For years marketers have taken prescribed actions immediately upon observing particular triggers, in most cases some form of customer engagement sort of a phone call, purchase or direct mail inquiry. Of course, before the general public introduction of the internet these kind of automatically approved activities took some time to reach the customer often weeks or more as we were conditioned to “permit 6-8 weeks for delivery” of our rebates, rewards and perhaps particular products and services. Today we're much less patient as customers and are demanding that even our small, local businesses react to our demands immediately.
90's – Enterprise
Large enterprises set the tone in the 90's because the internet and e-mail permitted them to automatically respond to opt-in’s, e-commerce purchases, phone calls and in some cases in-person requests within minutes or seconds. Airlines and other travel companies, for instance, were engaging us in their loyalty programs through a mixture of in-person, phone, email and internet services that taught us to expect our latest purchase to be reflected across channels in brief order to ensure that we could control the travel administration experience to our liking. Needless to say, the platforms supporting these levels of marketing and service integration cost these firms millions of bucks and were usually developed and/or managed by outside experts like Epsilon, Digitas and Targetbase.
00's – Mid-Tier
As we moved into the 00's, the shift to cloud computing (or SaaS) solutions brought the price of marketing automation down considerably – over 90% in several cases. This enabled mid-tier enterprises to leap into information -driven marketing automation at costs well below $100,000 per year. Now even smaller firms with marketing budgets of under $500,000 could spend under 20% of their budget to produce and support built-in, automated email and internet marketing solutions converting prospects to customers, up-selling customers immediately after purchase and accelerating customers into their next purchase cycle. The comprehensive suite of cloud-based services for these marketers included data cleansing, database management, email marketing, text messaging, direct mail support, social integration, business intelligence and reporting and more. Companies leading this phase of marketing automation remain growing rapidly and include Responsys, Eloqua and ClickSquared.
10's – Small Business
Now, in 2012, marketing automation is hitting the mainstream, and main street, such that we are going to begin to expect our small, local businesses to provide us with the kinds of services only the biggest companies in the world provided only fifteen years ago. For just a modest, up front investment of possible a few thousand dollars, accompanied by an ongoing cost of a few hundred dollars a month, small businesses can automate many aspects of their business, integrating e-commerce, database management, email marketing and more. A frontrunner in this space is NGR - (my firm).
Small Business Conference for Marketing Automation
Last week, we released the latest version of our marketing automation platform the NGRPulse. This latest version, actually, can enable the dedicated small business owner to understand enormous value from the platform. I emphasize 'can', as there isn't any doubt the platform is powerful and low cost, although no small business owner should under-estimate how hard it really is to successfully automate marketing (to customers’ delight) irrespective of the tool. The successful small business will either engage a NGR certified partner and/or dedicate someone on their small team to mastering NGRPulse and, more important, thinking through precisely what need to be automated and the way these automated actions should be fine-tuned over time. So, we proudly feel that the NGR will be the leader in the charge to bring marketing automation to small business, the burden is currently (finally) on the small business to adopt marketing automation and take its game to a higher level.
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