a leading edge midmarket SaaS application. Around for over a decade, it blazed a trail for service-based delivery, strong data
management and decent marketing ability in a sector then bereft of affordable
“The ETL capability is a major step forward as it automates the whole import process – the functionality vs cost balance has changed massively.” Simon Davis, MD, Atrium
marketing applications that actually worked. “There’s a general acceptance now that the cloud is the way forward,” says Simon Davis, Managing Director at Atrium, who lists lead generation functionality as the current big change in the midmarket. B2B-focused marketing automation packages that aim to complement sales systems like salesforce or MS Dynamics CRM are certainly in the ascendant. These are lining up alongside the various email platforms that many companies already use as de facto marketing systems. Just as for the larger suites, the midmarket is also seeing a move to triggered marketing in response to customer behaviour.
“This is the second generation of marketing automation,” says Davis, whose own product has offered rules-based triggered email for some years now. “You can set it up, run it for weeks or months, then review it and make small changes to optimise the campaign.” One of the big innovations in the newly-released version of Market Developer (5.1) is its built-in ETL capability. The template-based system automates the load/refresh process, and has the ability to take a continuous live feed of transactional data to add to the database. Validation, verification, deduping and consolidation: all can run overnight with no human intervention.
“It’s a major move forward for us,” Davis says, noting that in the past over 80% of a system implementation’s cost would cover data migration. “It automates the whole import process. The functionality versus cost balance has changed massively in this market: ten years ago, this sort of capability would have cost ten times as much. “
KEEP CHANGING
As the world moves on, so marketing software scurries after it. New channels emerge along with the best ways to communicate with them, vendors develop features to match and build them into their suites. One of the next big challenges will be mobile marketing to smartphones, and maybe even that long-awaited marketing channel: digital TV. In conclusion, it’s best to remember that technology is always just a part of any solution, with strategy, processes and people all just as, if not more important at the end of the marketing day. Software might deliver information but people deliver insight. n
www.dmarket.co.uk
November 2011 41
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