0 LoopFuse Offers No-Frills Demand Generation

Summary: LoopFuse offers attractive but limited demand generation functions at an easy-to-swallow price.

It’s been nearly a year since I took my first close look at the LoopFuse OneView demand generation system. I didn't write about them because the vendor was planning some major improvements and it made more sense to publish a review after these in place. We reconnected in December and the product is now ready for its close up.

The resulting picture is much prettier than before because the main changes in LoopFuse have been improvements in the user interface. It is now an attractive system with wizards to drive major functions and extensive in-line help messages to clarify next steps. The help functions are built with Helpstream customer support technology, which also provides a knowledge base and online community.

The process to set up multi-step campaigns (which the vendor calls “lead flows”) is now quite straightforward. Users first create the lead flow and link it to recipient and suppression lists that will determine who enters the flow. They then define the flow itself by following prompts to add nodes for activities, conditional decisions, waiting periods and retrial periods. (A retrial resembled a waiting period except that the system keeps retesting the previous condition. For example, the retrial node might check every hour to see whether someone has responded to a previous email. Come to think of it, it would probably make more sense to build the retesting into the conditional node itself.)

Esthetics aside, however, the actual capabilities of the lead flows are still somewhat limited. The only direct action available in an activity node is to send an email; all other options involve updates to the CRM system such as adding a lead, changing data, or assigning an activity. This leaves out other tasks that I consider basic, such as updating data within the LoopFuse database, removing the lead from the flow, or adding the lead to a list. (In the case of data changes, the omission is intentional: Loopfuse argues that such changes should be made in the CRM system and replicated into Loopfuse).

The conditional nodes make up some of the deficit. For example, failure to meet the node condition can remove the lead from the flow. (An activity to remove leads from a different flow will be available around next April.) The conditional nodes can check for several specific conditions, such as email responses, Web page visits, CRM lead status, data values and lead scores. These probably serve most purposes, but some users may be frustrated by the inability to combine several conditions within a single node or to specify more than two branches as outcomes.

Leads enter LoopFuse lead flows when they join the associated recipient list. Lists can include leads with specified data values on the lead record, that originate from a particular Web site or form, or that visited a particular Web page. Several conditions can be combined and lists can be static or regularly updated. But lists can't be selected based on lead scores, email response or activity levels. Again, processes that depended on these would need to incorporate them through conditional nodes in the lead flows.

Lead scores themselves can be based on data values in the lead record, email response or Web pages visited. However, the system cannot base scores on activity patterns such as "three Web site visits in the past week". The system stores one score per lead. Scores are recalculated every hour, which does not support immediate reaction to score-changing events.

LoopFuse provides a graphic email designer that can generate both text and HTML versions. Emails can be personalized with data from the lead record, including the assigned salesperson if available. But data from account or opportunity tables is not available, even though it’s imported from CRM. Nor does LoopFuse support any type of A/B testing, either in the email definition or its lead flows. Each email is tied directly to just one email “campaign”, although the email campaigns themselves can be reused in multiple lead flows.

Unlike most demand generation vendors, LoopFuse does not host landing pages or Web forms for its clients. Instead, the vendor provides a wizard that reads existing, externally hosted forms and generates modified versions that will post data into the LoopFuse database. Another wizard helps users to generate HTML forms from scratch. Either way, the new forms must be copied into pages hosted outside of LoopFuse.

LoopFuse will also provide tags that can be placed on other pages on a client’s Web site to track and report on Web page visits. It lets it generate some page-oriented Web analytics reports similar to Google Analytics.

Reporting is another area that LoopFuse has significantly strengthened in the past year. In addition to Web analytics, it provides detailed reports on Web site visitors, including reports that link anonymous visitors to their company through their IP address. The system also tracks lead movement through sales funnel based on a combination of its own data and information imported from CRM. Other reports show results from email campaigns and lead capture forms.

LoopFuse also gives salespeople a report showing recent activities by their assigned leads, allowing them to drill into each lead for details. A “company dashboard” report lets both sales people and marketers see all visitors from a particular company, again based on IP address. The report shows both known and anonymous visitors and lets users connect directly with external databases including Hoovers, Jigsaw and Zoominfo to look up additional information. LoopFuse can also alert salespeople by email when high-priority accounts perform specified activities captured in the system.

LoopFuse does a particularly good job with CRM integration. Because its sales process depends heavily on free trials, the company has developed a self-service wizard that guides users through the process of connecting to Salesforce.com, including an automated check for whether LoopFuse has been granted access permissions in the client’s Salesforce.com installation. (Apparently this is a very common omission.) Users have field-by-field control over how data conflicts between the systems are resolved. In addition to Salesforce.com, the vendor has a standard integration for SugarCRM.

Pricing in LoopFuse is based on email and Web page volume, with no limit on the number of names in the system database. This is unusual but not unique: Pardot and LeadLife take a similar approach. (See my recent list of demand generation vendors for an overview of competitive pricing.) Rates are quite aggressive: $750 per month for 50,000 emails and page views combined, or $1,250 per month for a much more generous 250,000 total.

LoopFuse was founded in 2007 although it was largely in stealth mode through early 2009. The company currently has more than 50 paid clients.

0 Spredfast Offers Systematic Management for Social Media Campaigns

Summary: Social Agency’s Spredfast helps marketers schedule social media campaigns the same way they schedule paid advertising. Cool.

It seems like common courtesy to listen to an existing conversation before jumping in with a comment. If social media worked the same way, companies would first buy a monitoring system to track what’s being said, followed by tools to respond to comments made by others. Only later would they initiate conversations and, eventually, provide tools to help their friends spread the word.

Silly me. I should have known that marketers talk first and listen later.

I’m not talking about personal style, although the decibel level at any marketing conference speaks for itself. But a recent eMarketer article B2B Marketers to Increase Social Spend cited two surveys that showed this is also a matter of policy.

Specifically, a study from Visible Technologies and SiriusDecisions found the most common use for social media was to “generate awareness” (25%), while another study in B2B Magazine found the top use for social networks was “thought leadership” (60%). True listening ranked fifth in the Visible Technologies/SiriusDecision survey (“monitor and respond” at 14%), and third in the B2B Magazine survey (“customer feedback” at 46%).

On reflection, this makes sense. Marketers are primarily interested in getting out their messages. Perhaps this is an old habit that will change in a customer-driven world. But I suspect that marketing results will always be driven by activity, and results are ultimately what matter. So I’ve now revised my expected sequence of social media activities to start with broadcast, only then followed by monitor, respond, initiate individual conversations and empower advocates.

Armed with this insight, I was much less surprised when Kenneth Cho of social marketing agency Social Agency told me that his new social media campaign tool Spredfast had been purchased immediately after release by major companies including AOL, IBM, HP, Cisco and Porter Novelli. Although I’ve seen plenty of “listening platforms” like Radian6, Alterian Techrigy and Scout Labs, I hadn't previously seen a system aimed primarily at managing outbound social messages. (Now that I'm looking, though, I find that ObjectiveMarketer seems to offer something similar.)

Of course, the listening platforms can also post social media messages, as can the social media features now found in many marketing automation systems. What distinguishes Spredfast is that marketers can schedule their posts through the life of a social media campaign, rather than simply replying or initiating conversations on demand. Spredfast supports on-demand posting too.

Another key feature is that Spredfast supports multiple “voices” of actual or constructed individuals, each having accounts in multiple channels (Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc.). The campaign calendar lays out of scheduled events by all voices over time, and is color-coded to show whether a particular event has already been delivered, is ready to go, or still needs approved content. This looks strikingly similar to the media plan for a flight of broadcast ads and serves very much the same purpose.

Users can drill into an event to add the content itself including bit.ly links that allow the system to track the click-through. One particularly nice feature is that when users assign the same content to multiple events, the system will automatically create different bit.ly links for each event. This makes it easy to track results for each event independently.

Spredfast's developers also recognized that large companies will have many different people working on different aspects of a project. Users can be assigned rights to specific campaigns, voices and events, with precise control over who can view, edit and approve content. Pricing is based on the number of campaigns, not users, so large organizations can incorporate as many people as needed.

As the bit.ly tags suggest, Spredfast also pays substantial attention to measurement. It provides three major summary metrics:

- activity (how much content the system is publishing),
- reach (the number of views, friends, followers, subscribers, etc.), and
- engagement (numbers of comments, retweets, likes, etc.).

Top-level reports summarize these by campaign and let users drill down to see detailed statistics by channel and voice and, ultimately, the actual content such as comments or reviews.

The system archives content and responses so they remain available even after they are dropped from the social media platforms that originally carried them. In addition to cumulative statistics, Spredfast displays daily statistics for the past seven days, giving a sense of trends.

Perhaps wisely, Spredfast's developers drew the line at reporting the raw numbers for its metrics. Users who want more elaborate scoring, perhaps applying different weights to different kinds of activities, can export the raw data and calculate outside the system. Similarly, Spredfast makes no attempt at relating social media programs to business results such as leads or revenue.

The system does provide what Cho called a “minimalist” listening platform, which can automatically search across public listening tools (Google, Google Blog Search, Social Mention, Twitter, Boardreader, Bing) for key words, and present any results so users can review and republish or reply to them. It also provides an RSS reader for feeds selected by the user, as well as a site indexer that can show the frequency of different terms in user-specified blogs as a word cloud. This helps users tailor their posts to encourage coverage.

Spredfast began its public beta in mid-November. The system is a vendor-hosted service. It is available in a free version with limited functionality; a $50 per month standard version with one campaign, no collaboration and no metrics after the first month; and $250 per month enterprise version supporting all features for up to three campaigns.

0 My List of Demand Generation Vendors and Their Target Customers

[Note: I update this post periodically to keep the information reasonably current.]

Summary: Demand generation features often sound similar, but the different vendors do aim at different types of clients. If you're looking for a system, try to find a vendor who will match your company.

One of the audience members at the B2B Marketing University in Boston asked about demand generation systems for small businesses, and how to distinguish among the vendors in general. My brief answer was that the biggest difference was less functionality than the target markets the different vendors pursue. This has more to do with the degree of personal selling (and after-sale service) than anything else. I also promised a blog post on the topic. Here it is.

(Incidentally, there's one more B2BU session left this year, in Seattle on December 1. I'll be flying cross country to attend, so you could too.)

The table below presents a reasonably comprehensive list of demand generation (a.k.a. B2b marketing automation) vendors, with links to my reviews where I've written one. The vendors are divided into four categories based on my understanding of their target customers. I'm sure some of the vendors will tell me they're in the wrong place -- and since this ranking is based on their own perception of their target markets, I'll make adjustments when they do. (Clever of me to write this while they're all distracted by DreamForce, don't you think?)

- Micro Business: these products are aimed at companies where the owner does their own marketing, or perhaps one employee who does marketing along with other functions. The systems have very low starting prices tailored to low volumes. Most offer a CRM option (typically priced at $10 to $20 per seat per month) for companies who don't want to pay for Salesforce.com. The feature/function lists of these products are often comparable to systems aimed at larger companies, although there are certainly differences when you look at the details. (Note: I've put NurtureHQ into this category based on their price and what I can tell from the Web site. I haven't had a chance to review it personally.)

- Small Business: these products are sold to small businesses, often with just one or two people in the marketing department. Vendors keep costs to a minimum by selling largely online or over the phone, and through self-service approaches such as free trials and pay-by-month arrangements without contracts. Prices are a little lower than products in the Small/Mid Size category, but the difference isn't usually that large. Similarly, functionality is generally comparable although they may be less sophisticated at some tasks such as dynamic content generation (automatically altering an email or Web page based on lead characteristics) and branching campaign flows.

- Small/Mid Size: these firms sell to small and mid-size companies, and occasionally to divisions of the giants. Every vendor cites a different revenue range for its "sweet spot" but $50 million to $500 million might be typical. Starting prices are all over the map; I've assigned vendors to this category based on a combination of pricing, features and my personal sense of their business. Functionally, these are pretty sophisticated products, although they don't usually meet all the needs of very large marketing organizations, such as fine-grained security and advanced content management. (See the Vendor Usability Study on the Raab Guide site for a discussion of these features.)

- Mid/Large: these vendors have the features needed to serve large companies and large marketing departments. They also tend to have a broader range of supplemental capabilities, such as support for telephone call centers. Pricing tends to be higher and more complicated, allowing buyers to pay for specific components as needed. These vendors have geared their sales process to selling to large firms, with the in-person demonstrations, technical reviews, formal proposals and contract negotiations that implies. Of course, these companies will sell to mid-size firms as well.

Final Thoughts: I know it's a cliche, but you really do need to select a vendor that matches your own company needs. Considerations extend beyond feature checklists to include sales and support models, pricing structures, training requirements, consulting partners, and usability. This list should aim you at the right neighborhood to begin your search -- but don't be afraid to look elsewhere if you find a product that seems appropriate.

vendor	link to my review	CRM option available	published price list	starting price
Micro Business
Infusionsoft*	blog	yes	yes	$199/month for 10,000 names, 25,000 emails
MakesBridge*	blog	yes	yes	$150 / month for 50,000 names, 5,000 emails,
NurtureHQ			yes	$295 / month for 5,000 names
OfficeAutoPilot*	blog	yes		$597 / month for 50,000 names, 100,000 emails
Small Business
ActiveConversion	blog			$500 / month for 10,000 visitors (email not included)
Act-On Software	blog	yes		$500 / month for 5,000 active names
Alsamarketing	blog			$750 / month for 10,000 names and 25,000 emails
Beanstalk Data	blog	yes		$1,500/month
Genoo	blog		yes	$599 / month for 10 users, unlimited leads, up to 50,000 emails / month - other versions from $199 / month
HubSpot*	blog		yes	$1,000/month for 10,000 names - other versions from $200/month
LoopFuse	blog		yes	$350 / month for 10,000 names, unlimited email and pageviews - free version up to 2,500 names, 5,000 email / month
Net-Results*	blog			$350 - $400 / month for 30,000 page views, 10,000 emails, 2 hours of support
Pardot*	blog		yes	$1,000 / month for 30,000 emails
SalesFusion*	blog	yes		$1,500 / month for 25,000 names, 125,000 emails
True Influence	blog		yes	$1,500 for 10,000 names
Small/Mid-Size
eTrigue	blog			$1,000 / month for 10,000 names (unlimited email, page views, users)
Genius.com*	blog			$1,100 / month - free version up to 3,000 names, 10,000 emails / month
LeadFormix  (was LeadForce1)*	blog	limited		$500 / month
Lead Genesys			yes	$995 / month for 10,000 names, 20,000 emails, 25,000 page views
LeadLife	blog			$500 / month for 1,500 emails; $1,395 / month for 25,000 emails
Manticore Technology*	blog			$2,000 / month up for 10,000 names
Marketo*	blog		yes	$1,500 / month up to 10,000 names (lite); $2,400 / month up to 25,000 names (full)
Marqui	blog			$1,000 / month
Right On Interactive*	blog			$1,700 / month
Treehouse Interactive*	blog	yes		$599 / month for 5,000 contacts
Mid/Large
Aprimo Marketing Studio*	blog			$4,000 per month for the base version with up to 10 users and 250,000 emails
Eloqua*	blog		yes	typically starts above $2,500/ month
Marketbright (out of business)	blog			$1,600 / month
Oracle CRM On Demand Marketing*	blog			$2,000 - $4,000 per month
Neolane*	blog			$5,000 / month
Silverpop Engage8*	blog			(not available)

* also in Raab Guide

0 Aberdeen Predicts Web Content Systems Will Add Marketing Automation: I Agree, But...

Summary: a new Aberdeen Group report argues that Web content management systems should add customer management features and will ultimately compete with traditional marketing automation products. I agree with one reservation: I doubt large companies will use a single system to manage all customer touchpoints.

I’ve been convinced for some time that Web content management systems (CMS) will become important platforms for marketing automation. The logic is that Web sites are increasingly the primary method of interaction between a company and its customers, and that Web analytics, testing and personalized treatments are better executed within the content management system rather than by external products. See my July 14 post on CMS vendor SiteCore for a more detailed explanation, and the admission that I borrowed much of this thinking from SiteCore VP Marketing Darren Guarnaccia.

(Opposing viewpoint: marketing automation vendors tell me they don’t see CMS systems as competitors, largely because the systems are sold to IT rather than marketing departments. But this could change.)

Aberdeen Group’s report Next Generation Web Content Management makes a convincing case for a similar position. In fact, the study contains any number of pithy summaries of what I see as the fundamental trends driving the industry:

“Supporting prospects throughout the buying cycle requires a dialogue between a company and the prospect, and this dialogue should be highly relevant, timely and personalized to maximize marketing effectiveness and grow top-line revenue.”

“The new paradigm in customer engagement assumes consumers have control over the buying process, not marketers. Marketers now have to embrace the customer centric shift and deliver relevant, timely content when and where the buyer wants to receive it. This demands multi-channel engagement and automated personalized content delivery.”

“By incorporating some of the most valuable components of today’s marketing technologies (like lead scoring, dynamic content, analytics, profiling, and integration), the next generation of WCM [Web content management] tools have the potential to deliver highly personalized online experiences with little or no effort from marketers.”

Exactly.

Author Ian Michiels has been evangelizing integrated marketing platforms for the past year or longer. One section of the paper specifically describes the “battle for the integrated platform.” Michiels writes:

“Niche technology providers are increasingly starting to realize consolidation and integration will be inevitable for marketing technologies. The question is: Which technology will emerge as foundation for integrated capabilities?”

He then offers email marketing, web analytics, web content management and customer relationship management as contenders.

I agree with one major reservation. If I read Michiels correctly, he believes that one integrated system will execute the interactions across all channels. Certainly this is the fond hope of the marketing automation vendors, but I don’t believe that large companies will use the same system for all touchpoints. There are just too many channels, and new options appear too quickly, for any one vendor to satisfy everyone in a large enterprise. It’s more likely that companies will employ multiple touchpoint systems and use a central marketing platform to coordinate them.

More specifically, I see the integrated marketing platform as an underlying technology with three main roles:

- gather data from multiple sources, including touchpoint systems. This will happen in both batch and real time.

- apply analytics and decision rules to select treatments for each customer.

- push the treatment decisions back to the touchpoints for execution.

Products to do this already exist. Major contenders include Chordiant, thinkAnalytics and Infor’s CRM Interaction Advisor.

How important is the distinction having one system execute all interactions and having one system coordinate interactions that are executed by separate systems? Michiels would probably argue it’s a big difference (and I'm wrong) because he sees the difficulty of integrating multiple systems as a major barrier to coordinated treatments, and therefore a primary reason companies will be forced to adopt a single system.

But I feel the main barriers to cross-channel coordination are organizational, not technical. In my view, getting a company to replace all its existing touchpoints with a single central system faces greater organizational and financial barriers than getting it to coordinate its existing separate systems.

Let’s assume I’m right that most companies will deploy a central decision engine with multiple touchpoint systems. Doesn't this contradict my prediction that touchpoints like Web content management and CRM will expand their marketing automation functions, threatening the current marketing automation vendors?

I don’t think so. Even though I expect touchpoint systems to ultimately become delivery channels for central decisions, I doubt the touchpoint vendors will accept this role without a fight. Rather, they will expand their ability to manage interactions, thereby positioning themselves to provide the central decisioning platform itself.

Indeed, there’s a good case for having one touchpoint system make decisions for itself and other touchpoints. This avoids integration hassles between the central decision platform and one execution system, while still allowing coordination across all interactions. The logical candidate for this joint role is a company’s primary touchpoint system, which these days is probably either the Web site or CRM. Hence my prediction.

In fact, if I had to bet, I’d wager that the hybrid model will be the most successful. Financially and organizationally, it's easier to expand a major execution system than to integrate a separate decision engine. Even though an independent decision system may be technically more elegant, the organizational and financial issues are likely to be decisive.

At this point, the “hybrid model” and “one big system” may be sounding pretty similar. After all, both involve central decisions made within a major touchpoint system. But there’s a fundamental difference: “one big system” is designed to avoid integration issues by doing everything internally, while the “hybrid model” uses a primary system designed with external integration in mind. These imply very different technical approaches. Vendors building these systems, and companies looking to buy them, need to choose which philosophy they favor and act accordingly.

0 B2B Marketing University Part 2: Marketing Content Has to Work Harder

Summary: As marketers add more content to meet needs throughout the purchase cycle, they must work harder to ensure prospects actually read it.

One of the emergent themes at Tuesday’s session of the B2B Marketing University was the growing importance of marketing “content”. The general logic was that marketers increasingly interact with prospects throughout different stages of the sales cycle, and each stage needs different materials. The materials also need to be tailored to different types of buyers – or “personas” if you want to get fancy – so you need even more variety.

Of course, buying stages and buyer types have always existed. But much of the information now delivered through Web interactions was previously delivered in person by salespeople, who could just talk or write an email. Since Web interactions require formally prepared “content”, the need for content has grown.

There’s no arguing with that, and as someone who is paid to write the occasional white paper, I'm glad to hear it. But, still, as I listened to people talking about needing to build more and more content, this little voice in my head kept reminding me of another grand theme of the conference, which is the increasing range of information that prospects already have available. Odd, my little voice said: We’re being told to generate more content even though buyers have less time to read it.

This isn’t really a contradiction. The greater competition for buyers’ attention actually means we have to build content they find more useful than anyone else’s. Creating a wide variety of items does this by letting us offer buyers something that precisely matches their needs of the moment.

The little voice went away after that. (It helped that the bar had opened.) But this perspective also offers some additional guidance. Recognizing that buyers are extremely time-constrained, marketers should:

- create small, bite-sized pieces of content rather than huge chunks of it. (Yes, this implies fewer, shorter white papers. **sigh** But there are still situations where old-style, long white papers are appropriate.) The good news here is this should help to keep content creation costs down.

- put additional energy into mechanisms that make it easier for prospects to find the content they want. This means bulking up on-site search engines and carefully monitoring the queries people submit. It also means better navigation tools to expose what’s available so people can find it quickly. As a side benefit, letting people specify exactly what they want to know also lets you store that information and use it to better target your future treatments.

- ruthlessly evaluate the utilization of the content we do provide, to ensure we don’t create more than necessary and to identify topics that may need additional coverage.

- incorporate feedback mechanisms so that prospects can rate the content we’ve sent them, again to foster continuous improvement.

- make the content easily available to salespeople so they can use it themselves. This saves them the time spent crafting emails that convey pretty much the same information.

In sum, as marketers increase their investment in content, they also need to manage that investment more carefully. This may mean shifting funds from content creation to content distribution and evaluation. Bad news for marketing creators, perhaps, but good news for marketing performance.