Salesforce ExactTarget Marketing Cloud launched Journey Builder in July to help marketers create a complete customer experience across Web, social and mobile channels.
Journey Builder for Apps extends this capability by enabling marketers to deliver automated custom content and messaging—including emails, targeted ads, push notification and SMS—via apps. The sending of content can be triggered by data like, for example, a customer's physical location or app usage.
Salesforce said the tool lets marketers create specialized customer Journey Maps, which can send personalized information to customers based on actions they take in apps, on websites or through other digital interaction with a brand. Companies can set up wait times and custom triggers to leverage real-time data across sales, marketing, service and communities. Pre-built journeys templates can also assist marketers in on-boarding new app users by creating good first experiences.
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Marteq's insight:
It's the ExactTarget part of the SFDC Marketing Cloud. App Marketing is so specific that it makes sense to build a solution around this vertical.
ExactTarget CEO and co-founder Scott Dorsey is exiting the company this summer (following former CMO Tim Kopp, CFO Steve Collins and Chief Administrative Officer Traci Dolan).
But the transition from Dorsey to McCorkle speaks to one of the major needs within ExactTarget Marketing Cloud – one that Dorsey made a point of praising in his message: integrating the multichannel messaging solution into the greater marketing cloud stack.
But behind the scenes, Salesforce.com partners and prospective clients have grumbled that ExactTarget, and Pardot in particular, aren’t well-integrated into Salesforce.com’s marketing cloud product. For that matter, the other components of the marketing cloud, including Buddy Media and Radian6, also reportedly suffer from integration issues.
Sources claim that Salesforce.com has not invested as heavily into ExactTarget Marketing Cloud, despite hopes it would do so after the acquisition. Consider how, last September, Salesforce.com cut 200 jobs from ExactTarget, claiming overlap.
Why is this significant? Because pretty much every marketing cloud available was assembled through acquisition and, consequently, integration is a key point of differentiation among the suite providers. All one need do is look at the messaging around how Salesforce.com competitors Oracle and Adobe sell their respective stacks.
Added [Jay MacDonald, CEO and managing partner of Digital Capital Investors]: "What I do know is that McCorkle really drives the tech team. And the real question is if the integration is complete or is the ingestion of ExactTarget still happening—that’s their biggest acquisition to date."
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Marteq's insight:
Normally I do not scoop articles about exec moves, but this one indicates that SFDC needs to get moving with their complete marketing stack, and it's not where it needs to be. And as users, I think we can all attest to that.
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Marteq's insight:
At some point, there needs to be clarity with ET and Pardot mailing capabilities, i.e., I'd love to have ET's mailing capabilities with Pardot MA functionality.
Enter Datalogix and Facebook’s Custom Audiences, and marketers now have the ablity to find their ideal customers and target them with hyper-relevant messaging based on a more holistic view of their behaviors. Today, ExactTarget Marketing Cloud announced a new partnership that makes it possible to leverage Datalogix data within our Social.com and Active Audiences advertising solutions. You can read the full press release here.
From AdExchanger...
Salesforce.com's clients now have access to what Datalogix claims is an offline audience data set that represents $1 trillion in spend.
This deal is a particularly important one for Salesforce.com, which recently watched Oracle snap up data exchange and data-management platform BlueKai. IBM recently bought email marketing and marketing automation provider Silverpop. While Salesforce.com has made its share of marketing acquisitions (its Marketing Cloud suite, for instance, was built by technologies from ExactTarget, Buddy Media and Radian6), questions remain around its paid media strategy.
Salesforce.com's paid media capabilities primarily center around social advertising via Social.com and its Active Audiences tool, designed to allow agencies and brands to scale first-party data sets for targeted Facebook campaigns. The Datalogix partnership extends those data sets substantially.
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Marteq's insight:
Again, B2C, and it's already occurring in the B2B world.
" Content marketing on LinkedIn has been an ideal solution for us because it allows us to not only identify our audience, but also understand the proper context for engaging with this diverse group of marketers. If you’re looking to mix up your advertising strategy on LinkedIn, I recommend leveraging content marketing at the core of your strategy. "
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Marteq's insight:
Sure, it's a quick LinkedIn promotion, but it shows how ExactTarget used LinkedIn and SlideShare to achieve results. Worth the 2 minutes.
Marketing software in the cloud is still pretty hot. Software giant Oracle proved it today by saying it will spend $1.5 billion to acquire email marketing company Responsys for $27 a share. That leaves Constant Contact, another email marketing company, available — its shares rose by more than four percent today in the wake of this deal. And while we’re at it, it’s worth mentioning that shares of Marketo, another cloud-based marketing company, are up by more than nine percent this morning.
Oracle said it will combine Responsys with another recent acquisition, Eloqua, which it bought a year ago today for $871 million. The result will be a marketing cloud product that serves both the business-to-business and business-to-consumer ends of the spectrum.
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Marteq's insight:
In direct response to the SFDC/Exact Target acquisition.
Radian6, BuddyMedia and social.com will integrate with the ExactTarget platform; what does this mean for marketers?
Condensed...
What stood out for me was the news that ExactTarget is becoming the heart of salesforce.com's marketing cloud. This is clearly happening not just in name, but in two key concrete ways.
The first is that Scott Dorsey, ExactTarget's CEO, is leading the marketing cloud organization within salesforce.com. I think this is important because it increases the likelihood that ExactTarget will maintain its culture while growing in line with the larger salesforce.com organization.
The second is that Radian6, BuddyMedia and social.com are being moved under the marketing cloud and integrated into ExactTarget's next generation platform IMH. It became clear a year or so ago that IMH is far more than a pretty dashboard for an aging platform, but a ground-up implementation of a service oriented architecture (SOA) solution designed to enable rapid development of new features and integration of disparate tools. It appears salesforce.com likes this architecture and will be utilizing it as the heart of its marketing cloud offering. That ExactTarget has made such strides in integrating these platforms in just sixty days is testament to the power and flexibility of the underlying platform architecture.
That's all well and good for ExactTarget, salesforce.com and their partners, but what about everyone else? This integration, the combining of Radian6, BuddyMedia and social.com into the ExactTarget platform and the new features/capabilities announced at Connections shows how seriously salesforce.com takes data-driven digital marketing.
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This may be the best merge in our space. The assimilation of these disparate pieces into the comprehensive Marketing Cloud (both architecture and marketing) will deliver significant benefits to the SFDC user and future users. It's turning out to be a no brainer. So if you're in the market for marketing automation, Pardot is your first stop (and probably your last).
Key capabilities of ExactTarget Journey Builder will include the following:
Drag and Drop 1-to-1 Automation: Plan, power, and measure the performance of lifecycle campaigns across email, mobile, social, and the Web based on customer data with a drag-and-drop interface.
Real-time Optimization: Establish thresholds of timing, cadence, frequency, and sequence to define which message or offer is delivered based on any change in customer data or interaction.
Advanced Analytics and Performance Tracking: Plan business outcomes for each phase of the lifecycle campaign and track performance against goals.
Marketing Cloud integration: Integrates seamlessly with the Salesforce ExactTarget Marketing Cloud's contact model, calendar, and messaging and data management applications.
Advanced Third-Party Data Integrations: Leverage ExactTarget's advanced data integration capabilities to further optimize data-driven marketing and extend campaigns with partner applications to integrate Web conferencing, direct mail, event registrations, QR code activation, Facebook ad retargeting, and more to extend lifecycle marketing campaigns.
Marteq's insight:
I've been curious as to how ET would be integrated into SFDC, and we starting to see some daylight.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff: "We want to create the future.
Pertinent excerpt...
Q: You’ve said you’re confident that your most recent acquisition, the $2.5 billion purchase of ExactTarget, a cloud marketing platform provider, is going to be a success. Why?
Somebody needs to be the platform that connects all these customers to these companies. I call it a one to one customer platform….I look at companies that have these connected products. It could be a toothbrush. It could be an ExactTarget customer already like Microsoft that has the Xbox 360 connected to…The reality is we’re moving into a multi-customer touch-point environment. That is the customer touch-point is prolific and changing and evolving. And you the company – Toyota, BofA, News Corp, whoever — you need to be able to have this consistent relationship with the customer wherever they you are…
When I saw ExactTarget transforming consumers into customers, that’s when I said that’s very aligned with our vision. They’re doing it from a pure marketing perspective and we’re doing it from a sales and service perspective…This is what we need for the next generation of Salesforce.com.
In that case, we’re buying for growth because we want to grow into marketing…In 24 months, our marketing product line will do $ 1 billion in revenue because we’ll be able to put these marketing assets together in a very unique, very compelling way. Our goal as a company is to be that customer company. We want to be the company that you turn to connect your customers with you, and that means you have to do it in sales, you have to do it in service, and you have to do it in marketing.
Platform brings marketing technologies and data together.
Excerpt...
Digital marketing provider ExactTarget, a Salesforce.com company, unveiled its HubExchange app marketplace today. The platform promises to help marketers find, install, and integrate apps built by ExactTarget and its global ecosystem of technology providers.
The marketplace's key features include cross-channel integration, which allows multiple marketing solutions within HubExchange to optimize customer data in one consolidated, easy-to-use application interface, as well as optimization, which can help build campaigns based on real-time, analytical insights compiled from each digital marketing application. HubExchange features apps with capabilities ranging from web conferencing and event registrations to QR code activation and Facebook ad retargeting.
Marteq's insight:
This is fascinating: with the acquisition of ExactTarget by SFDC, how will this mesh with the AppExchange as ExactTarget becomes subsumed by SFDC?
But I don’t believe the ExactTarget acquisition is the MAP market’s death knell. Yes, if Salesforce.com succeeds with its post-acquisition integrations (unlike what happened with some of the company’s recent social investments), eventually Pardot will become a native MAP inside Salesforce.com, most likely as an add-on module. However, that transition will take time, and Pardot’s capabilities are not as strong as those of other MAPs, although they are well positioned for the majority of SFDC’s client base.
Eloqua will continue to support Salesforce.com, as dropping support would have a significant impact on revenue. Salesforce.com will also continue to support Eloqua, as many of its enterprise customers would be up in arms if support were dropped. But we expect both companies to move away from pursuing any deeper integration and instead focus on enhancing their core platforms individually.
Salesforce.com’s acquisition of ExactTarget sets the stage for Salesforce.com to become more of a centralized marketing platform. In addition to its current lead management and social capabilities, Salesforce.com will gain email marketing pay-per-click and marketing automation capabilities, although it will need basic content management capabilities in order to move forward and assume such a centralized platform approach.
So, what does this all mean? The MAP industry will remain a fast-growing and highly innovative market. Although Salesforce.com’s acquisition alters marketplace dynamics, it doesn’t signal a cataclysmic event. I expect several MAP vendors will modify their market positioning or focus more heavily on specific areas of product or partnership development, but I don’t envision any major (previously unplanned) shifts.
Marteq's insight:
As if this is the be all and end all, and that innovation goes no further than MA. Wrong. Innovation is a constant, and marketing will continue to evolve and require technologies. We do, however, strongly agree that Pardot fits quite well with the SFDC user base.
It was a big week for marketing technology. Salesforce agreed to acquire ExactTarget (which had acquired marketing automation vendor Pardot less than a year ago) for a whopping $2.5 billion.
Key excerpt...
I still believe that the ultimate future of the marketing technology space is a true platform play: a common backbone for coordinating data and processes within marketing operations. Such a platform would thrive primarily on its ecosystem, enabling hundreds of different vendors and custom applications to easily plug into the backbone.
In such an environment, each marketing organization could weave together its own unique fabric of different components — a best-of-breed strategy, but one that could be more easily executed because the integration points in the backbone would be stable and standardized. Implement one integration to the backbone and gain loosely-coupled interoperability with everything else that’s connected to that backbone. Zapier is a terrific example of an early incarnation of such an approach.
Marteq's insight:
It's a nice read about the industry, and worthwhile clicking through. The point is with regards to a monolithic SFDC with all components completely embedded and the associated complexity (impossibility) of this task vs. a native integration of external components (which currently exists). It will be the latter, using one common DB, one view, one perspective.
The question then becomes, why did Salesforce.com choose ExactTarget as an acquisition target – and why did it do so now?
Excerpt...
What does ExactTarget bring to the table, then?
B-to-c entry point. ExactTarget holds a significant roster of b-to-c customers, ranging from Expedia and Universal Music Group to Nike and Coke.
Email capabilities. The email capabilities in the core Salesforce.com platform are weak. Email designers are non-existent, email deliverability is poor, and users cannot send large volumes of email out of Salesforce.com. The areas where ExactTarget excels in email marketing address these product gaps. Moreover, b-to-b MAP penetration is currently 20 percent, which means that 80 percent of the b-to-b marketplace still leverages email marketing without a MAP.
Marketing automation. ExactTarget’s 2012 purchase of Pardot provides marketing automation capabilities. Our recent vendor profile of Pardot noted that its marketing automation solution “may not pass muster with large, complex enterprises, but for more of a do-it-yourself marketer, it should be on the short list of MAP providers to consider.” Keep in mind that for the vast majority of Salesforce.com’s client base, Pardot’s MAP capabilities offer exactly the level of marketing automaton capability required.
License (not service) revenue. Compared to their peers, ExactTarget and Pardot emphasize usability for average marketing users and do not generally require significant professional services to set up and execute demand generation tactics.
Marteq's insight:
1) Although Pardot may not have the platform that appeals to large, complex enterprises, with Salesforce it has the resources to develop one, not to mention the relative simplicity of a single UI for CRM and MA.
2) License revenue not services revenue: important when it comes to company valuation.
Raises the specter of further market consolidation by large players. By making a bold move into not just automation, but digital media, Salesforce will raise pressure on Adobe, IBM, Microsoft, SAP, and other traditional enterprise application providers to make similar moves, raising the valuations of Responsys, Neolane, and Silverpop. Salesforce can now monetize both seat licenses and media CPMs, and clearly wants to create a billion dollar business line in the marketing cloud.
As a large, established vendor, Salesforce will make it easier for marketing departments to convince their IT and procurement peers of adopting ET. If Salesforce chooses to suppress digital media CPM rates, existing ET customers benefit, but Salesforce would make it difficult for (now much) smaller vendors, like Responsys and Silverpop, to compete.
Why ExactTarget? With a marquis customer list, and the ability to support robust email marketing programs, they offer Salesforce.com and their customers the capabilities needed to build out the marketing cloud. In fact, when existing Salesforce.com customers were seeking support for complex email requirements, the folks in San Francisco would point customers east to the folks in Indianapolis…often enough that integration via the Salesforce.com APIs already exists.
I doubt Salesforce will suddenly stop integrating with other marketing automation vendors. Small, independent marketing automation firms already had a tough time selling against big competitors, so this only makes their lives marginally harder. The smart ones (and that's most of them) already have a strategy in place to differentiate themselves from the big industry leaders.
I've long argued that CRM and marketing automation should be part of the same system. Like a broken clock, the time has come when I'm right. Marketing automation sits between email and CRM, in the sense that it uses both heavily. So Salesforce has effectively surrounded the marketing automation vendors with its purchase, even ignoring Pardot. This means that Salesforce will be in the room with a solution when email and CRM users discuss expanding into marketing automation. In many cases, clients will extend their Salesforce deployment without considering anyone else..
If Salesforce.com does wish to push deep into lead management, it will need to either invest heavily in its own development or acquire a company, which will bring another hefty price tag. Last month, Marketo, a marketing automation leader, had a successful initial public offering. It opened at $13 per share. Today it is trading in the $22 range with a market capitalization of about $812 million. Eloqua, the other leader in the category, sold to Oracle late last year for $871 million. [TechCrunch blew it with this analysis, not realizing that Pardot came with ET!]
This move is precisely (I would have said "exactly" but that sounded redundant) what salesforce needed to do. They now have an excellent email marketing suite, a strong upper-end-of-the-small-and-through-the-middle-of-the-mid-market marketing automation suite (via the Exact Target acquisition of Pardot last year) and, as an added bonus, the social comms tool Co-Tweet, which was one of the underutilized gems owned by Exact Target. They are also acquiring a substantial customer base that is reasonably ripe for salesforce's other offerings.
By combining ExactTarget's digital marketing capabilities with Salesforce.com's sales, service and social marketing capabilities, Salesforce said it will create "a world-class marketing platform across email, social, mobile and the Web." Salesforce marketing capabilities were previously limited to social channels, powered by capabilities gained through the acquisitions of Radian6 and Buddy Media. In contrast, rivals including IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAS and Teradata, among others, have much broader, multi-channel marketing capabilities, most on the strength of acquisitions over the last three years.
Our Take
For the CMO with SFDC and MA: You can maintain your MA without concern, regardless of vendor. You may, however, want to seriously consider the soon to be native ET/Pardot advantages, as that will reduce your operating costs to maintain separate systems.
For the CMO with SFDC but without MA: Your IT challenges will be resolved. CIO concerns will be overcome as SFDC acts as a Trojan Horse for your MA.
For the SMB marketplace: Your life just got a bit easier. Salesforce meets the needs of all sizes of businesses, and this bundled solution will improve your time-to-marketing efforts.
For Oracle/Eloqua: This is going to be difficult. Oracle wants to improve its CRM business, and the Eloqua acquisition to round out its offering makes sense. However, Salesforce want to improve its marketing capabilities, not necessarily its CRM business, so that it can fully assist the Marketing function. Big difference. Salesforce just cut Oracle off at the pass.
Marteq's insight:
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Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM) and ExactTarget (NYSE: ET]) announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which salesforce.com will acquire ExactTarget in a transaction valued at approximately $2.5 billion.
Salesforce.com's acquisition of ExactTarget will further its mission of being the world's leading CRM platform—one that enables companies to transform how they connect with their customers across sales, service, and marketing. By combining ExactTarget's leading digital marketing capabilities with salesforce.com's leading sales, service and social marketing solutions, salesforce.com will create a world-class marketing platform across email, social, mobile and the web.
Marteq's insight:
Needed to get this news to you quickly. More later...
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It's the ExactTarget part of the SFDC Marketing Cloud. App Marketing is so specific that it makes sense to build a solution around this vertical.