News

By Matt McKenzie, Contributing Editor

Marketing software provider Vocus announced last week that it had acquired iContact, a provider of cloud-based email and social marketing software. The $159 million purchase is expected to be of particular interest to B2B marketers working at small and midsized firms — the primary target market for both companies today.

Vocus originated as a provider of software and services to PR professionals. In recent years, however, the company expanded its cloud-based offering to include a broader suite of marketing-oriented products that embrace social media, search, and publicity tools (including its 2006 purchase of PRWeb) designed for marketers as small and midsized firms.

Aprimo reported new data-integration capabilities for Aprimo Relationship Manager (ARM), the company's suite of marketing automation tools designed to create and manage multi-channel marketing campaigns.

The new feature, called Extended Data Source (xDS), will be integrated with existing campaign management and analytics capabilities built into the ARM platform. Marketers can use xDS to pull information from third-party databases – including data from service desks, inbound and outbound call centers, and transactional systems – into a Teradata database that serves as a central data-storage repository. A marketing organization can then use this integrated data within new or existing ARM marketing campaigns.

By Matt McKenzie, Contributing Editor

What defines a successful marketing automation initiative? When it comes to lead generation, it's largely a matter of focusing on quality over quantity, according to a new study from Gleanster Research.

Gleanster's Gleansight Marketing Automation report surveyed more than 300 companies that have adopted marketing automation technology. Within that group, Gleanster analysts then identified top-performing companies, based on year-over-year improvements in three key areas: reductions in per-lead costs, increased customer acquisition rates, and increased return on marketing investments.

By comparing these top-performing organizations against others in the study, Gleanster analysts identified a number of differences in terms of why companies turn to marketing automation technology and what challenges they face along the way.

Pardot today announced new product features as part of its Winter 2012 release, including an enhanced visual editor and form builder, designed to enable marketers to streamline the creation of lead management campaigns.

"Many marketers today don't have an expert-level knowledge of web design, so we're always trying to make Pardot as user-friendly as possible for our clients," said Adam Blitzer, COO at Pardot. "That is where the wizards and pre-fabricated templates come in handy. We want to empower our users to create rockstar email templates and forms that will drive conversions, all in a few clicks. The new email and form editors are extremely flexible and, most importantly, make it easy to create marketing materials. It's important for marketers to be able to quickly produce very custom assets so that each audience segment or campaign can be targeted appropriately."

The Marketing Operations Cross Company Alliance (MOCCA) today will host nearly 50 marketing operations executives at Autodesk in San Francisco, for its third annual Executive Forum, an invitation-only event that bring together marketing operations VPs and directors for market trend discussions.

MOCCA, which presently has more than 950 members representing about 350 companies, is comprised of two chapters across the East and West coasts.