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Act-On Insight is available for free to the company's users. The product itself starts its subscriptions at US$500 a month. It is a remarkably cheap deal considering what it provides -- and the fact that there are few companies that offer anything comparable, Ian Michiels, principal analyst at Gleanster Research, told CRM Buyer.

Few marketers would argue against the importance of relevant, timely, personalized marketing communications. In fact, research has consistently proven the value of personalizing marketing messages by segmentation, targeting, or one-to-one messaging. Personalized email campaigns generate two to three times higher click-through rates than mass email campaigns and twice the conversion rates. Unfortunately, when it comes to personalization and one-to-one initiatives, many marketers are constrained by the quality of customer data and an inability to centralize disparate data for analysis...

Anyone who has worked in sales or indirectly worked closely with sales has experienced those curious times when deals that seem to be moving along perfectly suddenly go cold. Was it something you did, something you said, something you failed to do? ...

Most marketers will accept that some portion of marketing will always be an art that is tricky to measure. However, it's difficult to deny the overwhelming need for marketers who can "crunch the numbers." ...

Ian Michiels is a research director and the practice leader of the Customer Management Technology Group at the Aberdeen Group ...

In November 2008, Aberdeen published a study titled, "Lead Nurturing: The Secret to Successful Lead Generation." The survey captured the challenges and strategies from 213 organizations and found that on average, 16 percent of the total leads that are deemed "sales-ready opportunities" actually close. ...

There are dozens of webinars, seminars, research reports, whitepapers, and blog postings on the topic of sales and marketing alignment. Despite the endless flow of resources and suggestions, sales and marketing alignment continues to elude many organizations. ...

The term "marketing automation" is perhaps one of the most widely used, ill-defined and ambiguous terms in the marketing and sales technology landscape. Ask 10 different people how they define marketing automation, and you'll probably get 10 different answers. ...

Recession. Nine letters you never want to see together in one word; at least not in that order. Sales and marketing departments across the globe are reeling from one of the worst financial crisis in recent business. The stock market is down, unemployment is climbing, and businesses are bracing for what could be a long, slow recovery. ...

The economic downturn is top of mind for every organization. Pick up a newspaper or turn on the TV and it's hard to dismiss the facts: Recession looms and nobody knows when or how it will end. ...

Recent research from the Aberdeen Group titled "Channel Sales: Renaissance in Partner Management" explored the challenges, strategies and tactics from 220 organizations that rely on indirect channel partners, distributors, and retailers to drive top-line revenue. Sixty-three percent of companies indicate that partner/agent management has a moderate to severe impact on organizational effectiveness. ...

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 top-performing organizations indicated they leverage closed-loop marketing.

The proliferation of marketing channels and globalization remain key challenges for every organization. Digital content continues to expand at exponential rates as new marketing channels surface. CMOs and marketing executives are looking for ways to deliver more than simple asset repositories with content management tools ...

The proliferation of marketing channels represents a key challenge for every CMO seeking to optimize return on marketing investments. Today, the marketing department is tasked with maximizing return across dozens of marketing channels ...

Ian Michiels is a senior research analyst at the Aberdeen Group. Michiels covers customer intelligence and marketing management under the sales and marketing practice. His current research agenda focuses on demand generation, closed-loop marketing, CRM and marketing automation. He can be reached at [email protected]...

What does marketing resource management mean to you? Does it mean the same thing to your coworker? Your competitor? The vendors who sell these solutions? The acronyms used to define the marketing automation space -- MRM, MOM, EMM, DAM, etc. -- have undeniably become so ambiguous that it's not uncommon for one to define another ...

This category of application is an efficient way to reach out to customers who are not accessible through conventional CRM approaches, Ian Michiels, an Aberdeen analyst, told CRM Buyer. "Typically, a sales person won't have insight on where the customer was looking on a Web site -- in real time -- then be able to tailor the pitch to reach that person."