Archive

It can be difficult enough to market to consumers through one channel, but trying to work across channels compounds that difficulty considerably. Enter Experian Marketing Services, which recently upgraded its cross-channel marketing platform with several new features. Experian regularly updates its ...

The case for SMS marketing is easy to make. It's cheap and it's easy. It can be far-reaching, given how many people carry cellphones now -- and did I mention that it's cheap? Still, there is a downside to SMS marketing. For starters, it can be very annoying to consumers, especially if the text isn't...

Sage Summit, held in Washington, D.C., this week, was a more upbeat event than it has been over the last two years. During that interval, the company has had the thankless task of telling its customers and partners that it was making big changes and that things would be better. The news was not alwa...

Zenmonics has announced mobileBanker, a tablet solution that lets bank staff interact with customers on the move by tapping into a bank's back end servers. Among its benefits: customer identification and authentication; the ability to serve customers outside the teller line; paperless processing; an...

Just weeks after purchasing Neolane, Adobe on Thursday pushed further into marketing automation with the launch of Adobe Social, an application that expands the company's integrations with social networking sites and pretty much gives users a 360-degree view of their customers. Integrated with Flick...

When Cirruspath wanted to update its Cirrus Insight Gmail extension for Salesforce.com, it asked clients to draw it a picture. The result is what it calls a complete redesign that integrates lead tracking through Salesforce.com seamlessly into Gmail. First and foremost among the features in the new ...

In a move that surprised me, Amazon last week announced that it was lowering its fees for on-demand infrastructure by as much as 80 percent. Should we be rejoicing, or is this a sign that something is amiss? Back around the turn of the century, something similar happened in at least two situations. ...

ClearSlide has already released several mobile apps targeting salespeople on the road, and recently it rolled out another key piece of its platform in mobile form. Dubbed "Connect," the new app for iOS gives users mobile access to marketing and sales collateral stored in the cloud, such as presentat...

Like everyone else with a pulse, Paul Rand, president and CEO of Zocalo Group, has noted the phenomenal growth of mobile advertising. Statistic after statistic confirms such observations, including the latest from the Interactive Advertising Bureau, which earlier this week reported that mobile adver...

Last year, I polled a group of respected CRM resellers to create a list spotlighting "forgotten features" -- tools and settings in CRM that many users overlook, even when they could bring great value to their businesses. Perhaps the most interesting forgotten feature was internal reporting. Most com...

If ever there was a case for conducting online customer surveys, Adam Lasky, global social media coordinator at Spreadshirt, has lived it. "A week after a customer makes a purchase on the Spreadshirt platform, we follow up with a customer review survey," Lasky said. That's how the company learned th...

I still see far too many examples of content confusing the ideas of data and information. Sometimes it seems a writer is simply trying to avoid being redundant when using data and information in the same sentence to mean the same thing. Of course, they are different, and the result is unnecessary co...

The issue of mobile privacy has been simmering for years, and it's long been apparent that there will be some movement at the government level sooner or later. This week, sooner would probably be the better guess -- especially if the European Commission is included. In the last few days, more allega...

There is a long-standing debate in the email marketing community about timing -- that is, whether time of day makes a difference in open and click-through rates. In other words, will an email marketing message sent early Monday morning be more likely to be opened than one sent Wednesday around noon ...

I think I have used this title before, but this is in a whole different context. Also, this is a short piece because I know you are likely out contributing to the leisure economy as you should be. This will be here when you get back. I couldn't help but make one more comment on the Oracle-Salesforce...