Page 4 - index

RESEARCH, ANALYSIS & TRENDS

Marketing automation brings

together what belongs together

The interest in personalized, automated marketing has been traditional lead management with typically
communications is undiminished and actually steadily long purchase decision phases and complex products.
increasing. Hence, providers of marketing automation On the other hand, widespread email campaigns with
solutions expand their offerings constantly with the us- large wastage have been used in the consumer sector
ers pocketing the benefits first and foremost. for a quick closure.

If you ask yourself what today’s businesses are dealing The future looks different: Marketing accompanies the
with and keeps them busy despite marketing automa- customer holistically and represents its development in
tion, just continue reading: the communication over the entire life cycle. All rele-
vant email marketing vendors have recognized this
1. Moving forward trend early and already installed marketing automation
functionalities into their products.
More and more companies realize that it is not enough
to know, for instance, only their accounting processes 3. Consolidation with mergers
accurately, but that it is time to consider their customer
acquisition and customer care processes as critical to The "big players" have also responded already by ac-
the company as well. It is more important than ever to quiring important marketing automation vendors: Ora-
give customers the best possible customer experience. cle acquired Eloqua, Salesforce bought ExactTarget
and Adobe got Neolane, with the trend continuing in
Therefore, companies need to know their processes for 2014, when looking at Oracle’s acquisition of Respon-
customer loyalty extremely well to establish, on this sys.
basis, a comprehensive customer lifecycle manage-
ment (CLM). Cutting-edge marketing automation solu- Hence, the industry agrees: Marketing automation is a
tions provide them with the means to meet the high de- major growth area for the future - and all are pushing
mands that personalized CLM expects from marketing for the Marketing Cloud.
communications.
Let’ see how it goes and what comes next! ◊
2. Bringing together what belongs together
By Daniela La Marca
The tools used in marketing in the past have only been

geared to their own business area: On one hand, there
4 Asian eMarketing October 2014 - Marketing Automation