Silverpop unveiled new automated lead nurturing and testing capabilities for CoreMotives, an email marketing and markeing automation solution that Silverpop acquired in early 2012.

The company also reported that revenues for CoreMotives are up 54% since the acquisition and that the solution has more than 2,000 implementations in 45 countries.

All types of businesses use email as a way to establish ongoing dialogue with customers and prospects. But crafting effective email marketing campaigns requires a successful blend of art and science.

Through an analysis of more than 260 million emails delivered across 540 campaigns, Retention Science, a retention marketing solution provider, discovered that email subject lines that are between six and 10 words perform the best with a 21% open rate. Contrary to this finding, the majority (52%) of emails today have 11- to 15-word subject lines, and in turn, only garner a 14% open rate. Campaigns studied by Retention Science involved retailers in specialty goods, apparel, baby products, flash sales, whose and nutritional supplements, among others.

The sales and marketing relationship once focused on the quality of the leads being generated by marketing. Now,  attention is shifting to the quality and availability of content.

Aligning sales processes, content and resources specifically to buyer needs is critical to improving win rates. However, more than half (53%) say their selling processes and content are only somewhat or not aligned to the buyer stages, according to the recently released annual Sales Execution Trends survey from Qvidian.

While it has only been a few weeks since CallidusCloud acquired LeadRocket, the company has ambitious plans to integrate the social engagement and sales front-end of the tool with its marketing automation platform.

Demand Gen Report recently caught up with Giles House, CMO of CallidusCloud, who said the company expects to unveil the integration at its CallidusCloud Connections 2014 users’ conference in Las Vegas May 12-14, 2014.

Brent Adamson, Co-Author of the best-selling book, The Challenger Sale, will deliver the keynote address at its third annual B2B Content2Conversion Conference, being held May 6-7 in New York.

In his keynote, Adamson will address how the Challenger Selling approach has been successfully adopted by hundreds of companies worldwide. He will also introduce the new Challenger Marketing framework now being adopted by organizations to complement the new sales approach.

Oracle has acquired BlueKai, a cloud-based Big Data platform that enables companies to personalize online, offline and mobile marketing campaigns. This shores up the personalization capabilities of Oracle’s Marketing Cloud and eases the integration of various customer databases, according to industry observers.

"Marketers have needed to unify web advertising audiences with traditional customer databases, and that is precisely what this will do," David M. Raab, Principal, Raab Associates, told Demand Gen Report. “A solid data foundation has been the missing piece in most companies’ marketing architecture and this will enable Oracle to fill that gap.”

CallidusCloud, a provider of cloud-based sales and marketing software, announced a new partnership with DocuSign designed to speed up the all-important contract signing process.

The DocuSign Cloud Partner Program will offer CallidusCloud the ability to receive legally signed documents in minutes and ease the document management process, according to executives for both companies.

DivvyHQ, vendor of a cloud-based, content planning and production workflow tool, is rolling out a private beta version of its new platform, DivvyHQ 2.0. More than a year in development, the latest version is designed to help marketers and content producers organize and execute demanding, complicated and content-centric marketing initiatives.

DivvyHQ 2.0 will feature a completely redesigned, touch/mobile-friendly interface, as well as direct publishing functionality to many of the most popular web and social media channels.