1marketingBThe interest in personalized, automated marketing communications is undiminished and actually steadily increasing. Hence, providers of marketing automation solutions expand their offerings constantly with the users pocketing the benefits first and foremost.

If you ask yourself what today’s businesses are dealing with and keeps them busy despite marketing automation, just continue reading:

1. Moving forward

More and more companies realize that it is not enough to know, for instance, only their accounting processes accurately, but that it is time to consider their customer acquisition and customer care processes as critical to the company as well. It is more important than ever to give customers the best possible customer experience.

Therefore, companies need to know their processes for customer loyalty extremely well to establish, on this basis, a comprehensive customer lifecycle management (CLM). Cutting-edge marketing automation solutions provide them with the means to meet the high demands that personalized CLM expects from marketing communications.

2. Bringing together what belongs together

The tools used in marketing in the past have only been geared to their own business area: On one hand, there has been traditional lead management with typically long purchase decision phases and complex products. On the other hand, widespread email campaigns with large wastage have been used in the consumer sector for a quick closure.

The future looks different: Marketing accompanies the customer holistically and represents its development in the communication over the entire life cycle. All relevant email marketing vendors have recognized this trend early and already installed marketing automation functionalities into their products.

3. Consolidation with mergers

The "big players" have also responded already by acquiring important marketing automation vendors: Oracle acquired Eloqua, Salesforce bought ExactTarget and Adobe got Neolane, with the trend continuing in 2014, when looking at Oracle’s acquisition of Responsys.

Hence, the industry agrees: Marketing Automation is a major growth area for the future - and all are pushing for the Marketing Cloud. Let’ see how it goes and what comes next!

By Daniela La Marca