Ram Krishnamurthy

CSG Systems

Manager, Professional Services for Quaero, a CSG Solution.

Salesforce.com Acquisition of Radian6

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Posted on 2011-04-01

Salesforce.com's acquisition of Radian6 yesterday was quite the news yesterday. This was especially interesting following their recent investments in Hubspot and Seesmic and the acquisition of Jigsaw last year. This reflects a general trend where the B2B lead management (demand generation) and social media world are fast coming together and are no longer separate silos.

Social media is becoming a key building block for a successful brand management and customer engagement strategies. With social media companies can join conversations about their brands and stay connected to their customers and prospects.

The question is: Why did Salesforce.com acquire Radian6? With Hubspot's lead generation and engagement platform, Salesforce.com needed...

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Agile Marketing – Constant Evolution

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Posted on 2010-09-21

In a previous blog on agile marketing I discussed how marketing could learn from software development and become more agile. With online and digital channels becoming more prolific, there are numerous opportunities for marketers to put this into practice. A successful marketing program uses extensive experimental design and testing. Using the agile methodology, marketers can constantly test, learn and improve. This is becoming increasingly important as marketers strive to remain relevant and embrace Agile Marketing - an approach encouraging rapid response to align customer and prospect needs and maximize return on marketing dollars spent.
The core components of a successful agile marketing program are:
Embracing an expanded role for analysis and insights.

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Email best practices for B2B lead management

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Posted on 2010-06-07

A big component of lead management strategy in B2B marketing is the process of building relationships with your prospects and engaging a prospect with meaningful dialogue that moves them through the sales funnel until they are ready to become a customer.

According to Forrester Research, companies that excel at Lead Nurturing are able to generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower cost-per-lead. Here are some best practices for creating emails for lead nurturing and management:

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Challenges with Mobile Marketing – Part 2

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Posted on 2010-04-27

In my previous blog I wrote about the growth in mobile channels and content challenges that organizations are facing. In this blog I will focus on the two other major challenges for mobile marketers ---- Preference Management and Measurement.

Establishing fundamental and standard principles for opting in and out of marketing -- providing consumers with choice -- is the first step towards ensuring the continued acceptance of SMS marketing. Numerous studies and research have shown that consumers reward those who give them "choice" in marketing messages and there are established guidelines for online marketing and email marketing.

For email marketers, this has meant increased adoption of opt-in marketing lists and "unsubscribe" links. Mobile marketing has so far focused its attention on a single half of the picture: opt-ins. Consumers are also demanding the choice to opt-out.

Similarly in the email marketing sphere, issues of deliverability...

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Challenges with Mobile Marketing – Part 1

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Posted on 2010-04-12
In my previous blog I wrote about the growth in mobile channels and how it is interlinked with growth of social media. This growth presents a fantastic marketing opportunity. In this blog I will outline some of the challenges with mobile marketing.

The major challenges in mobile marketing are:
- Content Management
- Preference Management
- Measurement
Optimizing content for mobile devices on site is critical and now is the perfect time to re-assess your site design and how users find your site through mobile search - particularly for B2C companies. Companies more than ever are ensuring they can optimize the customer experience of the mobile users. Consumers are doing a lot more than just calling from their hand held devices - clothing, electronics, books and a host of other items are being purchased through mobile commerce. Additionally, social network participation through services like Facebook and Twitter are growing...
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Mobile - meet Social Media

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Posted on 2010-03-15

Mobile is one of the fastest growing channels for marketing and advertising in the last few years. And in the next few years marketing spend towards mobile channel is expected to grow at an even faster rate. Social networking is one of the fastest-growing activities and with a large set of demographics, social media users use mobile phones to access social media sites. This is fueling the growth of Internet usage in mobile phones and social media site usage by mobile channels.

This trend has several implications for both mobile and social media marketing. These are:

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Time for Marketing to Learn from Software Development

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Posted on 2010-03-01

The tough economic climate has significantly impaired marketing budgets. Although the economy and budgets may be bouncing back, Marketing professionals are still being asked to do much more with less and prove that marketing is working. In this tough environment, it would behoove marketers to think of agile marketing rather than the traditional approaches they have employed in the past.

Marketing has traditionally adopted a very intensive planning and execution process that is sequential in nature. They plan for months and months and debate the strategy and messaging. By the time the project execution is fully underway, the project team and stakeholders often come to the realization that what was originally planned only partially meets the business needs. By then it's too late and attempts to adjust execution even slightly is often met with a massive and inefficient change control process, which only delays execution further and makes things worse. The project...

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Value of Prospect Segmentation Online

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Posted on 2010-01-22

As more and more organizations want to extend their reach using Digital marketing, the biggest challenge they face is "how to handle anonymous users". Most organizations rely on cookie mechanism for identifying visitors and as users are increasingly deleting their cookies, typically 75% of the visitor traffic is anonymous visitors or first time visitors. This implies that organizations must develop a data collection, segmentation and targeting strategy for anonymous online visitors.

A lot of anonymous data can be collected based on user's browser header and using the URL parameters. This data usually provides rich insight into the user behavior and affinity online. This data is also very valuable in understanding the performance of the different campaigns in place that are driving visitors to your site.

Anonymous data can then be supplemented with enhancement demographic data to provide a rich data set that will allow for prospect segmentation. This in...

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