Marketing

In this heated battle for the consumer dollar, retail marketers are looking to establish a personal and consistent relationship with shoppers through integrated customer loyalty programs that leverage traditional offline and emerging communications channels. Not surprisingly, it can be overwhelming ...

NetSuite has added new features to its NetSuite CRM+ flagship product, focusing on building new and tweaking existing marketing automation and knowledge management workflows for customer support and service. NetSuite also announced support for Firefox 3, the latest version of the Web browser from th...

Lyris has upgraded its flagship product and rolled out a new application for the marketing and advertising industry. The enhancements to Lyris HQ pave the way for a steady addition of collaboration and social networking tools this year. Lyris HQ for Agencies, meanwhile, will provide an inroad into a...

On-demand business-to-business marketing vendor Genius.com has developed a new collaborative e-mail marketing module that focuses on lead qualification and prioritization. MarketingGenius brings together the sales and marketing departments. To a certain extent, it adds a service element, as the pros...

LucidEra, a provider of on-demand analytics for sales professionals and managers, is bringing marketing into its fold with the addition of LucidEra Lead Insight. This is an analytics application with more than 65 prebuilt metrics focused on marketing performance -- specifically, how effective the ma...

The launch of Healthline Networks' HealthSTAT last week is one more indication that the Internet ad platform wars are far from over. To be sure, Google remains the giant to beat -- and it looks as though it's settling into its role as the long-term dominant player. However, HealthSTAT may be on the ...

E-mail marketing has long been neglected in the larger marketing world. That's understandable -- e-mail marketing campaigns are easy to design and cheap to implement. Still, any tool worth using is worth using to its best advantage. Part of the problem is that e-mail marketers receive little to no f...

As we've said here before, blogs have been an excellent leveler of the playing field for consumers. Had a poor customer service experience or are just feeling aggrieved with a service provider? Complain to management, yes, but then blog about it. While such posts are generally considered to be the r...

Jigsaw, a provider of corporate information, sales and marketing leads, is providing some of its contacts for free to customer relationship management vendors under a newly launched Open Data Initiative. Several companies are taking advantage of the open source program and have inked partnership agr...

The Cluetrain Manifesto, written 10 years ago by Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls and David Weinberger, has won over a sizable number of devotees with a simple premise: As the Internet introduces new levels of communication among consumers -- and between consumers and companies -- those co...

We've all seen the promotions: Brand X donates a portion of its sales to a worthy cause, which can be anything from support for a local school to breast cancer research. It's called "cause-related marketing," and it is rapidly becoming one of the best ways for businesses to embroider their brands, s...

A recent report from the Aberdeen Group explores the critical role closed-loop marketing plays in today's Best-in-Class organizations, and the dynamic shift in the tools, technologies, and processes that support today's top-performing closed-loop marketing initiatives. Significantly, 88 percent of t...

Traditionally, the contact center has been a cost center. However, with the contact center transforming into a profit center, the selling of products and services has emerged as an opportunity for the center to improve agent and customer interaction. Yet the challenge will be balancing customer sati...

SAP and Research In Motion announced last week that they were partnering to develop a native BlackBerry client to link to SAP CRM, and then, eventually, to the firm's other business applications. The move is a no brainer for SAP, writes Vinnie Mirchandani, an ex-Gartner analyst and founder of the ad...

Candidates, political parties and money might seem to dominate the upcoming 2008 U.S. presidential election, but when it comes to voter relationship management, software rules campaigns and politicking. When qualified U.S. citizens cast a legal ballot to express a preference for a candidate or for a...