Demand Generation

The growing availability of spam-reporting tools is having a major – and negative – impact on marketing email effectiveness, according to a recent study conducted by ReturnPath.

The company's Email Intelligence Report found that marketers account for 70% of all "this is spam" complaints and 60% of all spam-trap hits. Over the past year, according to ReturnPath, marketers' inbox placement rates fell by about 5% – a continuation of what is describes as a decade-long "trend of stagnant inbox placement rates."

Marketing automation vendor Eloqua is coming off a busy few months. In August, the company issued its IPO; the stock, which went public at $11.50 a share, currently trades around $19. Last week, Eloqua followed up with its biggest user conference to date, including more than 1,500 customers and partners.

Demand Gen Report sat down with Eloqua CEO Joe Payne last Thursday for the following interview. We covered a lot of ground, including three topics that we'll share here today: Eloqua's take on mobile technology, the company's move towards industry-vertical solutions, and its approach to the SMB market.

SalesFUSION, a provider of integrated marketing and sales solutions, has announced a partnership with WebAttract, a webinar demand creation and management consultancy. In addition, SalesFUSION has released FUSIONcast, a web campaign management platform within the SalesFUSION event management platform.

FUSIONcast connects to the GoToWebinar and Webex webinar platforms. It enables users to build, track and manage webinar lead generation campaigns, while connecting webinar metrics to their CRM systems. 

As the marketing automation market matures, it makes sense for vendors to focus more heavily on specialized, industry-specific offerings. That's exactly what Eloqua is doing with its just-released Eloqua Asset Management solution.

Eloqua Asset Management, according to the company, is designed to help "mutual fund wholesalers, institutional asset managers, and marketers within the financial services sector to strengthen relationships while reducing overall marketing costs." The company also claims that its offering is the first of its type to target asset management marketers.

It's no secret that marketing automation is a high-growth industry. Yet it's also clear that many B2B marketers struggle to achieve the ROI they expected to get from their marketing automation investments: According to an often-cited 2011 Focus Research study, half of all companies say they haven't realized the full value of their marketing automation investments.

What separates the successful marketing automation users from the pack? According to many experts, it often boils down to a matter of timing – or, rather, of cadence.

"Cadence is commonly confused with frequency" in marketing campaigns, said Jessica Meher, Head of Enterprise Marketing at HubSpot. "Frequency is simply how many times emails are sent, whereas cadence is the 'pattern' of email – it includes the number of emails sent, the spacing between emails, the content sent, and the audience receiving the email."