Entiera Offers Consumer Marketing Automation Software as a Service

Summary: Entiera is a sophisticated consumer marketing automation system, offered as a service and at a lower price than conventional competitors.

Entiera Insight is a marketing automation system primarily for companies that sell to consumers. I’m highlighting this because most of my recent posts have been about B2B marketing automation (demand generation) systems, and the two types of systems are quite different. This means I apply different standards to evaluate them.

My template for demand generation systems includes outbound email, landing pages, lead scoring, nurturing campaigns, and CRM integration, while my template for (consumer) marketing automation has planning, project management, content management, execution, and analysis. There is certainly some overlap: “execution” in marketing automation typically includes nearly all the demand generation functions except for landing pages and Web content management. But consumer marketing automation systems generally have more advanced database, segmentation, planning, project management and analytics. (See the paper Demand Generation vs. Marketing Automation in the Resources section of the Raab Guide site for more on this topic.)

Back to Entiera. Although their Web site is tagged as “on demand marketing automation”, they have in-house staff to build, run and analyze client databases, plus compiled consumer and business files that can provide prospect lists or enhance customer records. This makes them sound more like a “hosted” vendor than “Software-as-a-Service” (SaaS), per the distinction in my July 25 post. But I ultimately classify them as SaaS because they offer self-service versions of their data loading and analysis tools. This is unusual among consumer marketing automation vendors.

Entiera Insight includes modules for campaign management, predictive modeling, marketing planning, reporting, and database management. Content management and project management are handled within the campaign module. Thus, Entiera offers all five elements of my consumer marketing automation template.

Like most consumer marketing automation products, Enteria is primarily focused on outbound campaigns. Users construct each campaign from components including filters (list selections), paths (segment definitions), channels (messages), suppressions and deduplication rules. These are laid out in a half-tabular, half-graphical format based on columns that each contain a single type of component.

For example, the first column in a typical campaign would contain a filter to select a universe; the next column might contain several path definitions that divide the universe into segments; and the third column could contain several channel definitions, each linked to one previous path. A multi-step campaign would contain several columns of channels, with each channel linked to a channel in a previous column. The terminology and interface are unusual, but should work well after some practice.

Filters and suppressions are constructed with powerful query builder that supports multiple statements, calculated values, and different types of samples (fixed quantity or percentage of universe; random, ranked or Nth selects). Records selected in one filter are automatically excluded from subsequent filters in the same column. This is a standard approach in consumer marketing systems, but often missing in demand generation products. Users can save standard queries and reuse them across multiple campaigns – another feature that’s more common in consumer than B2B systems. Entiera is rolling out a new Adobe Flex-based interface that will have similar functionality but with a more flexible, drag-and-drop style.

The channel (message) objects are assigned channel types, start dates and end dates. These dates are separate from the start and end dates of the parent campaign, although the channel dates must fall within the campaign’s date range. Channel objects can either be triggered by a specific event or execute after a specified waiting period. Although one channel object cannot be shared across campaigns, the objects are built with offers and marketing contents (such as a specific email template) that are themselves reusable. The system captures detailed information about offers, including target audience, limits on how many times they can be used and accepted, effective dates, unit cost, and retail value. This is an impressive set of features.

Campaigns are executed outside the system, either through transferring files or by sending messages to an external API. Entiera currently uses Exact Target as its email partner, although it could work with others. Users can build and reuse standard execution templates for specific destinations. They can also manage seed lists and control groups. Each campaign can execute once or on a regular schedule. The system is designed to support real-time interactions, although no client has yet deployed it that way.

Planning in Entiera is largely at the campaign level. Campaigns can be assigned start and end dates and tagged by type, objective, category and products. This lets users analyze their plans and results across different dimensions—an important need in complex marketing programs. Users can also enter actual and estimated figures for costs, revenues, audience count, responses and conversions. They can define fixed and variable costs for a campaign and have the system calculate the total costs based on volume.

Although the vendor is working on an expanded planning system, this is already more features that many marketing automation systems provide. Project management is less impressive, currently limited to campaign-level task lists. Tasks cannot be assigned to specific individuals, although this should be added by the end of 2009.

Reporting is available through a mix of standard and custom reports. Standard reports track performance by campaign, type, and channel, including responses, conversions, revenue, costs, and return on investment. Users can also see results for different offers and creative types, as well as responder profiles based on demographic information appended from the vendor’s compiled files. Custom reports are built in Jaspersoft open source software. Users can access different views of the underlying database, allowing them to work with data that is organized and named in ways that suit their individual needs. Custom reports can be saved, shared, combined into dashboards, and distributed by email on a regular schedule.

Entiera also supports advanced analytics and database management. A graphical interface lets clients create complex data flows to import and combine multiple sources. It can do name/address matching for customer data integration and can easily incorporate the company’s compiled lists. Kxen statistical software is integrated for end-user predictive modeling and scoring.

I trust it’s clear by now that Entiera is designed to support complex marketing operations. Security is also enterprise-grade, allowing different users to access different functions, data sets and campaigns. The interface supports different languages for different users within the same installation, a subtle feature which identifies enterprise systems. Entiera also supports portals (with message boards, document repositories, Wikis, etc.) that can be open to everyone or limited to a particular group.

The cost for all this is not cheap, but still considerably below a traditional enterprise marketing automation system. Part of the difference is that Entiera includes database management, reporting, analytics, hardware and other costs that would be purchased separately with traditional marketing automation software. In addition, fees for Enteria are just not that high: a mid-size consumer marketer might pay $20,000 to $40,000 per month, which is about half the cost of a traditional on-premise system.

Entiera was founded in 2005 and released the first version of Insight in 2006. The company has about a dozen Insight clients, and many more using its other services.

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Genius.com Adds Short URLs to Capture Social Media Replies

Summary: Genius.com is adding a URL shortener that will tie social media responses into the regular flow of demand generation and lead management. It’s a small but important step towards making social media a standard business tool.

I saw a quick demonstration today of a new social media feature that Genius.com will release at the end of September. It generates short URLs that directly connect social media responses with Genius.com’s standard marketing and sales support features. Here’s the press release.

As I wrote in my February post on Genius, the system creates links to a proxy server that can track Web site visitors within the demand generation system without actually modifying the Web site. (Typically, such tracking requires a landing page built in the demand generation system or a tracking script embedded in the regular site pages.) The Genius link can either point to a landing page created by the salesperson or marketer in Genius or pass the visitor directly to the existing Web page. These links are typically placed in an email created by a salesperson or marketer. The new feature is a desktop widget that creates short versions of such links so they can be added to social media responses such as a Twitter post, Facebook page or blog comment.

This both is and isn’t a big deal. From the technical and end-user standpoint, Genius has simply made it easier to access its existing technology. That’s a very small step. But from the business standpoint, inserting Genius URLs (inevitably if painfully shortened to “GURLs”) means that links in a social media post can now be tracked like other online responses: that is, the visitor can be tied to the original source, assigned a tracking cookie, shown special messages and added to normal lead processing streams. In Genius’s case, this means that visitors can be associated with a company via their IP address, offered an online chat and scored on their activities and form responses, while salespeople can be alerted to important events, find related data or leads in JigSaw or LinkedIn, replay the Web site visit and access the full activity history.

In other words, Genius has taken a major step towards integrating social media with the standard sales and marketing toolkit. Companies must still find effective ways to monitor and respond to social media events. But once that happens, the new Genius feature will let them manage all further interactions with the same tools and processes as leads from any other source. This is major progress, and a capability that I haven’t yet seen from other demand generation or CRM vendors.

That said, there’s a business strategy question of whether this product will give Genius.com a significant competitive advantage. I suspect other vendors could easily create the short URLs themselves and distribute them on a desktop widget. It would be harder to match Genius.com's technology for letting salespeople and other non-marketing users add their own landing pages. But I suspect most companies will want social media users to rely on a standard set of company-approved links. So that particular part of Genius.com's technology may not really matter.

However, I think the real use case is people pointing to ANY page on a company Web site* that happens to answer a specific social media query. In that case, what matters is the ability to create a short URL that activates the demand generation tracking features. This fits perfectly with the Genius.com proxy server. I don't know how difficult it would be for other vendors.

It's also true that Genius.com has a general advantage in dealing with non-marketing users because its original product was aimed at salespeople. But other demand generation vendors are already working hard to extend in that direction so I don't know how long Genius.com's lead will persist.

Whether or not Genius.com gains a long-term advantage, they certainly deserve credit for being the first (so as I know) to deploy this extremely creative and valuable idea. But the great thing about competition is that if a new feature is really valuable, other vendors will copy it—and then everyone benefits. To me, that’s the best outcome of all.

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* Genius.com only lets users link to pages the user's email domain, or others site for which they have explicit permission. This prevents them from intercepting links meant for someone else.

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Why Most Consumer Marketing Automation Systems Are Not Software-as-a-Service, And When That Will Change

Summary: Consumer-oriented marketing automation systems have been slower to adopt the Software-as-a-Service model than business marketing (demand generation) systems. But this will soon change, bringing lower prices and better systems as a result.

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is now the standard model for business-to-business marketing automation (a.k.a. demand generation) systems. Any vendor who didn’t sell that way would be an oddity. But consumer-oriented marketing automation products from vendors like Unica, SAS and Teradata are still commonly sold as traditional on-premise software.

Hosted vs SaaS: What's the Difference?

Many of the consumer-oriented vendors do offer “hosted” versions of their systems. These resemble SaaS in that the software is maintained off-premise by a third party. But clients typically still purchase of a perpetual license rather than paying monthly fees, as in SaaS. More important, the hosted systems are still largely configured and managed by the vendor or a business partner such as a service bureau. To me, the essence of a SaaS system is that users can largely do this for themselves.

I’m making a distinction here between running the software on your computers, which both hosted and SaaS vendors do, and managing each client’s implementation and on-going data maintenance. Hosted vendors do this for their clients but SaaS clients do for themselves. Although this distinction may be fuzzy in some cases, I still think it's important.

There are also technical distinctions that identify SaaS systems, such as whether one system serves multiple customers ("multi-tenancy"). Some people would argue that true SaaS systems are by definition multi-tenant and hosted systems are not. Mostly I’d agree, except that I can think of several conventional systems with versions that a service bureau can install to support multiple clients. Those are multi-tenant by any reasonable definition, but they’re managed by the vendor in the way that SaaS software (as I conceive it) is not. Multi-tenancy itself comes in several versions, depending on whether the hardware, software, and/or the database instance are shared. These have important technical and cost implications, but they aren't relevant to this post..

Why Consumer Marketing Systems Have Lagged in SaaS Adoption

What caused the divergence between consumer and business marketing systems? Much has to do with timing: the major consumer-oriented products were developed when on-premise software was the standard, and the large organizations who are their major customers have been relatively slow to accept SaaS in general. By contrast, the demand generation systems are newer and are sold to smaller companies, which have been early adopters of SaaS.

In addition, consumer marketers tend to manage the entire customer relationship, which requires integration with other corporate systems such as billing and customer service. Until recently, few SaaS vendors could handle such integration effectively. Business marketers generally limit their focus to lead generation and nurturing, which at most requires light synchronization with sales.

Consumer marketing databases also generally have more data feeds and more complex update processes than business marketing systems, again because the consumer systems are managing existing customers as well as leads. This makes them harder for consumer marketers to run without assistance, and thus less suited to the self-service-based SaaS approach. Yet even this is changing, as SaaS tools deliver greater power to non-technical users. For example, SaaS-based business intelligence vendors like Birst and Autometrics offer data integration capabilities that could form the basis for building a marketing system. The increasing openness of SaaS products also makes it easier for them to call on external data integration services.

In short, there’s nothing inherent in consumer marketing that prevents use of the SaaS model. The early obstacles that led to quicker adoption by business marketers are rapidly falling. We can expect the major consumer marketing automation vendors to continue to evolve their hosted offerings towards a true SaaS approach. We can also expect new entrants that are SaaS-based from the start, such as Neolane and Entiera (which I plan to review next week). And we’ll probably see marketing capabilities added by SaaS vendors in related industries such as email services (early example: Silverpop’s acquisition of Vtrenz, now Engage B2B) and Web content management (see my reviews of Marqui and SiteCore).

SaaS Systems Will Bring Lower Costs and Better Products

This can only be good news for consumer marketers. Pricing of conventional consumer marketing automation systems has remained stubbornly high in recent years. This is in part because of limited competition, but also because the bulk of the ownership cost is in the labor to deploy and maintain the systems. High labor costs mean that lower software prices would do little to encourage sales, since the buyer’s total expense would remain nearly the same.

By contrast, business marketers have seen ever-lower prices and rapid innovation as a multitude of SaaS-based vendors enter the field. These systems take very little labor to deploy, since that’s inherent to the SaaS model. In fact, implementation fees have in many cases fallen to zero, making the software fee itself the main expense. (The user’s own labor is another cost, but it’s largely hidden and difficult to estimate in advance; it therefore plays a minor role in the purchase decision.) The result is heavy competitive pressure to cut software prices, as vendors scramble to gain enough customers to cover their (largely) fixed costs.

SaaS-based consumer marketing automation systems have fundamentally similar economics, so we can expect similar results: new entrants able to deploy their systems at lower total cost than conventional software (because users do more of the work) will reduce their prices to achieve an adequately-large customer base.

The process will play out over several years as the SaaS based systems evolve to support more sophisticated marketing and greater end-user self-service. This means the new systems will start in the less-demanding lower and middle segments of the market and eventually work up to the largest marketing automation deployments. Still, the trend is clear and, so far as I can tell, quite inevitable.

It’s a great time to be a marketer.

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Simple Usability Studies Are Still Worthwhile

Summary: Web usability guru Jakob Nielsen has proven that simple usability tests are highly effective. Marketing automation vendors should take heed. Come to think of it, so should marketers.

A vendor very proudly showed me their new Adobe Flex-based user interface the other day. Flex is a “rich Internet application” technology, meaning it gives you drag-and-drop, pop-up windows, and other features of a desktop graphical user interface. I found the new interface a bit confusing, so I asked whether the vendor had done any usability testing. He said they hadn’t done anything formal, because of the cost, but had shown it to many current users who were very enthusiastic about the change. Fair enough.

By coincidence, a random Twitter post this morning pointed me to the blog of Web usability guru Jakob Nielsen. The specific post had to do with a study of mobile phone usability, which you won’t be surprised to find is dismal. But what particularly struck me was the relative simplicity of Nielsen’s methods – the study involved just a few dozen users doing selected tasks and its primary metric was the straightforward one of success rate. (I don’t mean to suggest the study itself is simple – the full report runs 132 pages and costs $198.)

Poking a bit more around Nielsen’s blog and Web site, I saw that simple usability studies are a recurring theme. For example, he showed back in 2000 Why You Only Need to Test with Five Users and made a more recent case for Fast, Cheap, and Good testing methods. Indeed, yet another post on Guesses vs. Data as Basis for Design Recommendations demonstrates that testing even two users is better than guessing.

Now, it’s true that Nielsen is measuring Web site usability, which is considerably less complicated than usability for a software application such as a marketing automation system. But I still think his point and his methods are valid: even a little usability testing goes a long way to help designers make the right choices. It’s something I hope more vendors will keep in mind.

Of course, Nielsen's work is even more directly applicable to the landing pages and other Web site components that marketers construct for their own use. Most marketers don't test enough in general, so you can see usability testing as just one example of the larger problem. But usability testing methods are different enough from standard marketing tests to think about them separately. The fact that they can be done very simply and before a page or site is launched actually means there is less reason not to do them, and greater value when you do.

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Jesubi Doubles Sales Prospecting Efficiency

Summary: Jesubi is designed to make sales prospecting as efficient as possible. It shows how specialized software can be much better at one function than general purpose systems. You may not want to replace your CRM system with Jesubi, but dedicated prospecting teams should take a close look.

The latest stop on my little tour of not-really-demand-generation systems is Jesubi. The flash show when you enter the company’s Web site could easily be mistaken for a demand generation product – it lists campaign workflow, list segmentation, email templates, Salesforce.com integration and dynamic reporting. Only a couple of other items hint that this is really a product for sales departments: manage calling queues, track appointment quality and record call history.

Once the flash has run its mercifully-brief course, a more concrete promise appears in delightfully large type: “DOUBLE YOUR SALESFORCE DON”T DOUBLE YOUR COSTS”. Except, um, this message still doesn’t quite clarify what they’re selling. I would have guessed recruiting services or maybe offshore outsourcing. But the succeeding text finally ends any confusion:

“Jesubi is for companies that:

• Have a sales team
• Need to increase prospecting activities per hour
• Need real-time visibility by rep, campaign, industry
• Want to proactively reach their market place
• Want to generate and qualify more leads
• Need to measure response rates of messages”

That’s a lot of words, but you had me at “increase prospecting activities per hour”.

Indeed, what impressed me about Jesubi was its very tight focus on prospecting productivity. The system was originally developed for its own use by outsourced appointment generation vendor LeadJen. As Jesubi president Bill Johnson tells the story, LeadJen originally worked directly with its clients’ CRM systems but found they were poorly suited for systematic prospecting. Jesubi was the result, and more than doubled LeadJen’s touches per hour when it was introduced in 2007.

Another way to look at it: Johnson showed me that it took 12 clicks to log an email in Salesforce.com, compared with about three clicks in Jesubi. Multiply that savings by hundreds of contacts per day and you’re talking real value.

Everything else about Jesubi needs to be understood in this context of inside sales productivity. Yes, it does list segmentation, emails and multi-step campaigns, but these are not the outbound email blasts or unattended lead nurturing campaigns of a conventional demand generation system. Rather, the emails exist largely to support telephone calls, either in advance or as follow-up, and the campaign steps are largely tasks for sales people.

The real attention has gone into scheduling and recording one-on-one interactions. For example, Jesubi makes it easy to capture referrals and link them back to the original contact, so the system can accurately report on the value generated by each name. Building these links is difficult in most CRM software and virtually impossible in marketing automation systems.

System reports are similarly tailored to tracking prospecting results. Jesubi provides detailed statistics on the outcomes of each contact within a campaign, as well as highlighting results for each sales person. The goal is to help managers understand which activities and which workers are most productive, so they can quickly correct problems and improve results.

Jesubi does provide standard contact management functions, such as call notes, opportunity tracking, and Microsoft Outlook integration. Johnson said about 40% of Jesubi clients use it as their primary CRM system, while the balance integrate it with Salesforce.com or another CRM tool. Automated synchronization is available for Salesforce.com using their standard APIs.

Jesubi is offered as a service, with pricing starting at $100 per user per month. Implementation adds $1,500 to $5,000 depending on complexity. Much of the effort is dedicated to setting up custom categories for campaign activities and outcomes so the system runs as smoothly as possible. Jesubi was made commercially available early this year and currently has about 35 clients averaging about ten users each.

Although I’ve described Jesubi as a sales system, Johnson points out that this type of prospecting is sometimes the responsibility of marketing. This makes Jesubi yet another example of the much-discussed blurring between the boundaries of marketing and sales. It’s also an great example of the true meaning of usability – a product that is very well suited for a particular purpose, even though its capabilities for other tasks are limited. Just thought I’d point that out.

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Active Conversion Offers Strong Lead Management and Leaves Out the Rest

Summary: Active Conversion helps marketing and sales departments make the best use of leads they’ve generated outside the system. That's fewer functions than traditional demand generation, but if those are the functions you need, who cares?

The classic demand generation cycle starts with an outbound email campaign, captures replies on a landing page, scores the responses, and then sends qualified leads to a sales automation system and keeps the others for more nurturing. These functions, plus supporting features for database management, content management, sales system synchronization, and reporting, form a basic template for measuring demand generation software. (For a more detailed description of this cycle, see Introduction to Demand Generation Systems in the Resources section of the Raab Guide. Registration is no longer required.)

But while this cycle is simple, the actual boundaries of business marketing are not so clearly marked. Leads can enter from channels other than email. Information can come from sources beyond the lead itself. Sales and marketing activities are increasingly intermingled, and sales people increasingly work with directly with marketing systems.

Adding these items to an evaluation template is not especially difficult. But a longer list of options creates more potential combinations. This makes it harder to define any particular combination as “standard”.

That’s just my problem as an analyst. From your perspective as a marketer, having more combinations available makes it more that someone will field a configuration closely tailored to your needs. So, on balance, more options is good news.

For example, take Active Conversion. As an outgrowth of search engine marketing specialist FoundPages, the system naturally incorporates strong features for tracking Google AdWords campaigns, calculating return on investment, and measuring visitors’ Web activities. But it only recently added even simple landing pages and Web forms, and still has limited lead scoring, email and nurturing features. Yet some other features are fairly advanced: Active Conversion can identify anonymous Web site visitors through reverse IP lookup, find contact names for those companies in JigSaw, and either send the data to Salesforce.com or let sales people access it withing Active Conversion itself.

This particular constellation of features is far from random. It’s designed to address a specific business need: helping small to mid-size businesses use leads generated by their inbound marketing programs.

Outbound email campaigns are largely irrelevant to this, so ActiveConversion doesn’t even offer email services. Rather, it allows users to email provider VerticalResponse or a different service of their choice. This keeps down the cost of ActiveConversion’s operations and therefore its prices, although of course marketers will have to pay someone else for their emails.

The system does create emails for multi-step lead nurturing campaigns, although these are still sent by the external email serivce. Even here, selections can only be based on a handful of tracked Web behaviors and whatever custom tags the user has set up in Web forms. These tags are needed even for attributes such as company size or buying intentions, since the standard lead database – which cannot be changed – stores only contact name, company, title and email address. ActiveConversion assumes that other attributes will be stored in the external email system or Salesforce.com, and any selections using those attributes will be done in those systems.

The nurturing campaigns themselves are also quite simple. Users can define an initial list, either imported from an external system or selected from the Active Conversion database. They then define one or more emails that are scheduled either for a specified date or relative to when a visitor submits a specified Web form. There is no additional campaign logic, so everyone who starts a campaign will receive the entire sequence of messages unless a user manually removes them from the initial list.

Filling out a Web form may also contribute to lead scoring. Scores are based on a handful of Web activities: return Web visits, numbers of pages viewed, clicking on an email, reaching a "goal" Web page (there can be more than one), and making a download. Each of these is assigned a point value. The user then sets the point totals that define three lead ranks (low, medium and high), the minimum rank for a "qualified" lead, and the minimum rank that will send the lead to Salesforce.com. This is vastly simpler than lead scoring and transmission rules in most demand generation systems, but Active Conversion says its clients don't want anything more.

What clients do care about is helping their sales people: so Active Conversion features in that area are pretty much state-of-the-art. I’ve already mentioned IP-based visitor identification and JigSaw integration. The system can also route new leads to appropriate sales reps based on territory assignments and custom tags; alert the assigned rep when a targeted lead makes a return site visit; let the sales rep view detailed Web activity logs, either within Salesforce.com or Active Conversion’s own SalesView application; and let reps assign leads to Active Conversion nurture campaigns. Sales reps can also receive regular reports via email on activities by prospects, qualified leads, and targeted companies.

In short, what we have here is the set of demand generation features that are needed for lead management, and very little else. If that happens to be what you need, Active Conversion is worth a look.

Active Conversion is offered as a service with prices based primarily on Web traffic. Rates start at $250 per month for up to 1,500 unique visitors, and are $500 to $600 for 10,000 to 20,000 visitors. This is considerably lower than most demand generation products, although it doesn’t include email transmission. Integration with Salesforce.com and Microsoft Outlook email each add $50 per month, while SalesView costs about $20 per user per month depending on the number of sales reps.

The system was released in 2007 and is currently installed on nearly 200 Web sites, spread among a smaller number of clients.

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Right On Interactive's 5Buckets Simplifies Multi-Channel Messaging

Summary: Right On Interactive's 5Buckets connects lists from external customer management systems with many types of output vendors (email, print, fax, text message, automated voice). It's a low-cost, easy-to-use alternative to more powerful marketing automation systems for companies who don't need other marketing automation features.

Last Wednesday’s revised ranking of demand generation vendors by Web traffic reminded me that I never published notes from a conversation I had several months ago with Right On Interactive, developer of the 5Buckets marketing automation software. Now is a good time to remedy that.

5Buckets isn’t actually a demand generation system, at least according to my usual definition. Rather, it matches the functions of a traditional campaign manager: accept inputs from external sources (CRM, Web sites, surveys, transactions), create lists from those sources, and send the lists to external systems for delivery. It can also combine its inputs into a persistent marketing database, but that's optional. Most clients just select directly from the external systems instead.

This is a much narrower scope than conventional demand generation systems: no email blasts, no landing pages (although the system does generate online forms), no content management, no lead scoring, and limited CRM integration. There's no query builder or "fuzzy matching" to identify records in different systems that relate to the same customer. The system does maintain a cross reference table to link records where different keys from different systems are known to refer to the same individual. The company plans to expand some of these database-related features by the end of this year.

On the other hand, unlike traditional demand generation systems, 5Buckets includes promotions to existing customers as well as sales prospects. By my definitions (see Demand Generation vs Marketing Automation on the Raab Guide Web site), this makes 5Buckets a type of marketing automation system.

Of course, the labels matter less than what the system does. The core feature of 5Buckets is its ability to run campaigns that direct output to different media. Campaigns can be triggered manually or run automatically on a regular schedule. They pull data from external lists and can execute actions including: send a message (email, voice mail, print, fax, post cards, mobile text); update Salesforce.com (create a task, send an email through Salesforce.com, update Salesforce.com bounce history); or get a record count.

A scheduled campaign can contain multiple steps, each with its own list (or “bucket”) and action. The lists are created in the source systems, independently of 5Buckets, and then imported. Existing integrations are available for Salesforce.com, Exact Target, Avectra netForum (association membership), and RealPage (property management). The system can also execute SQL queries. Although the lists are defined using the source system's own selection tools, 5Buckets’ itself does let users include or exclude one bucket from another. This makes it easier for records in a campaign to flow from one bucket to the next. But time intervals between steps must still be built into the external selection rules. Additional selection capabilities are also planned by year-end.

5Buckets hasn't made list selection a priority because it assumes that source systems can already do it. Instead, it has focused on making it simple to send messages in any channel. The vendor has standard connectors for ExactTarget, Salesforce.com and Delivra email; Vontoo voice messaging; PremiereGlobal fax and fax mailmerge; XpressMessages postcards and sales letters; MessageBuzz text messaging and ConnectiveMobile voice and text messages. Most marketers would find it very difficult to run on-going campaigns through so many channels without 5Buckets or the equivalent.

Pricing is also intended to make things simple. 5Buckets costs $6,000 to $12,000 per year depending on the number of schedules and connections. This is much less than conventional marketing automation systems like Unica or Neolane. Although some demand generation systems are in a similar range (see my ever-popular post Low Cost Systems for Demand Generation ), they don’t have 5Buckets’ prebuilt connectors.

Indeed, Right On Interactive VP Marketing Richard Cunningham says he considers 5Buckets to be complementary rather than competitive with traditional marketing automation systems. I’m not so sure, but do suspect 5Buckets will be attractive to marketers who want to automate multi-channel campaigns without other marketing automation functions. Since 5Buckets itself will probably expand its features over time, automated campaigns are a good place to start.

5Buckets was introduced in early 2008 and currently has about 30 implementations shared by about 300 organizations. (The difference is that several implementations are used by multiple entities, such as franchisees and business association members.) Right On Interactive is a marketing services agency but is shifting its focus towards software: of the 5Buckets implementations, only five to ten also use unrelated Right On marketing services.

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