How to Choose Marketing Automation Software (or at least, how we did it)

When I was VP of Marketing at Newfi Lending, we decided we needed a new, proper marketing automation system.  The selection process was such an educational experience that I thought it would be worth documenting what we learned, and most importantly, how we chose the right solution for ourselves.

Like many in the mortgage industry, we were getting the marketing automation job done using a hodgepodge of industry-specific tools. Some were adequate but not great in terms of data integration and advanced marketing functionality.  Choosing the right marketing automation system to replace this mess was not so simple, however.

Ultimately, we went with a less well-known choice for marketing automation software: Net Results. We did a very thorough look at all the major marketing automation vendors out there, and I wanted to take you through our logic and process so that my fellow marketers can learn from the experience.

Our special situation

First, it’s good to know that at Newfi, we had 4 special needs:

1. We have both B2C and B2B sides of our business. We needed to keep them completely separate from a sales perspective, but they both needed to be well-supported from a marketing perspective.
2. Our B2C business might end up having 250,000+ leads to handle very quickly, and we needed a solution that could do this effectively without crashing, and without huge expense (because many systems charge on record volume).
3. We have limited technical capability and resources at our company, so we wanted a system that was easy to understand, set up, and use – even for me, the VP of Marketing, who may sometimes be enlisted to manage campaigns! But most importantly, we needed to make sure it could be handled by Garrett Lietzen, who was the main technical lead for our organization and a co-partner in this selection process.
4. On the B2C side of our business, we already had Velocify, a system that essentially provided both CRM and email marketing capabilities, but which had outgrown its usefulness. We needed to be sure that the new solution could replicate EVERYTHING we already did in Velocify – and we had a lot of campaigns already going that we couldn’t afford to lose or drop.

As we reviewed the solutions, these issues were always in the back of our minds – with our technical support needs and usability being a primary concern.

Functionality analysis

We then made a list of all the functionality requirements we had, prioritizing them according to what we needed today, what we likely needed in the near future, and what would just be nice to have. Few marketing automation solutions do everything well, or intuitively, so this prioritization gave us a sense of the features we needed to focus on in any serious evaluation.

The main functionality categories we considered were:

• Contact management, segmentation and editing
• Lead statuses and dispositioning
• Lead scoring
• Email marketing (campaign- and lifecycle-based, with A/B testing)
• CRM integration (email templates for sales, alerts, behavioral tracking)
• Text and telephone integration
• Campaign calendaring
• Webinar integration
• Website content personalization
• Social media integration
• Landing page creation
• Form creation
• Pops-ups and interstitials
• Contact behavioral tracking (email & web interactions)
• Website content & blog management
• Event and other offline tracking
• Lead tracking & attribution
• Reporting & analytics
• Management dashboards & BI

As you can imagine, our needs assessment was a LONG document, full of ideas and use cases. But the process was necessary for us to make sure we didn’t miss anything.

Evaluating options

Companies with big technical teams have the time and resources to convert big, clunky systems into successes, or at least non-embarrassments. As a much smaller company with limited technical staff, however, we didn’t have that luxury — we needed to make a good decision from the start.

So we set out to talk to real, hands-on experts in the space to learn how the main marketing automation systems really worked on a day-to-day basis. We ultimately spoke to over a dozen active CRM consultants, Warburg Pincus portfolio companies, top marketers from my personal networks, and reference customers. The detailed interviews really gave us a sense of what actually works today.

What was surprising was how similar their takes were on the various top solutions. In a nutshell, they said:

• Marketo. Great all-around choice. Easy to find talent to manage. Downsides: Not out-of-the-box intuitive, probably requiring an expert to manage. Struggles at large databases sizes (1 million+ contacts). Customer support quality started decaying in 2017. Significant additional cost to add Salesforce integration for salespeople.
• Oracle Eloqua. Top choice for very high volumes. Very scalable, very customizable. Too expensive and too unwieldy for smaller organizations, but fine for the Fortune 1000, or other companies with multiple sites.
• Salesforce Pardot. This is Salesforce’s own marketing automation flagship. While part of Salesforce, Pardot relies on an API for integration just like the rest of them, so it has no advantage there. Not very intuitive. Has scalability problems. Hard to find good talent to support.
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud. (Yes, Salesforce has TWO marketing automation systems, both obtained via acquisitions. This one used to be called ExactTarget, and had been bought by Pardot before Salesforce swallowed up Pardot.) Not intuitive at all – even Salesforce doesn’t recommend typical buyers look at it anymore.
• Hubspot. Does a lot, but essentially requires your whole website and marketing to be managed through this one system. This is fine if you’re building from scratch, but not so useful if you already have a mature website. We heard there were scalability issues too, both in terms of feature set and database size.
• Adobe Marketing Cloud. Another beast. Not recommended by anybody I spoke with.

The decision

We evaluated other solutions as well, and the contest settled on two candidates: Marketo, the industry favorite, and a dark horse: Net Results. It would have been easy and safe to choose Marketo, but ultimately we settled on Net Results. So what was important for our decision?

• Features. Net Results had all the features we needed, and it does have a lot of them: email marketing, drip campaigns, landing pages, forms, lead scoring, social media integration. Without our detailed needs assessment, however, it would have been very hard to be sure we had picked the right solution for our current and future needs.
• Ease of Use. Net Results was intuitive to use, even for an old experienced VP of Marketing like me. I personally went through the entire interface to make I easily understood all the functional capabilities of the product. In addition customers repeatedly cited how good customer service and support were, even well past the onboarding phase. Here, talking to reference customers was essential to assuaging our technical fears.
• Price. With Salesforce integration for salespeople included, Net Results was HALF the cost of Marketo – a significant difference. Plus the company helps you install and integrate the system.

So far, we’re happy with Net Results. Integration was pretty easy and our first email campaigns went well, with higher engagement and far lower bounce rates. Customer support also lived up to our hopes: we’ve held over 6 hours of impromptu support calls and meetings with their engineers, and have gotten all our questions answered within 24 hours.

It’s early yet and there’s definitely more functionality to test, but Garrett and I are both happy with our decision. I hope to keep you posted as we settle in!