The reality for small businesses is that one or two people may be designated to manage the marketing system, along with their other roles and responsibilities within the organization. A marketing automation system that requires multiple steps and IT intervention to setup and operate is a non-starter.

In contrast, Act-On allows them to take a “toe in the water” approach and ease into marketing automation at their own pace.

Our customers often start off with e-mail campaigns, the bread and butter of e-marketing. Pretty soon, they use our website visitor tracking to follow the activity of their prospects coming from their e-mail campaigns. Then, they start setting up forms and landing pages to capture website signups. Then they start looking into webinars.

In the background, Act-On automatically builds the unified database that tracks all the online activity (web page views, e-mail opens, collateral downloads, etc.) necessary for real insights into prospects’ implicit buying behaviors. Once our customers see the power of behavioral targeting, they are ready for lead scoring and automated nurturing programs. In other words, full blown marketing automation!

Here is the Act-On recipe:

Start with a fantastic value proposition: enterprise class all-in-one e-marketing at an SMB price point. Next, focus on de-mystifying and simplifying marketing automation for smaller marketing groups and departments. Finally, make it easy to consume, with month-to-month contracts, no setup fees, and no termination fees.

We tell our prospects: Don’t just read the menu, go ahead and try the product for yourself. (It’s amazing how much of a stumbling block this is for many of our competitors.)

So the recipe is pretty simple but it is working really, really well for us. We are looking at a fantastic quarter.

The auto industry is not the only one in need of a “Cash for Clunkers” program to get rid of its legacy problems.

The government should seriously think about a similar program to let hapless marketing departments out of their long term contracts with vendors pushing dated technology.

These older systems contribute directly to global warming, since (a) they cause marketers to boil over in frustration and (b) they often feature inefficient application architectures running on older, power- hungry servers.

What’s not to like here?

Is “inbound marketing” (as defined by Hubspot) the best option for your business?  Yes. If you are patient. Very patient.

The ideas behind “inbound marketing”  are hardly new: develop useful and compelling content, publish it on your website or blog, and use SEO to raise your search engine ranking so that potential customers find your content.

This “build it and they will (eventually) come” ethos has a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. You need to build your brand before customers start coming around regularly. But to build your brand, you need customers.

New companies looking for customers  need a healthy dose of outbound marketing to get started.

In the context of Twitter, this means going out and finding people tweeting about the kinds of things you have to offer, and letting them known that you exist. (The inbound approach is about building a following, easily done if you are already a celebrity like Ashton Kutcher.) Your prospects may end up finding you. But in the meantime, you need to go out and find them.

Hubspot appears to have realized this as well, with their recent announcement about adding outbound marketing (like e-mail) to their inbound marketing platform.

With the likes of Omniture, WebTrends and Google Analytics out there, is there a reason to re-think website visitor tracking?

For B2B companies (like ourselves), the answer is a resounding Yes!

The vast majority (something like 97%) of visitors to your website are anonymous.  Act-On  website tagging now makes them a lot less anonymous, by using their IP address to try and find the name and address of the organization that owns that IP address. You don’t have to wait for the next day either, this happens in real time.

We have been running this on our own website for the last 3 months, right alongside our Google Analytics tags. (We do not see this as a replacement for Omniture, WebTrends or Google Analytics, which provide crucial reports and insights for marketing. Rather, it is a real-time website presence detector.)

As expected, this capability has been a godsend for Sales.  They see their prospects coming back and checking out our website, and this helps them better prioritize their outbound activities.

More unexpected has been the impact on Operations and Customer Support. One example: our Ops team was in the process of  upgrading our ISP relationships with Hotmail, Yahoo et al.  The whole process suddenly felt a lot less opaque when we found both Microsoft and Yahoo checking out our privacy policy pages during this process.

We started to roll this out to our customers a couple of weeks ago, and the response so far has been overwhelmingly positive.

Constant Contact would have you believe that every business needs e-mail marketing. We think that this misses the main point — first and foremost, every business needs to generate and manage leads. E-mail marketing may or may not make sense for everyone.  At Act-On, our philosophy is that no one tool is enough — each business will end up using the mix of tools that best fits their situation.

Recently, I got a fresh demonstration of how true this is.

I decided to get my 24-year-old roof replaced, and turned to Angie’s List to get bids from a reputable set of roofing contractors. The winning bid was from a company owned by Chilean and Mexican immigrants. As the crew was pounding away on my roof, I chatted up one of the owners, an experienced roofer but not a high-tech marketer by any stretch of imagination.

He was surprisingly sophisticated about his various lead generation channels: print ads, Angie’s List, Service Magic, and more.  He was thinking about how he might be able to use his website to “convert” more of his  proposals. E-mail marketing made no sense to him, but he was thinking of ways to generate referrals from past customers.

When I described the Act-On Marketing Service to him, he *got* it immediately. He sends his bids as e-mail attachments, so he totally saw the value of getting text alerts when the bids are opened. He loved the idea of seeing the connections between his outstanding bids and his website visitors. I did not need to paint the picture — he was pretty much already there.

More than ever, I am convinced that there is a huge under-served market out there for *complete* marketing solutions that are priced right and easy to use.

Now that Twitter has hit the mainstream media (e.g., Oprah Winfrey sent out her first tweet last Friday), we thought we would get in our two bits’ worth.

Twitter has been wildly successful in driving people to our webinars, so much so that we have stopped using Google AdWords (or at least cut waaaaaaay back).

When we tweet about an upcoming webinar, we look for people who have just expressed dissatisfaction about their existing e-marketing vendor or their marketing capabilities. So we are reaching the right people (marketers) at exactly the right time (when they are inclined to look at new solutions). With Google AdWords, we don’t know who they are and we are only vaguely aware of their need/intention. It’s no contest.

When we first started using Twitter, we were a bit concerned that the Twitter user base might be too young (i.e., people without budget authority). In fact, what we found were professionals in their late 20’s and 30’s, savvy creative people that represent our sweet spot. And now, thanks to Oprah, we are bracing for the onslaught of mom-and-pops.

P.S. The Act-On Twitter campaign module is in alpha test. Look for it later this summer.

Here is what we found in the market:

• Companies that built their marketing around marketing data warehouses are finding that their sales and marketing databases have become separate silos. The lack of synergy between sales and marketing regarding leads is so common as to risk cliché.
• Companies are looking for a better alignment between marketing and sales. Sales wants to see all of the actual marketing touches for any specific lead. Marketing needs to get measured on the leads that actually convert.
• Salesforce.com has become the de-facto database of record. We have had any number of CMOs tell us that the marketing data has to be pushed back to Salesforce.

Given this situation, we decided early on to build Act-On around a marketing behavior database, rather than a marketing contact database, which might already exist in Salesforce.com or some other CRM system. (That said, we do have many customers, including our own marketing department, that use Act-On as the central marketing contact database.)

To start using Act-On, you don’t need to go through an elaborate setup phase around your marketing database. You can start by uploading lists (pulled from your CRM system, your old marketing database or even collected at your tradeshow booth) and then using Act-On to interact with your prospects. As you interact, we automatically build the marketing behavior database in the background. If the same person happens to be on 2 separate lists, it’s not a problem. The marketing behavior database automatically collates and consolidates the interaction information.

This makes Act-On an ideal complement to Salesforce.com. We have created Salesforce plugins to be able to move selected Salesforce leads and contacts to Act-On, and to make Act-On marketing histories, lead scores and reports accessible from within Salesforce.

This also explains our pricing model, which is not based on the size of your lists but is instead based on the number of “active contacts”, i.e., the size of the marketing behavior database.

One of the really great things about the Act-On Marketing Service is that we  use it ourselves for our online marketing efforts to promote Act-On.

Every page in our website carries Act-On tags as well as Google Analytics tags. The Act-On tags provide a real-time “heads-up” display of visitors on the site *right now*  for our marketing and sales teams, very different from the Google Analytics report, which is sort of “rear view mirror” view that only our marketing people seem to care about, and that too not every day.

We run a weekly webinar for prospects looking for a live interactive demo. We use Act-On to promote these webinars via e-mail campaigns and Google ads, to send reminders and to follow-up. Along the way, we made significant usability improvements to Act-On to make the management of webinars and other online events intuitive and simple. So much so that a lot of our new customers have chosen Act-On just for its unique webinar management capabilities.

In some cases, our marketing efforts “Aha!” moments have driven Act-On in exciting new directions. For instance, our marketing interns started using Twitter (manually) to promote our weekly webinars. Pretty soon, we noticed that Twitter was driving a lot more people to our webinar landing page than Google Adwords. This in turn caused our product development team to sit up and take notice. So sometime in the near future, Act-On will be rolling out a brand new Twitter campaign module based on our internal experiences.

Bottom line: having to eat our own dog food has (a) made us healthier and (b) improved the quality of the dog food. A lot.

This is not a hardware question. It is Microsoft Windows vs OS X (OS X kicks butt) and Microsoft Windows vs Linux (Linux kicks butt).

The issue that prompted this discussion is what kind of machines our developers ought to have to be most productive.

Bob is our die hard Mac user. Anecdotally, his Mac (almost 3 years old, Core Duo) seems to run circles around newer Windows machines with Core 2 Duo, when it comes to compiling our source code, running AWK and GREP, etc. But then again, all Mac users have that fanatic gleam in their eyes so we tended to discount this.

Then, I decided to replace my 3 year old Sony TZ laptop (Intel Centrino, 1G RAM) with a new souped up Sony TZ with 2G RAM and Core 2 Duo CPU, running Vista Business. The old one, about to be donated to charity, was re-imaged to run Ubuntu Linux. When we did a head-to-head test between these 2 machines (the test was a ground up recompile of all our source code), the old machine was 4x faster than the new one!

Arrgh!

The smart guys up in Redmond appear to be the perfect antidote to Intel & Moore’s Law.

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