6 Key Marketing Measures That Don't Include Revenue

Ask most marketers how they measure performance, and they’ll tell you they look at results: incremental revenue or return on investment if they’re available, or response rates if they're not. Industry experts take a similar approach, focusing largely on the need for better revenue measures. The situation – and barely concealed frustration – is captured perfectly in the headline from a recent Forrester Consulting study sponsored by Silverpop: “Response...

Read More

Experian Buys Conversen Marketing Automation to Strengthen Its Offerings

Experian Marketing Services yesterday announced its acquisition  of marketing automation vendor Conversen. This is the third marketing automation acquisition in the past month, following Intuit’s purchase of Demandforce and FICO’s purchase of Entiera.Conversen is somewhat similar to Entiera in offering sophisticated multi-step campaigns, although its main differentiator is multi-channel dynamic content that makes it relatively easy to deliver different messages to different segments across multiple channels. See my review from February 2010...

Read More

FICO Buys Entiera Marketing Automation: Another Independent Option Gone

Three weeks ago, Intuit shook up the low end of the marketing automation universe by purchasing small business marketing shooting star Demandforce. Last week the action shifted to the high end, where FICO announced its purchase of Entiera, one of the few remaining enterprise class products.FICO, the company formerly known as Fair Isaac and originator of the influential FICO credit score, first dipped its toe into marketing automation services and software when it acquired DynaMark in 1992. Since then, the company has continued to grow its marketing...

Read More

What Brain Research Teaches about Selecting Marketing Automation Software

I’m spending more time on airplanes these days, which means more time browsing airport bookshops. Since spy stories and soft core porn are neither to my taste, the pickings are pretty slim. But I did recently stumble across Jonah Lehrer’s How We Decide, one of several recent books that explain the latest scientific research into human decision-making.Lehrer’s book shuttles between commonly-known irrationalities in human behavior – things like assigning a higher value to avoiding loss than achieving gain – and the less known (to me, at least)...

Read More

Intuit Buys Small Business Local Marketing Vendor Demandforce: There's a New Gorilla in Town

Intuit  last week announced an agreement to acquire local business marketing vendor Demandforce  for $423.5 million. That’s a hefty sum for a company with a reported revenue of $37.5 million, although it has been growing at a blistering pace – more than doubling last year – and now has over 35,000 customers. Still, the move makes perfect strategic sense, giving Intuit a stronger foothold in the marketing side of its small business customer base. (Intuit dominates the market for small business accounting with five million Quickbooks...

Read More