So email does matter after all. Buying ExactTarget not only plugs gaps in the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. It could be just what the vendor needs to solve impending renewal challenges in its core Sales Cloud business.
Yesterday Salesforce.com announced plans to buy up email marketing firm ExactTarget for a cool $2.5 billion. Wall St got a bit twitchy, but industry analysts take a longer term view of what could be a bulls-eye move from Benioff.
If you still don't get that idea that Salesforce.com is serious about the Marketing Cloud then think again after the decision to splash out $2.5 billion to crash into the email marketing sector with the purchase of ExactTarget.
Maybe they might think about paying some more tax here and there, but Starbucks is setting an example when it comes to the use of digital, social and mobile to extend its brand beyond the bricks and mortar.
If advertising is dead then what follows? Scott Karp thinks it is 'native advertising.' It's not a view to which we subscribe. We think there is a better way - at least in the business to business world.
While all the talk in CRM and marketing is about the omni-channel, at practical level the likes of online retailer Zavvi continue to fail. Why?
Banks are just really, really bad at customer interaction, yes? So why aren't they tapping into digital channels to improve the situation? Maybe they just don't care.
I first met Hugh MacLeod sometime in 2005. At the time, he was one of an emerging crowd of blogerati rock stars that congregated around events like LeWeb, a cauldron of often edgy but always energizing ideas about the evolution of the social web. MacLeod's schtick was about creating cartoons on business cards.
Imagine a day when the standalone digital agencies of today are a thing of the past and everyone in the next generation of marketing is a digital native. That day isn't that far off according to European marketing high-fliers.
Not content with shaking up the music industry, Pandora is now in the digital marketing game with an e-Business advertising technology platform of its very own. But does an internet radio firm have the right digital credentials?
Even the Facebook generation reads email, yet you'll be hard-pressed to hear it discussed at marketing technology events. The industry seems almost embarrassed to mention email - perhaps it's because the technology to integrate email with mobile and social is lagging behind what enterprises need.
Does Intuit understand cloud? It would appear not. to make matters worse, its attempts at market intelligence gathering just nosedived with this effort. Too big to fail? We'll see.
