Silverpop Marries Best Of BtoB & BtoC Marketing With Launch Of New Platform
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Catering to the BtoB and BtoC marketing arenas, Silverpop recently announced the launch of a new digital marketing platform designed to combine email-marketing tools with its top-ranked marketing automation and lead management applications.
“For some time now, I felt that the solutions supporting BtoC and BtoB marketers should come together into a single, scalable platform that makes the unique tools of each marketing discipline available to all, and our clients have overwhelmingly agreed,” said Bill Nussey, CEO of Silverpop.
“The reason we did this is that the two respective audiences of marketers were asking us heavily to have the features that the other group of marketers had. Lead generation managers wanted some of the advanced email capabilities. The traditional, high volume email marketers wanted some of the scoring and automation capabilities from the BtoB product.”
The launch of Silverpop Engage 8 works was supported by the findings of a recent Silverpop survey, which polled more than 1,800 BtoC and BtoB marketers. When asked what their top challenges are in the coming year, both groups said finding more prospective customers, up-selling or cross-selling to the customer base, improving analytics to strengthen campaigns and better leveraging new marketing channels are problems they face.
Nussey said BtoB marketing tools are equally valuable to BtoC marketers, like CRM integration and marketing automation. Moreover, BtoC marketers are leveraging the potential of time-based behavioral targeting to optimize email response rates.
Other features included in the Silverpop Engage 8 include:
- Email Marketing tools to create and automate campaigns designed to drive conversions and more deeply engage both current and prospective customers.
- Lead Management capabilities designed to help marketers gain prospect insight at every stage of the buying cycle. BtoC and BtoB marketers supporting a direct sales force will know exactly when a lead has been qualified by marketing, accepted by sales and converted.
- Share-to-Social technology designed to enables email recipients to share messages on their favorite social sites and provides valuable insight and reporting data on recipient sharing activity.
- Data and List Management solutions designed to import, manage and leverage the myriad marketing data needed to execute multi-channel campaigns.
- For BtoC or BtoB marketers supporting a sales force, Lead and Contact Scoring routes prospective customers identified as ready to buy to sales and moves those not yet ready to purchase into automated nurturing programs.
- Nurture campaigns designed to monitor buyer behavior and serve up timely and relevant content, keeping a brand top of mind and helping move buyers toward a purchase.
- CRM and Web Analytics integration leverages point-and-click integration between Silverpop Engage, Salesforce.com, Web analytics providers and virtually any other application, giving marketers the power to improve relevance and boost marketing results.
- Surveys to gather deeper customer insight and broader customer attributes that can help drive ROI and increase the relevance of communications.
“Automation is the only way that BtoB and BtoC marketers can get the sophistication without doubling a staff,” Nussey said. “Without automation staff can’t scale, so by adding automation, and for the first time in any market, making it accessible, that automation will allow marketers who aren’t technicians to create really sophisticated automated campaigns, report and understand them.”
Nussey added that BtoB marketers could use these automated features for nurturing, while BtoC marketers can use the same tools for education campaigns and multi-step buying campaigns.