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Just before the new year dawned BtoB marketers put down their predictions and trends for the coming year. From what’s going to be hot in 2009 to what we may see burn as business to business marketing evolves along with the technolgy that drives it. Based on what we saw last year, one of the predictions that I would put my money on is that more marketers will look towards marketing automation and lead nurturing solutions over their current email campaigns.
Towards the earlier half of December 2008, Robert Lesser of Direct Impact Marketing wrote a really insightful post titled “The Evolution of Email for Lead Generation” based on a survey the company carried out. The findings were really interesting and showed that 86% of the responders did use email campaigns for lead generation. What was more fascinating is that other than email solutions such as Vertical Response and Constant Contact, more comprehensive lead generation and nurturing solutions such as Vtrenz , Marketo
and Eloqua were gaining ground.
Email campaigns have been a staple for b2b marketers and while its unlikely to become any less popular for quite some time to come, there is a clear interest to have a lead generation system which does more than send out emails and track responses. Lead nurturing applications can provide that automation and more comprehensive system of reaching out to prospects periodically, tracking their activity and measuring their readiness to buy not to mention continuing to nurture those who are not yet ready. Nurture was specifically built to help bridge that gap between simpler email marketing tools and much more comprehensive lead generation applications and provide a cost effective alternative to running one off email campaigns. The benefits are very significant and more marketers are becoming aware of how effective the nurturing technique is.
Only time will tell just how much of a share lead generation software will take from email tools but it will be an interesting one to track through 2009.
I think in the B2B arena, we will see marketers increasingly move towards marketing automation / lead nurturing. Email is a tremendously cost effective marketing channel and adding the extra advantages of nurturing (timing and personalization), you take a good medium and make it even better. We’re still seeing this as a space for early adopters but the market will really mature in the next couple of years.
Neil:
You’re absolutely right that marketing automation and lead nurturing are become essential tools, especially during this recession.
Determining who is ready for a sales call and nurturing those who are not (until they ARE ready) is absolutely necessary, especially in the B2B world, where so much time elapses between the initial inquiry and the sale.
It can be impossible, however, to do that manually – it’s just too much work.
The best solutions, including those of our client, Market2Lead (www.market2lead.com), not only automate the scoring and nurturing process, but also automatically modify and personalize the nurturing program based on the activities of each individual prospect.
Another important attribute of marketing automation software is the ability to determine the ROMI of each campaign, in terms of sales opportunity dollars (rather than number of web page views, for example) even without the cooperation of sales representatives. Market2Lead does this automatically, thus enabling marketers to reduce waste and bring in the most sales per marketing dollars spent.
Theres a new concept out there called Relationship Management Tele-Consulting (RMTC) thats getting some big companies interested. Its offered by an Australian company called The Database Dept.
I regsitered the Domain & Express Email Marketing services in the site express-email-marketing@low cost…