RedPoint Offers Broad, Deep B2C Marketing Automation

On days when I have nothing else to be cranky about, I sometimes fuss at how business-to-business software vendors hijacked the term “marketing automation” despite its long and relatively honorable history describing systems for consumer marketing. Oracle’s recent agreement to purchase Eloqua reinflamed that wound, since much of the commentary ignored Oracle’s extensive existing suite of consumer marketing systems.

More productively, the deal also shifted discussion from components within a marketing suite to where marketing systems fit within the larger world of unified customer management. This perspective has always been part of consumer marketing, where the classic description of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) was “marketing, sales and service”. That formula fell out of favor when the most prominent CRM system became B2B-oriented Salesforce.com, whose very name reflects its origins in B2B sales automation.

One reason that B2B perspectives have dominated the recent discussion of marketing automation is that the major B2C marketing automation products have receded from view after being absorbed by larger corporate platforms: Unica is part of IBM, Aprimo is owned by Teradata, Portrait Software is owned by Pitney Bowes, Epiphany is owned by Infor (which last month acquired marketing resource management leader Orbis Global, a bit of news I'd missed), Alterian is owned by SDL, and SAS is owned by, well, SAS. This diminishes most products’ independent profiles (Aprimo is the exception), although they are still selling nicely. Even some of the less prominent B2C products have been acquired recently: Conversen by Experian and Entiera by FICO, although neither of these are enterprise software vendors.

The net result of all this harvesting by big buyers has been to clear the ground for the next crop of B2C marketing automation systems. These fill a demand for powerful but moderately-priced options by both marketing services providers and mid-sized companies. Those buyers often find that systems from big enterprise software vendors become too expensive or require too many ancillary components from their corporate parents.

One vendor taking advantage of this opening is RedPoint. Founded in 2006 by veteran CRM consultants and technologists from Accenture, the firm has created an exceptionally extensive marketing automation product including not just campaigns and content management, but also database maintenance, which isn't usually part of marketing automation.  Although IBM, SAS, and Pitney Bowes provide a similar scope, RedPoint is unique in having built all those components itself and keeping them tightly integrated.

The data features are especially impressive. RedPoint offers a rich set of standard data management features including loads from files, databases, and semi-structured formats like XML and EDI; transformations including regular expressions, file splits, and table joins; batch and on-demand process flows.  There's also a novel option to use Web service calls for on-demand data appending, a particularly noteworthy concept.  Beyond those, the system provides specialized functions to manage customer data including name/address parsing, standardization, and matching. Users can apply the system's built-in rules for these or modify the rules to meet their own preferences. All data functions are managed with a sophisticated workflow engine that allows fast development of new marketing databases -- often in a matter of weeks, not months.  This removes (or at least shrinks) the single greatest obstacle facing many new marketing systems.

The system was also designed to scale.  It can work with standard files and SQL databases, with native connectors for SQL Server, Netezza, Oracle, and Teradata. Support for Hadoop, Hbase, PIG, Hive, Cassandra, GreenPlum and other “big data” technologies is due early this year. Clustering is available at all application service layers and the system supports true multi-tenancy (multiple instances running on the same installation).

Campaign management features are equally deep although less unusual.  A drag-and-drop flow builder allows complex, rule-based branches and can react to behaviors during the campaign. Users can define audiences with batch selections, scheduled processes, and “subscription groups” of anonymous individuals (such as Web site visitors) who match specified behavior profiles. Splits can be based on logical conditions, random selections, or auto-generated cells with all possible combinations of specified variables. The auto-generation feature, which can easily produce segmentations with hundreds or thousands of cells, is a hallmark of sophisticated B2C marketing automation systems. It is used for segmentations such as RFM (recency, frequency, monetary value) cells, age/gender/cluster cells, branch or dealer assignments, and product splits.

RedPoint also provides self-training predictive models.  These are currently used within the data management functions and matching algorithms. They will be soon applied to select offers for Web personalization.

Content management includes an editor to create outputs for email, Web, SMS, Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare, LinkedIn and other formats. Users can build shared templates that are later modified for individual projects. Objects can contain Web forms and dynamic content blocks driven by selection rules or mapped to audience segments. The system can generate Web tags to capture user behaviors and can react to those behaviors in real time. It manages approval workflows, version tracking, and precise control over which users can access different objects and functions.

Pricing for RedPoint is based on a combination of deployment services, software licenses, and hosting fees. A minimum system starts around $60,000 per year. There are more than 100 installations, about half sold directly and half through partners such as marketing service providers. The system can be hosted by RedPoint, by a service partner, or by the client.

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MarketingPilot Offers Integrated Marketing Management for Mid-Size Companies

Yesterday's acquisition of AssetLink by SAS has prompted me to finally write about MarketingPilot, a vendor I've been following since its launch nearly ten years ago.

MarketingPilot started as an operations management tool for mid-size direct marketers, with features for project management, list and media buying, source code tracking, expense capture, and vendor management. Since then it has expanded steadily to encompass the full range of marketing resource management and then gone ahead to add marketing database management and campaign execution. The technology has evolved from Windows-based client server systems – using the Borland Interbase engine, if you want a real whiff from the memory jar – to a mix of on-premise and hosted options.

Average price and client size have also increased steadily, although the focus has remained on mid-size rather than enterprise clients. The company also created special editions for ad agencies, which now provide about 40% of its business. MarketingPilot has about 40 employees and 400 installations with over 15,000 end-users.

With AssetLink (60 employees) now owned by SAS, MarketingPilot also may be the largest remaining independent MRM vendor. I can’t say for sure because there are several companies in the field that I’ve never researched. But it doesn’t really matter, because MarketingPilot is now positioned as an integrated marketing management product. That puts it into roughly the same class as much larger firms including Neolane (200 employees) and Alterian (370 employees).

I say “roughly” because Neolane and Alterian are rooted in the campaign management side of marketing automation, while MarketingPilot is based on marketing resource management. Although the overlap between these products is growing, they are still quite different.

To give you an idea of the scope of MarketingPilot, here is a set of headings from its Web site:

Alerts - Analytics/Performance Measurement - Approvals - Budgets - Calendars - Campaign Management - Collateral Management - Contract Management - CRM - Digital Asset/Document Management - Direct Marketing - Direct Response - Editions - Email Marketing - Enterprise Edition - Enterprise Marketing Management - Estimates - Event Management - Expense Management - Financial Management - Internet/Online Marketing - Inventory Management - Lead Management - List Management - Marketing Automation - Marketing Database - Marketing Plans - Marketing Resource Management - Media Buying and Planning - Multi-currency - Purchasing - Print Production - Reports - Scheduling - Social Media - Solutions - Strategic Planning - Supply Chain/Vendor Management - Time Slips - Trade Shows - Web Portal

This is broader list than you'll see from most marketing automation vendors – a group not known for modest product claims. But even MarketingPilot isn’t all things to all people (yet). Here's a quick inventory of strengths and weaknesses:

- just about any MRM feature you can imagine: planning, budgeting, project management, vendor management, media buying, content management, creative mark-up, approval workflows, etc.
- email, landing page and Web form creation
- high volume email delivery
- social media execution and tracking
- lead distribution and lead scoring based on attributes, but not behaviors
- integrated CRM, with an future option to synchronize with external CRM systems
- marketing database management with separate company and contact levels
- a highly tailorable interface that shows each user only the features they can access (critical in a system with so many options)
- multiple languages, currencies and time zones
- segmentation on contact and company data, with plans for a visual query builder that allows more complex queries against additional tables
- single-step campaign execution, with multi-step campaign flows due later this year
- response reporting, with plans to add ROI calculations
- Google Analytics integration, with expanded Web visitor tracking and analytics using MarketingPilot’s own tags due later this year.

That’s an impressive list, even after recognizing that key marketing automation features are not yet available, including multi-step campaigns, advanced segmentation, Web behavior tracking, behavior-based lead scoring, and ROI calculations. But they’re all promised fairly soon. Once they’re delivered, MarketingPilot will be a viable mid-market option for integrated marketing management.

If somebody doesn’t buy them first.

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SAS Acquires AssetLink: Great for Enterprises, But What About the Rest of Us?

Summary: SAS's purchase of AssetLink ensures it's a viable alternative to IBM/Unica and Teradata/Aprimo for integrated marketing management. The real question is whether mid-size firms will be able to afford those systems.

SAS today announced its acquisition of marketing resource management vendor AssetLink. The move makes perfect sense: the other big MRM vendor was Aprimo, and once they were acquired by Teradata, SAS and AssetLink had no alternative partners in the enterprise marketing space.

Let me make clear that when I say “enterprise”, I mean “enterprise”, as in big business. Our friends at Gartner have recently proposed replacing “enterprise marketing management” with “integrated marketing management” as the general term for, um, integrated marketing management. Makes sense. But AssetLink told me their 50+ clients are all big companies. SAS’s marketing systems are also sold mostly to big firms. So we’re really talking about the “enterprise” market here. Once you starting considering mid-size businesses, there are other players, most notably MarketingPilot for MRM and Alterian and Neolane for business-to-consumer marketing automation.

Naturally, SAS and AssetLink don’t intend to limit themselves to enterprise buyers. Like IBM/Unica and Teradata/Aprimo, they hope to sell integrated marketing systems to mid-size firms too. This may be easier for the other two vendors: IBM and Unica certainly have more mid-size marketing clients than SAS and AssetLink, and although Teradata is mostly a big-company vendor, Aprimo has a broader client mix and a relatively new “Marketing Studio On Demand” product that was designed for smaller buyers. Still, we can expect SAS to try.

I'll admit to being skeptical that enterprise-oriented firms like IBM, Teradata, and SAS can successfully sell their products for the mid-market. The transition faces some technical roadblocks, mostly about hiding complexity and reducing the need for customization. But those can be solved. The larger challenges are rooted in corporate culture and require changes in areas like pricing and sales compensation. To put it more bluntly, enterprise firms like to sell big deals.

In fact, I think big deals are exactly what have attracted IBM, Teradata, and SAS to focus on marketing systems. They all seem to have adopted the grand vision of integrated marketing automation as a centrally-managed, analytically-driven process to coordinate customer contacts across all touchpoints. This requires integrating the marketing system with sales, customer service and Web systems. While I also love that vision, I suspect that only a few large firms will have the resources to implement it. This could mean that, in practice, integrated marketing management is limited to enterprise buyers.

This leads to another question: What are Oracle and SAP up to? They’re the other big enterprise software vendors and they’re surely interested in offering integrated marketing automation to their own clients, both to increase revenue and to block account penetration by competitors. Both vendors do have some marketing automation products but these don’t have much of a public presence. If integrated marketing automation really takes off at enterprise accounts, I suspect we’ll see Oracle and SAP pay more attention to this market, either through acquisition or enhancement of existing products.

You’ll notice I haven’t said much here about the SAS/AssetLink deal itself. That’s not due to any lack of enthusiasm: it’s just that the pairing was so obvious that it doesn’t require much explanation. It ensures that SAS’s marketing automation suite remains a viable alternative to IBM and Teradata, by giving it the scope that those other vendors possess. Of course, there are still substantial differences among the products, so buyers who are free to choose any of them will need to dig into the details and match them against their requirements. But I suspect that many companies will have a strong predisposition towards one vendor or another, depending on what other systems they have in place. In that case, there may be fewer truly competitive deals than we saw in the past, when marketing could choose its system without the rest of the company really caring all that much.

My bottom line, then, is that this deal doesn’t reshape the market, but it does clarify its structure and ensure that SAS continues to compete. My real concern is whether mid-size companies will be able to participate or integrated marketing automation will remain the preserve of enterprise marketers.

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