The Evolution of Marketing Automation

While aiming to promote products and services successfully in the market, businesses had realized the importance of adopting marketing strategies early on. Due to the intense competition, marketing strategies got infused with the technological innovations in order to evolve out as the modern marketing, which is now embedded in the customer’s lives and affecting it at a rapid pace.Fortunately, from radio to internet and smart-phones, nowadays technology has revolutionized the ways marketers can reach to their potential customers. But, back then in the late 50′s, with almost no effective marketing channel, companies were finding it challenging to approach a huge customer base.This is how automation technology came into existence. It has traced its origins back from a Customer Relationship Management or CRM that came out of Rolodexes and a pack of business cards. It acted as a rescuer for the companies who were endeavoring to maintain their employees and client’s records into a central knowledge group. But, in no course of time, it became the fundamental business element and started finding its applications in professional business services as well.During the late 1980s, CRM platforms had gained more power in terms of customer support servicing, sales management, and forecasting. But, the high price tag kept it confined to few multinational corporations.In 1999, Mark Benioff, the founder of Salesforce, invented the Monthly Licence (MLC) fee model, with aiming to offer cost-effective and agile business model, that further introduced SaaS or Software as a Service. And in contrast, this technology evolved out as an amalgam of email capability, web analytics, and the Marketing Resource Management (MRM). With the advent of the internet, marketers were seeking potential ways to reach their customers. The pioneer of this space Eloqua came in 1999 and developed a product, later renowned as automated marketing service in 2003.Soon, the success of this trend led to the arrival of more players in the market such as Pardot, HubSpot, WhatsNexx etc, and industry started gaining momentum while shifting marketing automation services to cloud platforms.By 2008, new platforms such as HubSpot, Act-On, ruled the market, and the advent of social media marketing, content management, search engine optimization made marketers incorporating a variety of automation tools.In the period 2013-2014, the automation industry witnessed a huge growth financially through acquisitions when a giant marketing software company ExactTarget acquired a marketing automation company Pardot for $95.5 million and in turn, salesforce.com spent $2.5 billion to acquire ExactTarget, This is recorded as its largest acquisition ever.I found people wondering if CRM and marketing automation co-exists. In fact, few consider the later as a subset of the CRM industry which follows one of the marketing laws suggested by Al Ries and Jack Trout. To clarify, CRM is sales focused software while the other is user-centric software that completely focuses on marketing strategy. Where a CRM manages company’s interactions with their customers, a automation software streamlines company’s marketing tasks, and work-flows. However, these two, together, go hands in hand and reinforce company’s insights and efficiencies. A good CRM-marketing automation integration unleashes an opportunity to handle data management and strategies marketing plans.It can filter relevant data and required fields to standardize tagging and data, and ideal processes. Also, it can run auto-cleaning processes to clean the dumped data in a CRM system. Businesses utilizing automation software have witnessed an incredible growth of 451% in qualified leads and 14.5% in sales productivity as well as 12.2% marketing overhead reduction. We can conclude by saying that the future of marketing completely belongs to Marketing Automation.

Ecommerce Solutions: Hot Trends in the Market

Every year the online buyers are increasing. This uprising trend of ecommerce serves as an opportunity to generate maximum profit and on the other side it can be a final blow for the brick and mortar enterprises. Certain trends are discussed in this article which will provide an insight to the online retailers that will enable them to carry on the business among the uncertain paths of the web retailing.Some of these trends are as follows: -a. Unique Products: – Ecommerce Solutions include all the best ecommerce platforms such as magento. Unique Products refer to antiques, artworks, paintings and more that are difficult to find somewhere else. The sale of such products depends on the individual’s creativity as well as the brand and its reputation. It is the quality that creates demand of such products.b. Arbitrators’ providing ecommerce sites: – Online traders can directly tie up with the firms who provide an ecommerce site setup as well as its maintenance to boost the business. Some of these third parties are Shopify and Volusion.c. Mom & Pop effect: – The online mom & pop shops have a less growth due to increase in firm competition from chain stores. Yet, the online traders dealing with digital goods do have a success. This mom and pop advantage helps in recognition of the shop more than the customer loyalty. According to the CEO of Tactic Knowledge, smaller shops aren’t bothered with outdated organizational structures that divide an enterprise by different modes such as store, catalogue or digital.Some companies provide these moms and pops of the internet with the tools to emulate with huge ones. Small and medium business enterprises get an advantage from such supportive firms.d. Remarketing: – With a view to stand out among the competitors, every business may be small or huge has to be creative. Ecommerce has come up with new technique called Remarketing. This technique can be used in any of the ecommerce platforms say Magento development, X commerce development, eBay solutions, Zen cart development are a few. Remarketing refers to using multiple touches to develop prolonged interest in the product.When visiting any ecommerce site, if it reflects the advertisements that match your interest, then the site has used remarketing.Companies can easily follow those customers who just visit the website and exit without making any purchase. This can be possible through remarketing where ads and offers appear on the web page that the visitor is viewing.However, these creepy ads can irritate the visitors.e. Mobile: A very popular device almost everyone’s favourite which if has the internet connection can assist the users to do online shopping. Ecommerce sites should be compatible with mobile device as these devices are most preferred by people to access internet. Ecommerce websites with streamlined mobile apps get more sales. Facts reveal that average transaction price from mobile sales is 12% more as compared to sales generated from computer desktop based sales.Physical stores cannot get this advantage as customers visit the store and review the prices then the search the same product on their mobile device to get a better option.These trends can shift as per the time as ecommerce is a field that keeps evolving and advancing at regular intervals. The main thing that remains steady in the ecommerce field is to develop loyal customers with better quality customer service. To be at the top of ecommerce trends serves as an added advantage to the business when communicating with the clients.Hiring ecommerce developers from Zesttech can also ease the task of the business owners and they can obtain ecommerce services at a nominal cost.

The Seven Deadly Sins of Advertising

Sin No. 1And in many ways this is the biggest sin of them all!
The total lack of genuine accountability and effectiveness. More and more evidence is emerging that there is ample justification for questioning a major advertising pretension that it does, indeed, work at all!The repetitious cry and certain belief that “creativity” is the answer to all marketing problems – it isn’t and frankly never really has been.It’s a given that all human knowledge is provisional but it is also incremental, the sum of what we know to day is far greater than thirty years ago – with, possibly, the sole exception of marketing/advertising. Nothing new has been added to the armory of advertising…no debate is taking place as to where to go next! Perhaps that is because there is no place else to go!However to day it is still an article of faith among advertising people that advertising will not change because “it works”!Facing the painful truth is the first essential step in devising a sensible strategy for the perpetuation of advertising. And the painful truth is “Advertising no longer works”!Sin No 2.Is it because that, for financial reasons, you do not want to address the problem of clutter…because it is a huge and growing problem which contributes to the declining effectiveness of all advertising.
The poor old customer, or in advertising speak, Consumer, does not want to take delivery of even more messages, after all they do not appear to be taking much notice of the messages that exist already!
The advertising world has dehumanised and depersonalised the process of communication and very little evidence of consideration of the consumer exists.Sin No.3You just don’t listen, whenever some well meaning person dares to question the “Advertising Works” article of faith, down comes a torrent of abuse, and the fact is it can only be a torrent of abuse because you do not have a solid fact to support your spurious claims. Listen to your Clients:
As one large Client recently explained: “In to day’s marketing landscape, building a brand is about a whole lot more than advertising. An advertising agency alone cannot deliver everything we need – even though agencies may claim to deliver this, it’s a myth”.
Or even listen to people closer to home:
Derek Morris, Chairman and chief executive of ZenithOptimedia attended “Media 360 Conference” in Wales. In a long letter in MediaWeek, he said, among other things, “But what are the lessons to bring home from South Wales? What should we actually do? And there, in the final session, reality caught up when the Client told us to “Change before you are dead”.Sin No.4If you don’t want to listen then for Heavens sake forget the glorious past.
Your current model of advertising was developed in the Sixties when product choice was much more limited and people were easier to stereotype into categories like income, sex and class. It was much easier for advertisers to target people and bombard them with sales messages.Today’s marketplace is different and all the old certainties are gone. To be effective in your communications it is sound advice to start with the premise that you know nothing about the people that you believe your product is aimed at.You all have become too parochial, too introspective, too convinced by your on hyperbole.Sin No.5Stop this insane rush onto Web 2.0 it is not a medium intended for mass advertising, and, as has been recently established, “Users became more or less desensitised to the Advertising”That was recently said of advertising on social networking sites.Clients are experiencing fast diminishing returns on their social networking ad investments.Clients are expressing disillusionment.Web marketers, ranging from Google at the apex of the ad triangle to the mass of small companies are showering social-networking sites with ad dollars without getting their hoped-for returns.The question is not “Has the advertising model broken”? The question now is “What are we going to replace it with”?The complacency of the IPA is overwhelming, they appear not to be doing anything to answer the increasingly strident complaints.Complaints such as, clutter, and here the irony is that advertising agencies appear to think that placing more advertisements is the way to solve clutter!Complaints such as lack of accountability, to day, and after fifty years of extensive advertising, there are no reliable figures available on audience measurements.And most certainly there are no effective studies as to the effectiveness of advertising…on sales…. As a return on ROI…and much more.To day it is more important that a close investigation as to the suitability of advertising on Web 2.0 be undertaken instead of rushing onto the Net and ignoring all the signs. These are that it is a highly unsuitable medium for advertising.After all it is “The Wild West” where anything goes!Sin No.6Your inability to move very rapidly into the post-advertising mindset is caused by you being unable to recognise Sins 1 through 5 above.Astonishingly, a sizeable percentage of marketers and marketing-service leaders seem mired in the advertising mind-set.The Cannes Lions Festival still celebrates ads-a position, one suspects, roughly equivalent to the Cannes Film Festival honouring silents. The One Show held two concurrent programmes this year-one for conventional ads, another for online. (One wonders who in this mix felt like a second-class citizen).In a transparent world, the power of an “ad campaign” to change minds is strictly limited, and getting more so every day. It’s way past time for the industry’s leaders to get naked and reinvent advertising…it they can!Sin No.7Your complete and utter lack of understanding of the word “communication” together with a lack of appreciation as to what can, and does, stifle effective communication.All advertising is a form of learning whereby the advertiser is asking people to change their behaviour after learning the benefits of the products or services on offer. However, we all tend to filter out information, which we do not want to hear. This clearly alters the effectiveness of conventional advertising in quite a dramatic way.The final purchase decision is invariably a compromise and this leads to a certain amount of anxiety; the worry that perhaps the decision was not the best or the right one. In order to minimise this anxiety the purchaser seeks to reinforce their choice and begins to take more notice of their chosen product’s marketing communications.Due to a lack of understanding of the communication process we have created a media society during the past 40 or 50 years, where the whole process has been de-humanised.There is now an extraordinary reduction in interaction because conventional advertising and marketing have become a one-way practice whereby information is disseminated in a passive form.So what are you going to do about this?