0 Infusionsoft: Impressive Marketing Power for a Very Low Price

Two economists are walking on the street. One looks down and sees a $100 bill. He points it out to the other, who says, “It must be counterfeit. If that were a real $100 bill, someone would have already picked it up.”

The point of the story, other than showing why economists are poor comedians, is that the market is not always perfectly efficient. I suppose no one needs reminding of that in today’s economic situation. But most of us still assume there is a reasonable relationship between price and value. This is why it’s hard to imagine that low-priced software can deliver similar performance to mainstream products.

Now we come to Infusionsoft, which offers marketing automation, CRM and ecommerce for as little as $199 per month. Like a free breakfast at Denny’s, that sounds too good to be true. But the company has been around since 2001 and has thousands of customers, so there must be something to it. At least it’s worth a closer look.

I took that look last week and came away impressed. The company’s marketing is tightly targeted at very small businesses (under 25 employees) but its marketing features are competitive with demand generation products aimed at much larger firms. Three of the five core demand generation functions are clearly there: outbound email, Web forms, and lead nurturing campaigns. Of the other two, lead scoring is primitive at best (I only saw an ability to apply segment tags, which I suppose is all you really need; the company says lead scoring is available “but we don’t advertise it because we haven’t made it easy enough within the software yet”). The fifith core function, integration with Salesforce.com, is not provided because Infusionsoft has its own sales automation capabilities. If you really wanted it, the system does provide an API that would let someone with the right skills set it up.

If advanced lead scoring or Salesforce.com integration are show stoppers for you, then read no further. If not, the marketing automation functions in Infusionsoft are worth considering. Although I mentioned only email campaigns before, users can in fact import lists and then execute email, fax and voice broadcast from within Infusionsoft, or extract lists for direct mail, call center or other external vendors. Simple telemarketing could also be handled within the system using its CRM features. The system includes an email builder with the usual features such as personalization and required “unsubscribe” links. Infusionsoft enforces double opt-in email procedures, monitors its clients results closely, and has a ‘three strikes” policy to educate and if necessary remove clients who violate the rules.

Users can create landing pages and forms within the system, although they must load the HTML onto their own Web sites since Infusionsoft doesn’t host them. This differs from other demand generation vendors, who nearly always host those pages themselves. The practical impact is nil, since the Infusionsoft forms do post data to the client's Infusionsoft-hosted marketing database. I suspect the difference reflects the small-company orientation of Infusionsoft: while marketing departments in larger companies want to be independent of their Web team, Infusionsoft clients probably don't have a Web team separate from marketing (if they have a Web team at all).

Users can also specify the activities that follow submission of a form or other customer interaction. This is where the real power of Infusionsoft shines through. The activities can include assigning the lead to a sequence of follow up messages, assigning it a tag for later segmentation, or sending it to a salesperson or affiliate, either directly or through a round robin distribution. Different answers on Web forms can be linked to different sequences, and users can add filters that determine whether these actions take place. Subsequent events can add leads to new sequences and remove them from existing ones, thereby adjusting to customer behavior.

The result is enough fine-grained control over lead treatment to satisfy all but the most demanding marketers. To me, this is the essence of a lead nurturing system and probably the critical feature of demand generation in general. After all, any email client can send an email and any Web system can put up a landing page. It’s the multi-step, behavior-dependent campaign logic that’s otherwise hard to come by.

That said, the campaign manager you’re getting here is not as polished as the best mainstream demand generation systems. To that extent, at least, you get what you pay for. There’s no flow chart to visualize campaign flows and no easy way to do split testing. Nor is there branching within a sequence, although you could achieve the same effect by having one sequence feed into several other sequences with different entry conditions.

(Side note: Infusionsoft has a public ideas forum for users to suggest and vote on enhancements. Split testing currently ranks number five, behind four refinements to the ecommerce features. This probably means that most users find the marketing features relatively adequate, at least compared with the ecommerce capabilities which definitely looked much less mature. The public forum itself certainly shows a healthy attitude by Infusionsoft towards its own customers. The company also has excellent online documentation and an active user forum for questions and answers.)

On the other hand, Infusionsoft actually does a better job than some demand generation systems of tracking marketing costs. Users can attach a fixed cost and per-response cost to each lead source, which can be an outbound marketing campaign or an inbound source such as Web ads, trade shows, or traditional advertising. Users can also attach a piece cost to each message in a sequence. Revenue for individual customers can be captured with the shopping cart or from opportunities in the CRM system.

This information is presented in a variety of standard reports, although, perplexingly, I couldn’t find one that related the cost of a campaign to the revenue from its respondents. Reports do track response rates, conversion rates, and movement of opportunities through stages in the sales funnel. Standard reports can be run against user-specified date ranges and sometimes against user-specified customer segments. Users can’t create their own reports within the system, but can export their data to analyze elsewhere.

User rights (i.e., which users can do what) are actually more fine-grained in Infusionsoft than in many demand generation systems. Infusionsoft needs the control because it will be used by people throughout the company than a typical marketing system. Infusionsoft also includes contact management and project workflow features, such as tracking tasks and appointments, that aren’t found in most demand generation products.

Infusionsoft pricing starts at $199 per month for a system limited to 10,000 leads and 25,000 emails per month. This version has pretty much all the features needed for demand generation. Going to $299 per month adds ecommerce, sales automation, affiliate management and the API. Even people who don’t need those features might pay the extra money just to move the volume limits to 100,000 leads and 100,000 emails and go from two to four users. $499 per month buys the same features but higher volumes and one more seat. Clients can also add seats for $59 for the base version or $79 per month for the higher two. Implementation costs range from $1,999 to $5,999 depending on the version. [Note: in July 2009, Infusionsoft dropped its implementation fees. Other prices were unchanged.]

Any way you slice it, Infusionsoft would be a tremendous value for a marketing department that could use it instead of a mainstream demand generation system. That’s not to say the choice is a slam-dunk: you may need some of the missing features, and there are other demand generation products that also underprice the mainstream vendors (see last week’s post). Still, if money is tight and your needs are limited, Infusionsoft is certainly an option to consider.

0 Will Twitter teach us to be concise and save the world from information overload? See my 1000 word blog post

Just kidding.

0 Blog Posts I'll Never Write (With Apologies to Borges)

Jorge Luis Borges wrote surreal stories that dealt largely with the nature of literature and authorship. His most popular work is Ficciones, a collection that includes a series of reviews of books that were never written. This was a brilliantly efficient conceit, allowing Borges to analyze the themes and issues of these stories without going to the trouble of actually creating them.

In that same spirit, here are summaries of three blog posts I doubt I’ll ever have time to actually write.

1. The Future of Technology Analysts. This is a reaction to a blog post Do CRM Analysts Provide Value for Money? by veteran consultant Graham Hill. Basically he concludes that the ‘big-name’ analysts don’t tell him much that he he can’t pick up from his own experience or other sources like blogs, books and academic papers. He does feel that ‘niche’ analysts provide more value.

As a ‘niche’ analyst myself, I tend to agree. But the more important issue is the movement away from traditional analysts to a community or peer-to-peer model. Rather than listen to expensive experts, marketers want to hear from other marketers, whom I think they perceive as more practical and less self-interested. This implies a change in the business model of analysts and consultants, who must deliver concrete business solutions rather than simply offering knowledge that clients can’t get elsewhere.

This is probably a good thing in the long run, although it does raise the question of who will do original research when no one will pay the analysts for the results. (This is a special case of the larger issue raised by the Internet, where professional journalists are squeezed out by volunteers who work for free but may not do a thorough or accurate job.) People will need to evolve new mechanisms to judge the value of different information sources—a problem that is widely recognized but nowhere near being solved.

2. A Cookbook for Demand Generation. Probably the biggest obstacle to selling demand generation systems is that many marketers don’t know what to do with them. This reminds me of the little cookbooks that come with kitchen appliances, which give a few simple recipes that make use of the appliances’ capabilities. How about a little demand generation cookbook that would describe a dozen or so starter projects, each with a list of ingredients (emails, landing pages, etc.), step-by-step instructions for setting them up, and maybe a snapshot of the expected results? I guess we could call it “The Joy of Demand Gen.” The goal is to make this as non-intimidating as possible.

3. Taxonomy for Twitter Analytics. I think there is a hierarchy of analytical methods for Twitter and other social media. The simplest layer would be to count mentions of a company or product. The next would be to list the people who are making those mentions, ranked by frequency. Then you’d measure the influence of those people based on number of followers, links, reposts/retweets, etc. Next look at the content of the mentions: are they positive or negative? Finally, really understand the content, taking into account things like sarcasm and emoticons, and maybe convert this into some sort of long-term attitude measure (enthusiastic, skeptical, objective, etc.). Most or all of these measures are available to some degree, but I don’t think I’ve seen them all linked together in a single solution.

0 Low Cost Systems for Demand Generation

My new obsession with Twitter (follow me as @draab) has led to several messages from people who seemed to have trouble choosing between Eloqua and Marketo . This is a bit perplexing, since those products are at the opposite ends of the spectrum: Marketo being relatively low cost / limited functionality / easier to learn, and Eloqua being higher cost / richer functionality / takes more training. It shouldn't be hard to figure out which one suits you better.

But what really concerns me is that these people are apparently limiting their consideration to just those two products. I do recognize that they are the best known vendors in the space (with apologies to Vtrenz, whose identity is somewhat blurred since its purchase by Silverpop). But there are plenty of other options, particularly for marketers with limited budgets. Marketo is certainly a fine product, but marketers should still look around before picking it by default. Here are some alternatives that will come in at or below Marketo’s published starting price of $2,400 per month (or $1,500 for their “Lite” version). (To be fair, many of the vendors below charge an installation of that can be several thousand dollars or more, while Marketo doesn't. But even including that, the first year cost for most of these will be less.) :

Manticore Technology: a full-featured demand generation product. See my 2007 blog entry for some information or buy the Raab Guide to Demand Generation Systems for a detailed review. (Just kidding...or am I?) Pricing on their Web site is quite close to Marketo’s: $1,000 a month for a limited edition and $2,400 per month for all the bells and whistles, and no extra charge for installation.

Pardot: another pretty powerful product; see my blog review from December 2008. But much better pricing at the low end $750 per month for the smallest complete system, and $1,250 per month for something that should be adequate for larger firms.

OfficeAutoPilot: this is the current incarnation of what used to be Moonray. I took a detailed look at a beta of the next release a couple of weeks ago and liked both the interface and breadth of functionality. I’m just waiting for the official release (due in for late February) to publish a detailed review. [Click here to read the review, published in April.] Pricing for a full-featured system was $597 per month—quite a bargain. Even cheaper options are available if you need fewer functions.

Treehouse Interactive: another company I spoke with recently, and another one I’m not writing about yet because they showed me some features that won’t be released for a while (early March). [Click read my March 18 review.] The company has a low profile but has been selling its demand generation product for nearly ten years. It offers a pretty complete set of features, with shortfalls in some areas balanced by strengths in others. More important to people who need it, the company offers partner management and channel sales management products that integrate with its demand generation offering. Pricing starts at $599 per month.

Infusionsoft: I spoke with them just yesterday, and there’s nothing preventing me from writing about them in detail except that I do like to sleep occasionally. Maybe next week. [I got to it on February 12. Read it here.] They aim to be a complete business operating system for very small companies (under 25 employees). So they offer not just demand generation but everything from contact management to e-commerce. However, marketing is their core function and they provide a decent set of features, although certainly not as polished as some other products I’ve mentioned. On the other hand, pricing starts at $199 per month for a 2 user system with pretty much all of their marketing features, and you’d be hard-pressed to spend more than $500 per month unless you want lots of users for non-marketing functions such as sales automation or order entry. Although you may not be familiar with them, the company is five years old and has more than 12,000 (yes, that's twelve thousand) clients.

Active Conversion: I had a chat with president Fred Yee last August although I didn’t publish a detailed review. [I did publish a real review in July 2009.] They focus on email nurturing campaigns and marketing measurement. The system didn’t do landing pages or forms when I spoke with Fred, although he tells me it does now. Pricing starts at $250 per month and averages around $500.

Act-On Software: a slightly different take, with strong Webinar support and an option to use its own low-cost sales automation system as an alternative to Salesforce.com Price starts at $499 per month. I reviewed it here in March.

Before I get any complaints from other vendors in the industry, let me stress that the systems I've listed above are ones that I know have low price points. My own consideration set also includes Marketbright, Market2Lead, MarketingGenius, LeadLife, LoopFuse, LeadGenesys, , eTrigue and SalesFusion360, although I haven't looked at all of those in detail.

Obviously you need to evaluate these products in depth before deciding which is right for you. There are free papers on the Raab Guide site that can help you organize this process and of course I do consult in this area for a living. But the point of today's post isn't that you should run a thorough selection project. It's simply that should recognize that you do have choices, and take advantage of them.

0 QlikView Is Champion In Aberdeen AXIS (But Is This Graph Necessary?)

I occasionally do some development work in QlikView and have made no secret that I think it's a great product. So part of me was pleased to learn that it had been listed as a—indeed, the only—“champion” in an Aberdeen Group AXIS report on BI/Performance Management software. Although QlikView has received plenty of recognition recently, it deserves every bit of it. (If you’ve been living in a cave, or, much worse, not reading this blog: QlikView is business intelligence software that combines an in-memory database, special “associative” data model, data transformation scripts, and a powerful presentation layer. My own experience has shown it lets business analysts build in days what would take months of work by heavyweight IT experts with conventional BI tools. For details, see What Makes QlikTech So Good?--by far the most popular post I've ever written.)

Here is the AXIS itself, with QlikView alone at the top:

And therein lies the problem. Fond as I am of QlikView, I can’t imagine any measure by which it would be a dominant business intelligence tool, let alone rank so far above its competitors. So I was more than a little perplexed to see the Aberdeen ranking, especially because I wasn’t aware that Aberdeen produced something similar to the Forrester “waves” and Gartner “magic quadrants”.

Indeed, it turns out that the AXIS program is brand new. The BI report is the second to be issued but will be followed by several per quarter. Aberdeen’s materials describe its reports as “unlike other comparative products that primarily focus on feature and functionality”, but to my eye it looks pretty similar. Apparently what makes it “the market’s first technology solution software provider assessment tool that is truly customer-centric” is that one of its two dimensions, “value delivered”, is based on Aberdeen’s surveys that identify best-in-class companies.

Exactly how this relates to the vendor rankings is unclear, although I could find out if I paid $895 for the report. Maybe a higher “value delivered” ranking means the product is used by more best-in-class companies, although I rather doubt it given QlikView's still-limited market penetration. More likely, the higher ranked products are viewed by users as delivering greater value, perhaps with some weighting towards the relative performance of the companies doing the ranking. I’ve no doubt that QlikView users are more enthusiastic than any other vendors’, both because it truly is a great product but also because it’s still in the relatively early adapter stage where users tend to be highly motivated and vocal. Perhaps Aberdeen looks at the features desired by best-in-class companies and compares those to the features delivered by the different products, although this too seems unlikely.

The second dimension of “market readiness” is described by Aberdeen as based on “evaluation of responses to a standardized vendor questionnaire, analyst briefings, public records and customer interviews.” This sure sounds like a conventional feature-and-function assessment to me.

As someone who has been evaluating software for many years, I fully appreciate the appeal of these sorts of matrices. Vendors love them because, if they’re ranked near the top, it gives them something to crow about. Buyers love them because they can save work by considering only the top-ranked alternatives (even though vendors piously warn this is inappropriate). The analyst firms love them because they get lots of publicity, both directly because the press loves a horse race and from the winning vendors who promote them.

I have always avoided producing such rankings, even when people ask for them, precisely because they make it too easy for buyers to avoid the essential work of assessing products against their own needs. Still, the commercial advantages of the rankings are so great that I may yet feel impelled to produce them. That being the case, I can’t really criticize Aberdeen for rolling out their own. But I do hope they make a serious effort at educating people on what the "AXIS" means and how it should and shouldn’t be used.