HubSpot’s email marketing, email nurturing, lead scoring and landing page functionality, most mid-size businesses will have more advanced requirements. Some of these requirements are lead nurturing based on rules with an unlimited number of steps, support for multiple lead scoring models, and progressive profiling for web forms. For those requirements I would recommend using a Marketing Automation system, as even the most affordable Marketing Automation solutions have way more functionality in this area than HubSpot. However, few if none of those solutions have the SEO and Social Media tools.

HubSpot is a good option for mid-size companies that need best practices and an integrated tool to improving their SEO & Social Media strategies. Combined with a CMS and a Marketing Automation system it is a complete online marketing suite.

Conclusion

SEO and Social Media take a lot of time to do right, and HubSpot makes this process a lot smoother. Small companies can use HubSpot as a one-stop-shop, while mid-size companies can integrate it with their existing CMS and/or Marketing Automation system. You still have to create lots of compelling content, but HubSpot takes care of the rest.

About Jep Castelein

Jep Castelein is the founder of LeadSloth, a firm that helps technology companies find untapped revenue in their marketing databases. He is always looking for marketers who want to get a better ROI on their investment in Marketing Automation technology. For more information on LeadSloth’s methodology, see the webinar “7 Steps to Finding Untapped Revenue in Your Marketing Database“.

Webinar Recording: 7 Steps to Finding Untapped Revenue

This is the recording of the webinar about the 7 Steps to Finding Untapped Revenue in Your Marketing Database, which took place on June 22nd, 2010. Please click the ‘play’ button to start. The total length is 28 minutes.


To see the slides, please visit SlideShare.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction by Jep Castelein
2. 1848 James Marshall Discovers Gold
3. How Much REVENUE Are You Missing Out On?
4. NURTURE Leads to Assure More Revenue
5. 50% of Leads are NOTReady to Make the Jump
6. 23% BUY from a Competitor 6 Months after Initial Inquiry

7. Nurtured Leads Produce 20% MORE Sales Opportunities
8. # 1: COLLABORATE with Sales
9. # 2:CHOOSE the Right Audience
10. # 3: Know them WELL
11. # 4: Provide VALUE
12. # 5: Make OFFERS They Can’t Refuse
13. # 6: HAVE Conversations
14. # 7: Track & MEASURE
15. Case Study
16. The Complete Process
17. Need Help Finding those Gold Nuggets in Your Database? Let’s Talk!
18. Q&A

Plugging the Leak in the Middle of the Sales & Marketing Funnel

I’ve recorded an introductory video on lead nurturing and how it can turn more raw leads into qualified leads. Effective lead nurturing will prevent prospects from falling out of the funnel before they are ready to talk to a sales person.

This video is a preview of Tuesday’s webinar “7 Steps to Finding Untapped Revenue in Your Marketing Database“, which covers a comprehensive 7 step process to design a lead nurturing strategy.

The webinar is now available for watching on demand.

7 Steps to Finding Untapped Revenue in Your Marketing Database

1 Reply

This Tuesday (June 22nd at 11am PDT) I’m presenting a webinar on the 7 steps to finding untapped revenue in your marketing database. Do you have many leads in your database who have never been followed up on? If yes, you have a lot of untapped revenue in your database. View this webinar to learn how to generate additional revenue from your existing leads.

This video gives an overview of the content of the webinar:

The webinar is now available for watching on-demand.

Upcoming Lead Management Events

2 Replies

This week there are a couple of interesting Lead Management events, so I thought I’d share them with you in a short blog post:

Hubspot Show & Tell

Hubspot is best known for their Inbound Marketing evangelism and a software product that helps small to medium-size companies generate leads through search engine optimization and social media. They are taking some steps towards lead management, and will be showing their email marketing and lead nurturing capabilities in this webinar. It’s not a full-blown marketing automation system (not sure if they want to go there either), but it’s interesting to see them adding these features.

More info & registration »

Genius Demand Gen Academy

The Demand Gen Academy is a free online learning program to help you master the process of demand generation with practical, hands-on training. It covers Demand Generation, Lead Management, Return on Investment and Inbound Marketing in a series of 35-minute webinars. There is a webinar every Wednesday for the next 12 weeks. You will earn a Demand Generation Certification badge if you successfully complete the exam. I’m co-presenting the email nurturing session this Wednesday.

More info & registration »

MarketingSherpa Lead Management Webinar

The full title of this event is “Lead Management: Tackling the Top 5 Questions about the Lead Cultivation, Qualification and Hand-Off Process”. It’s presented by Sean Donahue, Editor, MarketingSherpa and Jennifer Horton, Best Practices Consultant, Eloqua. During the webinar, they will cover practical strategies that highlight the best way to attract new leads, how to find the right approach for the type and timing of messages, and when to complete the transition to sales.

More info & registration »

7 Reasons Why Oracle’s Market2Lead Acquisition Makes a Lot of Sense

Oracle has just acquired Market2Lead, one of the early Marketing Automation vendors. There has been a lot of talk in the industry about possible consolidation, such as vendors going out of business, becoming irrelevant or being acquired. This is the first transaction involving a major software vendor, so it deserves some notice. Everybody expected Salesforce.com to make a first move, but Oracle surprised us here :- )

People asked my opinion on this acquisition. Overall, I think this is great news, for 7 reasons:

1. Market2Lead Probably Got A Good Deal

Market2Lead was one of the early Marketing Automation vendors. Actually in 2006, when I was a marketing manager at a software company in San Francisco, I selected Market2Lead as our Marketing Automation system. But since then too little progress was made: the product was good, but their marketing was lagging behind. The result: not enough new customers. Selling the company to a well-known software company may be a very good outcome for Market2Lead (speculation, I have no inside information on this).

2. Marketing & Sales Belong Together

More and more I’ve come to believe that great marketing initiatives go bad if marketing and sales don’t have a productive relationship. A Marketing Automation system either needs to have great connection to the CRM system, or it should all be integrated. Oracle clearly takes the integrated approach (as they always do), and I believe this is a good move.

3. The Market Needs Consolidation

I publish a list of all Marketing Automation vendors. There are over 30 vendors on this list, which is way too much. There isn’t enough business in this market to support so many vendors. So one fewer vendor – although always sad for the individuals involved – is not a bad thing for the market as a whole.

4. It Puts Marketing Automation On The Map

Most Marketing Automation companies are relatively small. Even industry leaders like Eloqua and Unica are relatively small compared with vendors in more established software categories. This is the first serious Marketing Automation initiative by a major software player. Other CRM vendors claim to do Marketing Automation, but I believe those claims are unsubstantiated. So the Oracle move shows that Marketing Automation is becoming a mainstream solution.

5. Small Installed Base / Few Customers Affected

It seems that Market2Lead is migrating their customers to other solutions, at least, Eloqua’s announcement gives that impression. According to the Oracle’s announcement, only the IP has been acquired, not the company. The fact that the Market2Lead’s installed base is relatively small is a good thing: major disruptions can give a market a bad name, and that’s the last thing Marketing Automation needs.

6. Enterprise-Ready Product

More on a product-level, Oracle is getting their hands on a very feature-rich product. Having done a lot of work with Market2Lead myself, I know first-hand that it’s a very powerful system. This is a good fit with Oracle’s main customer base: mid-size to large companies.

7. Great Technology Fit

There is also a good fit from a technology perspective. The Market2Lead product has been developed using the Java programming language. That is not one of the most hip languages such as PHP or Ruby, but it’s the primary technology at Oracle. Oracle has been a Java-company for a long time, and after the Sun acquisition they also own the Java technology itself. It should be reasonably easy to integrate Market2Lead code in Oracle applications.

My Take On This Deal

I think this deal signals the beginning of a 3-5 year long consolidation process in the Marketing Automation industry. The winners will have tied their applications into other vital marketing and sales processes, either through integration or through acquisition. So my advice for marketing practitioners is to hedge your bets: your Marketing Automation vendor may not be around anymore in a couple of years.