Saturday, December 21, 2013

Oracle to Buy Responsys for $1.5 Billion

by Dan Freeman 
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More evidence (as if we needed more) of the strength of the marketing automation sector came on Friday as Oracle announced the purchase of Responsys for about $1.5 billion.

Interestingly Responsys (MKTG +40.4%) closed Friday at $27.40, $0.40 above Oracle's (ORCL -0.6%) $27/share acquisition price. Speculation grew that investors are betting on an SAP counteroffer arriving soon.

Meanwhile, fellow cloud marketing automation software firms Marketo (MKTO +11.3%) and Constant Contact (CTCT +6.8%) closed up sharply.

As we’ve been saying for the past year, if you are a marketing automation company, this is your moment. Carp diem!
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may.
Old Time is still a-flying
And this same flower that smiles today,
Tomorrow will be dying.
****   ****   ****    ****

Marketing Growth Strategies LLC has been engaged in research, analysis, lead generation, and client implementation in the Marketing Automation sector since 2009 and has recently revised its highly successful 2014 Marketing Automation eBook.

Are you a marketing automation vendor? Learn about the capturing up to 500 fresh Marketing Automation leads.

Considering implementing marketing automation? Download the 2014 Marketing Automation eBook.


Thursday, December 12, 2013

Who's Using Marketing Automation?

by Dan Freeman 
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OK, so you’re hearing a lot about marketing automation. Getting tweets and emails and reading blogs and white papers about how it’s simplifying and transforming the lives of marketers. From all this hype, you might have the impression that everyone who’s anyone in marketing is using marketing automation software. I recently saw a headline claiming that 46 percent of B2B companies use marketing automation. When I read the details, it was clear that the 46 percent represented those that responded to a marketing automation survey. Who responds to a marketing automation survey? Usually those people that use marketing automation software. Duh! This was not even remotely representative of the marketplace as a whole. 

Marketers who get inundated with these type of stories get an inflated view of the market penetration of new technologies. But if there is a lot of hot air in these numbers, what can we say about the actual adoption rates of marketing automation software?  We delved into this question in our just published Marketing Automation eBook.

We looked at the total number of businesses in the US but took out the smallest of enterprises—those with not even a single employee. The table below shows marketing automation software use by size of company.
Keep in mind there are also over 20 million business with zero employees—freelancers, consultants, and other self-employed people, many of whom use email marketing software and could be ripe to upgrade to marketing automation platforms.



All told, there are roughly 50,000 marketing automation installations—less than 1 percent of the nearly 6 million businesses with at least 1 employee. It’s interesting to note that even for the 631,000 companies with 20 or more employees, penetration only stands at about 4 percent today. 

You can read more about adoption rates market sizing, and profiles of some of the leading vendors in our  Marketing Automation eBook.


Monday, November 11, 2013

Internet Search Trends of "Marketing Automation"

One of the ways to gauge interest in a topic or product is to measure Internet search trends over time. As you can see from the chart below, the phrase "Marketing Automation" has trended up, albeit not in a straight line, from 2007 through 2013. Note that the chart data is in index form where the highest results are "indexed" to 100 and other data points are relative to that.