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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 lookout the download free , 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.