Vendor consolidation, tech integration drive changes in how B2B marketers acquire leads
Media Business
Lead generation is becoming simpler in practical terms—it’s easier than ever before to find and nurture prospective customers. But the forces driving it are complex, including the integration of marketing and sales tools and continued industry consolidation. “Today, all these tools, including marketing automation, CRM and email, are talking to one another,” said Adam Blitzer, VP-b2b marketing automation at ExactTarget’s Pardot. “Because of API management, every channel I use in marketing communicates with each other.” Blitzer said this new world of interconnectivity is particularly important not just for connecting all the marketing operations dots but also because customers prefer to communicate in different ways.
“Say you collect someone’s data from a Web form,” Blitzer said. “Being able to pass that seamlessly to a direct mail or email system is a powerful thing. Or consider when an email recipient clicks on a link. He then will visit a landing page with more engaging information, which in turn can trigger a direct mail piece.”
These capabilities weren’t possible a few years ago, he said.
There were 1.3 billion Google search results for the phrase “email is dead” when I sat down to write this. Even though some may think that the era of connecting with consumers via their inbox is over, the numbers tell a very different story. Email is actually better than it’s ever been before, and companies who take advantage of the growing need for mobile-optimization and the very latest stats on best practices could see an ROI that makes interruption marketers want to cry.