Optimove Helps Optimize Customer Retention (And, Yes, It's a Customer Data Platform)

As I wrote last week, it sometimes seems that every system I look at these days is a Customer Data Platform. Of course, this is partly because I’m choosing to look at that type of system, and partly because CDP vendors are reaching out to me. But I do believe another reason is that CDPs are an idea whose time has come: I’ve recently seen at least three CDPs that are just emerging from stealth or beta mode. All were developed because someone else recognized the huge unmet need for getting  better customer data to marketers.

One of the vendors that contacted me was Optimove, a Tel Aviv-based firm that calls itself a “retention automation platform” but definitely fits the CDP criteria. This means that Optimove is a marketer-controlled system that loads data from multiple source systems, puts it in a marketing-friendly format, and makes it available to external marketing execution systems.

Like many CPDs, Optimove also includes a campaign engine that pushes specific marketing actions to the external systems. Optimove’s approach is unusual in basing its campaign interface on a calendar that lays out the campaign schedule for each user-defined customer segment. This makes it easier for marketers to build a comprehensive contact strategy from multiple campaigns.

The campaigns themselves each have their own schedule, allowing them to run once, daily, weekly, or monthly. Users can also limit the number of messages sent to each customer by assigning an exclusion period to each campaign. Other campaigns can be instructed to respect or ignore these exclusion periods, ensuring that high priority messages are delivered in all circumstances. Each campaign triggers a single action, which can be directed to email, banner ads, direct mail, Facebook custom audiences, in-app pop-ups, SMS, app message boards, call centers, or other channels. The connections may be through file transfers or APIs.

Optimove's campaign interface is unusual, but the system is even more unusual in taking performance measurement very seriously. Its standard campaign setup requires users to assign a success measure and to either set aside a control group or set up a multi-way split of alternative treatments. This enables standard reports, including the campaign calendar itself, to show the incremental value provided by each campaign – the critical information needed for long-term optimization. By contrast, most marketing systems make success targets and testing optional if they support them at all. Users can also see a history of all campaign results for a given segment, making it even easier to identify the most productive programs.

The campaign segments themselves, which Optimove calls target groups, are built by accessing data that Optimove has loaded from the client’s data warehouse and operational systems. Optimove has standard data models for different industries, reflecting its current customer base: online gaming (bingo, casinos, poker, sports betting, etc.), foreign exchange trading, and ecommerce. The system assumes the data has already been coded with customer IDs, which something that makes reasonable sense given the focus on retention rather than acquisition. 

Data is typically loaded daily or weekly. After each load, customers are assigned to life stages (typically, new customers, active customers, and churned customers) and to multiple segments based on behaviors and attributes, such as location, product preferences, and spending levels. The system then uses the life stages and segment attributes to assign customers to "microsegments" that cluster analysis has found will behave similarly. It’s important to understand microsegments represent a current customer state that will change over time: that is, each customer belongs to different microsegments at different stages in her life cycle.

Optimove calculates the probability of moving from one microsegment to the next and uses this to predict how a given group of customers will behave in the future.  This is the basis for its lifetime value and churn predictions – key metrics in system reports. This type of forecasting is something else that really should be done by every marketing system, but rarely is. Optimove also provides cohort analysis reports, comparing performance of customers who joined during different time periods. This is yet another important type of information that is not always available.

Optimove does have some limitations. I was surprised there are no standard reports to highlight attributes that separate responders from non-responders within a promotion audience: this is pretty common information that helps marketers to refine their segmentations and better understand what is driving results. Nor does the system current recommend the best action to take with individual or a group. Both features are being worked on for future release.

Optimove was founded in 2009 and currently has about 70 clients, mostly in Europe. It has a few U.S. customers and is looking to expand in this market. Pricing is usually based on the number of customers and begins around $2,500 per month.

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Marketo's Engagement Engine Simplifies Complex Marketing Automation Campaigns

I’ve long said that the best campaign design would be one circle: the system executes the best treatment for each customer, waits a day, and repeats. My point is that elaborate, branching flows are too complex for most marketers to build and maintain, and – because reality is infinitely messier than even the most sophisticated flow chart – will often give customers a sub-optimal treatment.


It’s probably just as well that no vendor has ever built a system based on my design. But the good folks at Marketo have taken a step in that direction with their latest enhancement, which they call an “engagement program”. It has more than one step but does get away from the idea of a rigid, branching campaign flow. Instead, it is organized in terms of “streams” that contain pools of content. Once a customer is added to a stream, the system will offer the next piece of content whenever a contact is due according to the campaign cadence. What’s next is set by the order of content within the stream: users just drag content into the container and put on top the ones they want sent first. The system will go through the content in this order during each execution (which Marketo calls a “cast”), and send each person the first item they have not already received. This avoids duplicate messages and lets the system deliver a defined series of messages without explicitly setting up a sequence. It also makes it almost effortless to insert a high priority message that goes to everyone or to swap out contents as new materials become available.

As you’ll immediately notice, sending the next thing isn’t quite the same as sending the best next thing.  In my ideal world, the content would be selected by calculating the value of each item for each individual and taking the highest. This would only take a small tweak in the current approach, which is one reason I like what Marketo has done. Marketo does in fact plan to apply predictive modeling to the system, although I think they're trying to find the most effective content sequence for all customers, rather than scoring content at the individual level.

There’s quite a bit more to the new Marketo feature than I’ve described so far. Content can actually be a multi-step program of its own, such as a sequence of messages to promote and manage a Webinar. Content can also have availability dates that are enforced automatically, so future messages can be added at any time and obsolete messages are automatically discontinued. One thing that’s missing is eligibility rules on content, to let users specify who is allowed to receive it. This is a key feature in traditional decision management systems, permitting customer-level customization within a fixed priority sequence. But Marketo users can achieve the same thing by embedding content within programs, which do have such rules, and adding the programs to the stream instead of the content itself. This is Marketo’s recommended approach because it also provides better data for reporting.

Users can further tailor treatments to customers by setting up multiple streams within one engagement program.  Each stream has “transition rules” that pull in qualified customers from other streams.  This is less rigid than having selection rules in one stream push customers to another stream.  It's not quite clear what happens if someone qualifies for more than one stream: Marketo's position is that would only happen if you make a mistake.  I think reality is not so tidy.  Marketo is considering letting marketers prioritize the transitions based on the position of the streams, just as they prioritize contents within a stream.

In any event, customers can only be in one stream at a time, so they won’t receive multiple messages from the same engagement program. Whether they receive messages from multiple programs is controlled by Marketo’s standard communication limit features, which can set a maximum number of messages per day and per week. Users can decide whether those limits apply to any particular program. The system also lets salespeople or other programs pause messages from an engagement program to an individual customer.

The new package includes a good set of reports that track content usage and results.  They also provide an “engagement score” that combines several success metrics into a single value. Other reports show how many people in the program have run out of content – a good way to ensure the company doesn’t lose touch with them. Surprisingly, there's no report on movement from one stream to the next. But Marketo says this can be set up using their revenue performance management module, which tracks movement of customers across other types of stages.

The engagement engine is included in all Marketo versions, although lower-level versions have some limits.  Adding a more powerful version to the Standard edition of Marketo starts at $295 per month.

Added Thought: Marketo engagement programs are a type of state-based system, an idea that has been tried from time to time in marketing systems and is currently the basis of Whatsnexx.   As the name implies, state-based systems assign customers to categories and then define treatment rules within each category.  Unlike the sequential flow of a traditional multi-step campaign, customers in a state-based system remain in the same category so long as they meet its membership conditions. State-based systems typically reclassify all members at the start of each cycle, which is different from Marketo's approach of relying on transition rules to pull customers from one stream to the next.  This means that someone could remain in a stream even though they no longer met its entry criteria.  This is something Marketo might want to reconsider.

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Neolane Interaction Tightly Integrates Real-Time and Outbound Marketing Campaigns

As I mentioned last week, there haven’t been many new B2C marketing automation products in recent years. But this doesn’t mean the industry has been stagnant. New developments have come from established vendors who are steadily expanding their products.

Neolane has been one of these, growing from its roots in email to encompass other outbound and inbound channels, and more recently with a slew of social and mobile marketing features. One of its offerings, originally launched in 2009, is its real-time interaction manager, Neolane Interaction.

Interaction performs the same basic functions as other interaction managers: it receives a request from an external touchpoint that is engaged with a customer, selects the best treatment, and returns the recommendation to the touchpoint.  However, it differs in several key details:

- it supports both batch (outbound) and real time interactions. This is unusual, because efficient processing usually takes different data structures and methods for batch vs. real time. But Neolane cites one customer delivering 10,000 Web recommendations per minute and another sending ten million customized emails per week, so it has apparently found a way to handle both. Supported channels include email, Web, social, mobile, call center, point of sale, and SMS.

- it uses the same offer library for real-time and outbound campaigns. This means that offers can be used interchangeably in both types of campaigns – something that considerably simplifies program design and analysis. Each offer can include separate content for the different channel formats. Users specify which offers are available in which channels, to ensure an offer isn't recommended where it shouldn't be.

- it draws data from the Neolane marketing database as part of its offer selection rules. This is different from most interaction managers, which query external systems rather than maintaining their own persistent customer database. (Neolane could also do external queries.)  Again, this approach raises a technical eyebrow, since traditional marketing databases are not structured for real-time interactions. But Neolane seems to pull it off.  I suppose it helps that Neolane can attach to any data structure, so clients who want real-time interactions presumably build a real-time-friendly database.

- it supports both anonymous and identified customer interactions. Most real-time interaction managers make customer-specific recommendations, although Web recommendation engines are often designed for anonymous visitors. It makes sense for Neolane to support both, again serving the greater goal of providing one marketing system to meet as many needs as possible.

These items all grow out of the fundamental fact that Interaction is a module within the larger Neolane system, rather than a separate product. Other features of the system are more typical of dedicated interaction managers:

- eligibility rules for each offer. There are also eligibility rules for offer categories, which save effort by applying the same rule to multiple offers.

- offer arbitration (i.e., choosing which of several eligible offers to return). Offers can be ranked using fixed weights assigned to each offer; by calculating weights with a formula that draws on customer data; or with an unusual “autolearn” function that adjusts the weights to ensure that the offer will be seen. The system does not incorporate any of predictive modeling, although model scores built elsewhere could be used in weighting formulas.

- each recommendation is independent of a larger dialogue flow. At best, marketers wishing to deliver a sequence of treatments could create eligibility rules that check for previous treatments. This limitation is typical of real-time interaction managers.

- a simulation function that estimates how often each offer would be presented to an audience with specified characteristics. This helps marketers see the results of different eligibility rules and offer weights, which can be difficult to estimate in advance. It’s found in some but not all interaction managers.

The downside of Neolane’s approach is that customers who only want an interaction manager must still purchase the full Neolane system. This isn’t necessarily cost-prohibitive: the company says its average deal for the base system plus Interaction is around $350,000. Actual fees depend on the number of interactions processed. The system is available for on-premise, hosted, or “hybrid” deployment (on-premise installation with Neolane-hosted email delivery). Neolane says about 60% of its clients choose an on-premise option.

To end on a positive note: Neolane sold 22 new Interaction installations in 2012, up from 17 the year before. This makes it one of the company’s fastest-growing products.

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Selligent Brings a New B2C Marketing Automation Option to the U.S.

I’m writing this post on my old DOS-based WordPerfect software, to get in the proper mood for discussing business-to-consumer marketing automation.* The late 1990’s were really the last time we saw major innovation in the B2C market, when vendors like Unica and Aprimo released their then-innovative systems to create lists for direct mail and, somewhat later, email campaigns. Since then, the number of independent B2C marketing automation vendors has actually dwindled** as major and not-so-major products were purchased by larger companies to bundle into integrated suites or just use internally. Even the leading survivors, including Neolane (founded 2001) and RedPoint (founded 2006) have their roots in traditional outbound campaigns, although they now support Web, social, and real-time interactions to varying degrees.

Still, I’m excited as an entomologist with a new beetle*** to see another vendor in the space. Selligent  isn't brand new – the company was founded in 2000 and its marketing automation system dates back about six years – but the company says it was built from the ground up to manage real time interactions. A deep dive left me seriously impressed.

The first thing you need to know about Selligent is that while it’s new to the U.S. market, it is well established in Europe, where it serves 400 brands in eleven countries. It’s particularly strong among retailers and publishers. This experience translates into the types of refinements that can only be based on client demands. To pick a couple more or less at random, these include a matching engine that selects among hundreds of news articles to find those most relevant to individual subscribers (a sort of dynamic-content-on-steroids that’s important to publishers) and tools to manage product give-aways and rewards for viral sharing (important for retailers). They also include standard B2C features that are still lacking in most B2B products, such as precise control over user access to specific pieces of content, data, and system functions; planning hierarchy to schedule and budget for multiple marketing programs in separate organizations; and rules to limit the number of marketing messages each customer receives.

The basic architecture of Selligent is typical for B2C marketing automation systems. That is, it attaches a marketer-friendly interface for data access and analytics to an externally-built customer database. Brave users can add new fields and even entire data tables, and can import external data directly into the system. But the data must be matched on a fixed identifier, such as account number or email address, or combination of fixed identifiers. Data standardization, identity resolution, and change history (such as new vs. old mailing address) are largely handled elsewhere.

Selligent also uses the familiar flow chart interface to design its campaigns. Beyond the superficial graphics – where Selligent is no better than average – it takes a connoisseur to spot the subtle differences among these implementations. Selligent does hit a number of fine notes, including A/B tests, option to reunite branches after a split, mix of data segmentation with marketing outputs in the same flow, ability to enter and leave flows at multiple points, option to direct customers to other flows, separate schedules for individual objects within a flow, and automated warnings of incomplete designs.  Did I mention hints of almond?

But the big differences are not visible. For example, you see that a campaign flow can include a survey.  What you can't see is that surveys go beyond progressive profiling (replacing questions as they’re answered) to include branches based on customer profile and in-session answers, ability to re-ask questions after a specified period, asking questions in different languages but storing answers in one language, using the same question on multiple surveys and storing all answers in a single location, and providing statistics on completion rates, average time to complete, and which pages have the most validation issues and drop-outs. This is definitely above average for survey features in marketing automation tools, and more than competitive with many dedicated survey systems.

Selligent flows also support business processes that include external steps, such as manual review of an order. To do this, the system assign a “state” to a customer and then reacts differently within the flow based on that state. A separate “FrontOffice” module provides an interface for call center and other agents, and can apply rules to route customers to specific centers, teams, and agents. The system supports Microsoft’s computer-telephone integration (CTI) features, but doesn’t integrate with other phone systems. Basic campaign flows can send data to external systems via file exports or by calling an Application Program Interface (API).

As these examples may suggest, one key theme for Selligent flows is tight integration across all channels. Perhaps the best example of this – and something I’ve looked for in many other systems and never found – is that its flows can control movement from one Web page to another. That may not sound unique, but if you look closely at other marketing automation flows you’ll see they typically end with serving up a Web form and then start independently with events triggered by completion of a form. All well and good, but it means you need to build a separate flow for each step in a multi-stage interaction. Even the real-time interaction management systems treat each recommendation independently, so the only way to create a multi-part dialog is to build separate campaigns or to build one campaign with complex qualification rules that test for completion of each dialog step before moving to the next. Both approaches involve much painstaking labor and room for error. Selligent, on the other hand, lets users connect one page to another on the flow diagram; the system then automatically embeds URL links to make the connection. I’ve had three clients ask me for this in the past year alone.

Back in the realm of the normal, Selligent also offers a graphical email/Web page designer that supports the usual design features, personalization, dynamic content.  More impressive, it has integrated multi-variate testing and lets users convert an email to a Web page, or vice versa, by pushing a single button. A single email or Web page can be shared across multiple campaigns with  changes to the master object automatically deployed everywhere it’s used. Selligent doesn’t automatically store previous versions of contents as they’re edited and doesn’t provide formal check out/check in to avoid conflicting edits. But users can save and restore backup copies.  The system also keeps an audit trail of who made changes and issues a warning when someone opens a document that someone else is already editing.

Reporting in Selligent is based on information gathered from each object in a campaign flow. The specific data depends on the nature of the object.  Users can also insert objects that capture specific information such as the number of people who have passed through. There are no standard campaign reports; instead, users build their own reports by assembling the object-level information. I found this a bit odd, but Selligent said each client wants something different and prefers to create their own. The vendor has recently added a Business Intelligence module, using Quiterian (recently purchased by Actuate and renamed BIRT Analytics) which provides ad hoc analytics and visualization. Data is exported from Selligent to the Quiterian database, but this happens automatically and selections made in Quiterian are automatically copied back to Selligent as segments for marketing campaigns.

Selligent does have its weaknesses. It doesn’t easily support some advanced queries and splits, such as finding the top 100 customers per store or selecting the highest-spending person per household. It has no built-in predictive modeling or integration with third-party modeling systems, although it can easily import externally-created model scores. Somewhat surprisingly, it lacks geographic radius selections (although Quiterian has these) and doesn’t adjust sending dates or hours for the local holidays or time zones. Apparently it hasn’t needed these in Europe, where clients run separate campaigns for individual countries, countries don’t span time zones, and local units, such as provinces, are small enough to make distance-based selections unnecessary. This will surely change as it adapts to the U.S. market.

Pricing for Selligent is based on modules used and number of unique customers. There is no separate charge based on message volume or number of users. The system can be purchased as a vendor-run service, deployed on-premise, or deployed locally with Selligent executing the emails. Price for the base system starts around $6,000 per month for 250,000 contacts.  The vendor says its cost is often equivalent to what high-volume clients are paying for email alone.  As in Europe, Selligent expects to sell primary through marketing agencies and service providers in the U.S. market. 


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* Not really. I tried, but WP.exe won’t run on my current computer. Too many bits or something.

** See my list of mid-tier B2C systems.  Seven of the twelve listed are now owned by someone else.

*** Probably more excited. New beetles are pretty common.  Nearly 250 have been discovered this year alone in New Guinea  and Central/South America.

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Marketing Automation Interface Should Focus on Customers, Not Campaigns

Several vendors have shown me their new campaign management interfaces recently. All were refined, attractive, and thoughtful. Each had subtle features that appeal to a connoisseur: floating tool pallets! Fly-over icon labels! Dynamic menus! Curved lines!  But they’re all still basically the same flow charts that Frank Gilbreth (of Cheaper by the Dozen fame) introduced in 1921 and we've seen in marketing systems for more than 20 years.

Now, I’m not saying marketing automation vendors should find a new approach just because I’m bored with the old one. But the truth is that the old way doesn’t work: every experienced developer I’ve ever spoken with has told me they’ve found users get confused when flow charts grow past a handful of branches. That’s true even though users themselves design campaigns by drawing a flow chart on a whiteboard. If you watch that process closely, you’ll see that (a) users themselves have trouble when their diagram gets too complex and (b) they can’t make much sense of it when they come back the next morning (assuming the whiteboard wasn’t erased).

Developers have taken two approaches to this challenge. One is to add features that help manage complexity – all those floating pallets and pop-up menus. These do help but it’s like Chaos Theory as explained in Jurassic Park: piling complexity on complexity eventually ends in a catastrophic collapse. The other approach is to simplify the experience by removing capabilities such as multiple branches and recursive loops. The extreme version of this is interfaces that define each campaign as a single sequence of steps, with no branching at all. This is certainly comprehensible but it can prevent marketers from doing what they want.

Something more radical is needed. Developers must think outside the flow chart. One way to start is to consider interfaces they’re already using in other systems.

• touch screen. Dragging and poking at a flow chart with your fingers instead of a mouse wouldn’t be much of an improvement, although it would help. Creating splits by stretching an icon until it breaks into pieces might be kinda fun. Scaling up or down the way you zoom into online maps – and having the level of detail adjust automatically – would definitely be an improvement. But I’m guessing there are some more dramatic alternatives that avoid the flow chart altogether.  Think about your favorite touch screen apps and see what comes to mind. How could you design a marketing campaign with Angry Birds?

• voice activation. I have no interest in speaking the same commands I could type. But a system that understands voice commands has natural language capabilities to infer what I need based on context and past experience, and thus save me the work of defining the details explicitly. (Think IBM Watson on Jeopardy or iPhone Siri.) If you think about the primal whiteboard scenario, what really happens is the marketers say “let’s add a split here” before drawing it – so a natural language approach could be a big time saver by skipping the drawing step altogether. Or the system might actually ask questions and make suggestions that lead the marketer through the design process: Who is your target market? How many reminder emails do you want? Might I suggest you add a reward: here are the best three to consider.

• virtual reality. The biggest problem with flow charts is they are inherently two dimensional.  This means that intersecting branches must visually overlap, which is very confusing.  Could a virtual reality interface let marketers follow each path independently, like walking down a street or flying through a forest? This comes closer to simulating the customer’s experience – perhaps the marketer could be pelted with messages as she passes through (I’m thinking of monkeys throwing fruit), and toss them back as a response.  Or, imagine a road map that traces the customer's physical journey through  both the real world and cyberspace, with marketing messages presented as billboards and interactions as conversations with passersby.  Or could you map the customer journey itself – a trip through the funnel – with a similar presentation of billboards and conversations?  Think of a child's board game like Candyland or, perhaps more appropriate, Alice's trip down the rabbit hole. 

• data visualization. Think of all those cool illustrations you’ve seen of social networks, molecular structures, Web behaviors, economic trends, geospatial data, manufacturing processes, and who knows what. Why can't marketing systems do better than flow charts and pie graphs? How about a three-dimensional campaign diagram that you can rotate and zoom on three axes? Or a six-dimensional view using height, width, depth, color, size, and shape, with a slider for time? Some of these might be hard to interpret but even a flow chart takes some training to understand. I'm certain that creative design can pack more information into a simpler package.

• games and simulation. Could a marketing campaign sprout like a tree, growing more complex over time and bearing customers as fruit? Simulation games use simple rules and a few user choices to create elaborate cities, empires, and organisms. Some already let users run model businesses. More advanced versions of those programs could use rules derived from your customers' actual behavior to test alternative campaign designs and pick the ones most likely to succeed. The campaign details would be built by the system, so the interface becomes less important, although marketers would still need to review everything before deployment. These designs would be inserted into the matrix of existing programs, so the system could model each program’s incremental impact on the full customer lifecycle and on other program results. This leads directly to the Holy Grail of Marketing Optimization (which might make a fine multi-player quest game, come to think of it).

• multiple views and viewpoints. Most of today's marketing automation systems already let administrators control which features are available to which users. But everyone with access to a given feature usually sees the same thing. The one exception is that salespeople are given wholly separate interfaces tailored to their needs. But this approach should be carried over to other personas within the marketing department – the CMO’s view of campaigns is radically different from the marketing operations person’s, and they should not be looking at the same flow chart. Even the same user might want different views at different times, depending on the task at hand.

• customer perspective. I’ve already touched on this but it’s worth more attention. There’s a strong argument that the fundamental notion of separate marketing campaigns should be replaced by integrated customer treatments across all channels and life stages. The flow chart interface is based on the individual campaigns, and becomes impractically complex precisely when campaigns are expanded to accommodate too many contingencies. A customer-centered approach would develop rules for each situation rather than stringing together rules for many different situations. Those rules would be simpler because they dealt with a narrower range of conditions. They could also be spread between campaign logic and dynamic content logic, and many might be replaced altogether by predictive models that choose the highest-value treatment. The explosion of channels and contacts has made integrated customer treatments essential. Marketers need a fundamentally new interface designed to provide them.

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More Systems for Business-to-Consumer Marketing Automation

I spent yesterday prowling the exhibit hall at the Direct Marketing Association annual conference in Boston. This uncovered several additional candidates for mid-tier business-to-consumer marketing automation. I’ll list them here and also add them to my previous list of mid-tier marketing automation systems so that future visitors will find the complete set in one place.

This products below are a somewhat arbitrary selection, since pretty much every printer, service bureau, and email provider has a list selection tool. I’ve tried to include only products that can connect to a “real” marketing database, meaning it supports separate tables for customers, transactions, and contact history, and that allow multi-step campaign flows. 


RedPoint – a suite of tools for database building, campaign management, and analytics. Can be hosted by a service provider or run on-premise by the client. Highly scalable and mature – the company has been growing quietly for six years and has some very large clients.

BullsEye Marketing Systems – generates sophisticated outbound campaigns. The company’s major clients are cable TV systems but it also serves education and other areas. The system lacks an end-user interface for building campaigns; instead, these are built by the vendor based on client instructions.

Consolidated Technologies Group – a hosted system offering data hygiene, CRM, campaign management, digital asset management, and analytics. Sister company offers printing, direct mail and physical fulfillment. Cleveland-based with mostly local clients.

BFC – a hosted system tailored for central control over local marketers, such as franchisees. Provides multi-step, event-triggered campaigns, content creation, asset management, and multi-media output including Web-to-print.

Direxxis – also hosted, also designed for central control over local marketing.  Supports multi-channel campaigns, asset management, fulfillment, and performance measurement.

Of all these products, you'll note that only RedPoint is a general purpose marketing system.  BullsEye, BFC and Direxxis are specialized by vertical, and Consolidated Technologies is a regional player. Of course, if you happen to be in the market any of them serve, that’s an advantage.

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List of Mid-Tier Business-to-Consumer Marketing Automation Systems

The world clearly has more B2B marketing automation vendors than it needs – my master list of demand generation products includes two dozen. By contrast, mid-tier consumer marketers often have a hard time finding good options. The major B2C marketing automation vendors -- IBM/Unica, Teradata/Aprimo, and SAS are more attuned to the enterprise market. Here are some others, in rough order of industry familiarity:


Alterian – extends beyond multi-channel campaign management to include Web content management, Web analytics, and social media monitoring.  It offers both hosted and on-premise options and uses a proprietary analytic database engine for key functions. Many marketing service providers manage Alterian systems for their clients.  (Alterian was purchased in December, 2011 by language technology and Web content management vendor SDL.)

Neolane – provides multi-channel campaign management, realtime interactions, and marketing resource management. Clients can choose hosted or on-premise deployment, or a “mid-sourcing” option where the system is run by the client but email is sent by Neolane.

Decision Software Inc.  – offers MarketWide, a very powerful campaign management tool. Can be deployed on-premise or hosted and managed by the vendor.

ExactTarget – originally an email service provider, it now also supports mobile, social, Web pages, and Web analytics. Recently introduced its “Integrated Marketing Hub” which offers more advanced campaign management and can support a more complex marketing database. Only available as a service.

Entiera – a hosted system that offers outbound campaigns and interaction management. Entiera also builds and maintains the client’s marketing database. (Enteria was purchased in May 2012 by credit scoring and analytics vendor FICO.)

MarketingPilot – started as a marketing resource management system and has steadily expanded.  It now offers true campaign management on a real marketing database. Can be hosted or on-premise.  (Acquired by Microsoft in October, 2012.)

ClickSquared – originally a marketing services provider but now repositioning itself as cloud-based campaign management software. Just launching a new version of its system, snappily named “Cross-Channel Marketing Hub”.

Portrait Software – purchased by Pitney Bowes in July 2010 and now part of the Pitney Bowes Business Insight group, along with former MapInfo and Group 1 Software products. Provides outbound campaigns and real time interaction management as well as advanced analytics.  The campaign management portion is based on the Million Handshakes system purchased by Portrait in 2008.

Conversen – a hosted system that offers a mix of campaign management and multi-channel output generation.  Recently enhanced to support complex marketing databases as well as simple lists.  I recently wrote a white paper about their approach.  (Acquired by Experian in May 2012.)


RedPoint – a suite of tools for database building, campaign management, and analytics. Can be hosted by a service provider or run on-premise by the client. Highly scalable and mature – the company has been growing quietly for six years and has some very large clients.

SmartSource Online –  offers hosted email, content management and Web forms, backed by a workflow engine that allows multi-step campaigns and daabase management.  Specializes in custom applications and support for other marketing service providers.  (Acquired by Extraprise in April 2013.)


Selligent –  offers tightly integrated outbound and interactive campaigns, with hosted or on-premise deployment.  Based in Belgium with plans to enter the U.S. market in 2013.  Well-established among European retailers and publishers.  Sold mostly through agencies and marketing service providers.

Final Note: this post also originally listed SmartFocus as an option.  But Emailvision, which purchased SmartFocus in April 2011, is no longer selling it as a stand-alone product.  The SmartFocus interface will survive as a front-end to the Emailvision email system.

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