Complexity and Commitment: Keys to Marketing Automation

The past week has been an interesting one in the world of marketing automation – particularly in terms of freemium marketing automation services making substantial changes in order to survive. We’ve been a captive audience to these changes here at Lead Liaison – it’s interesting to see what works for other marketing automation companies and what doesn’t.

David M. Raab wrote a great article on his Customer Experience Matrix blog about recent changes in the industry. It’s worth taking a look at to get an idea of this week’s mergers – in particular, SalesFUSION acquiring Loopfuse and CallidusCloud’s acquisition of LeadRocket. Raab hypothesizes – likely quite accurately – that the buyout of these two services may have something to do with the ‘freemium’ payment model the companies used to market their services.

Marketing Automation and Freemium Payment

Raab guesses quite accurately,

“My take is that freemium doesn’t fit well with marketing automation because marketing automation takes a lot of work to use effectively. Compare this with email and Web site hosting, where freemium has worked well: casual users can be quite successful with those products.”

A commenter observes that the ‘freemium’ model doesn’t tend to work with products that involve complexity. Marketing automation products are definitely complex – for many users, installing a marketing automation platform ensures that a new way of working on basic tasks needs to be adopted. This new way requires adoption at all levels of the business, training and a fully integrative customer support experience that just isn’t casual.

For Us, It’s About Commitment

Taking things a step further, we believe marketing automation is about commitment, not just complexity. Marketing automation systems are definitely complex. Dealing with that level of complexity and changes to a company’s workflow process requires a level of commitment businesses should be ready for. We truly believe that Lead Liaison’s marketing automation process can save a business a lot of hassle and can even lead to generating more revenue – but that does require some understanding of how the process will work for clients from start to finish.

We can communicate the need for that level of commitment from the beginning, but customers need to be on board all the way through. For us, freemium wouldn’t work as we need to be actively involved and available in our clients’ marketing dashboards – giving tutorials, being available for assistance and showing our clients better ways to use the platform. Commitment is key to dealing with the complexity of marketing automation – but that complexity is worth it, solving many challenges our clients face over time.

We’d love to talk to you about how we can take the pain out of the complexity involved in marketing automation – let us give you a consult today!