News and Events

Press Releases

Marketo Reinvents Marketing Automation (Again) with Launch of Marketo Lead Management 3.0

200+ New Features Take Visionary Conversational-Marketing Model to Next Level Award-Winning Lead Management Solution Gets Design Makeover

SAN MATEO, CA – March 3, 2009 –Marketo, the company that redefined how customers evaluate and buy marketing automation, shook up the demand generation industry again today with the latest release of its award-winning marketing software, Marketo Lead Management 3.0. This release, the largest since the product’s launch one year ago, delivers key upgrades to support the company’s unique ‘conversational’ approach to marketing automation, including significant new functionality such as targeting enhancements, real-time alerts, and progressive profiling; deeper integration with Salesforce CRM to weave in the ‘human conversation’; and a comprehensive upgrade to its user interface to foster marketing agility.

A Conversation, Not a Script

Marketo recognizes that marketing cannot script a prospect’s buying process on a flowchart. Developing relationships with today’s buyers requires marketing to have conversations that listen to the prospect and adjust appropriately. Last year, the company introduced its innovative conversational approach to marketing automation and fundamentally reset customers’ expectations for power, ease-of-use, and time-to-value – a unique combination that shook up the industry and made the company the fastest-growing lead management vendor. Today, the company is redefining conversational marketing again with Marketo Lead Management 3.0.

“With Marketo Lead Management 3.0, we have gone beyond traditional feature / functionality enhancements to deliver a comprehensive upgrade to create a solution that truly works better” said Phil Fernandez, president and CEO at Marketo. “The release delivers great new capabilities to support our conversational model of marketing, and at the same time, marketers will find that our new user interface makes them more agile than ever, leaving them with time to focus on strategic and creative work like lead nurturing, lead scoring, and closing the loop with sales.”

Trend-Setting Product Innovation

Marketo completely and totally re-imagined the way that marketers design and run campaigns. As a result, the product is fundamentally faster and easier to use, especially for non-technical marketers, and the user experience is one that customers use words like “fun” and “love” to describe. This architectural advantage is a key reason for Marketo’s rapid growth and is not easily copied by competitors. Today, Marketo Lead Management 3.0 delivers an additional 75 new usability improvements and a great new design that makes marketers more agile than ever.

“Marketo Lead Management is intuitive and easy to use, a true one-stop shop for marketers,” said Celia Brown, a marketing manager at Boomi, the leader in on-demand integration. “With Marketo, I can build and deploy campaigns quickly, which makes it easy for us to develop relationships and educate leads before our sales team engages with them.”

In addition to user interface enhancements, Marketo Lead Management 3.0 offers 125 additional enhancements that enable deeper and more flexible marketing conversations. Some of the new capabilities include:

• Segmentation, targeting, and triggering enhancements. In a world where the customer controls the buying process, it is more important than ever for marketing to be able to target the right message at the right time. Marketo now provides the industry’s best segmentation, targeting, and triggering capabilities, including real-time event based triggers (e.g. target prospects who click to watch the demo), negative operations (e.g. target all the people who have NOT opened a particular email), and time- and quantity-based criteria (e.g. decrease the score for everyone who has not visited the website more than twice in the last month). According to Jupiter Research, this level of targeting can increase open rates by more than 50% and increase conversion rates by more than 350%.
• Progressive profiling on forms. Each additional field on a registration form costs $1 or more in reduced conversion rates. Prospects don’t want to share all their information before trust is built, so (just like with real conversations) the best practice is to ask few questions up front and then deepen the relationship over time. Marketo now allows marketers to use progressive profiling on their forms, so instead of requiring known prospects to fill out information they’ve already given, they can ask additional information and build out the profile over time. The results are better conversion rates, lower cost per lead, and deeper prospect relationships.
• Real-time alerts. With some leads, immediate action is required; response rates begin to drop dramatically in as little as five minutes. With Marketo’s real-time alerts, sales reps are notified of hot leads instantly on email or their mobile device, ensuring hot leads are contacted before the competitor reaches them.
• Anonymous lead tracking and profiling. With conversational marketing, the activities of a potential customer before they register on your website can be as important as what they do once they give you their contact information. With Marketo, you get the complete history of each lead from the moment they first show up on your site. Marketo now also identifies the company and geographic location for anonymous visitors on your site. This lets you know which companies are engaging with you, and allows real-time alerts when someone from one of your target companies is visiting the website.
• Advanced data quality and duplicate removal. 15-40% of a typical company’s leads are duplicates, which can lead to inaccurate conversations and lost time and productivity adding up to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Marketo now automatically identifies duplicate leads and contacts using a variety of fuzzy logic options. Duplicates can be merged manually or via a batch “EasyMerge” operation using a variety of custom rule sets. As always, new incoming leads are automatically de-duplicated against existing leads and contacts, ensuring your contacts stay clean to support effective campaigns and accurate reports.

In addition, Marketo Lead Management 3.0 enables the ‘human side’ of the conversation with what is now the industry’s deepest and most native integration to salesforce.com. With complete activity history tracking; the ability to update data inside Salesforce CRM and create tasks directly inside a sales rep’s queue; five minute data synchronization; the ability to change owners and re-assign leads; and complete opportunity and campaign integration to close the loop, Marketo now enables marketing and sales to collaborate on their customer conversations at every stage of the revenue cycle.

“Marketing automation is rapidly becoming a no-brainer for companies that need to get maximum return for every marketing dollar spent,” said Jon Miller, vice president of marketing at Marketo and author of the Modern B2B Marketing blog. “Last year, we redefined how companies evaluate and buy marketing automation software, and with Marketo Lead Management 3.0 we’re raising the bar again with a great release that customers really love.”

What Marketers Are Saying

“We looked at multiple solutions, but Marketo Lead Management really stood out because of its flexible functionality and great user interface,” said Emily Salus, director of marketing at CollabNet, the application lifecycle management platform leader for distributed software development teams. “Today, Marketo is really helping our world-class sales team to focus on the right deals, which is a key factor driving our growth.”

Andrew Spoeth, director of marketing at B2B search marketing agency Enquiro, said, “With budgets tight, marketers must focus on unlocking the value of all their leads. Marketo lets us measure our clients’ behaviors and determine their interest, so we can confirm or deny our predictions of what customers want. This really enables our marketing to move from ‘batch and blast’ to true conversations with prospects.”

Marketo provides a comprehensive demand generation solution to help marketing and sales teams collaborate to drive more revenue and improve marketing accountability. Marketo’s Lead Management and Lead Insight for Sales solutions include email marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring and closed-loop reporting capabilities to qualify and generate sales leads, shorten sales cycles, demonstrate marketing ROI and drive revenue growth. Marketo is powerful yet easy to use with minimal training, and offers an on-demand model to get customers up and running quickly, with no charges for set-up or integration. Since launching in March 2008, more than 150 midmarket and enterprise companies in nine countries have chosen Marketo to automate their lead management processes.

###