Marketing Automation Round-up for 1st half of 2014. Who's Winning and Losing?

NEW YORK - July 8, 2014 - PRLog -- One of the most important metrics in evaluating the ultimate value of any cloud software product is its customer retention rate, a number that encapsulates the value obtained versus client expectations. Retention rate takes into account usability, support, expectations set, and impact on marketing and/or revenue goals. Companies that receive value in excess of expectations will generally renew; those that don’t will opt out.

Though supremely valuable, customer retention is a number that marketing automation vendors are loath to release. Vendors’ sometimes publish data on the number and growth rate of their customer base but not a single one lets on to retention rate, or its inverse—churn.

Not to worry. Another class of marketing technology companies to the rescue.

Software tracking company Datanyze scans over 15 million of the world’s most-trafficked websites, hunting for Javascript embeds and web tags that indicate the presence of hosted software—in this case a marketing automation platform. Website additions/losses over time are an indication of platform success in the marketplace.

The accompanying chart shows the total number of websites using selected marketing automation platforms as of 6/30/14. Note that websites do not equate with customers as a single customer may use marketing automation software on dozens or even hundreds of websites.

But wait.

Further analysis shows that the leader, Hubspot, offers a variety of product packages, including a Basic package that includes many inbound features as well as email marketing, but does not include the most salient marketing automation features such as lead scoring and automated workflows.

I estimate that at least 60 percent of Hubspot’s customers are Basic and if we reduce their numbers by 60 percent, the chart looks like this...See the full Marketing Automation Round-up for the first half of 2014 at http://www.marketingtechreport.com/2014/07/who-is-winning...


About Dan Freeman and Marketing Growth Strategies
Dan is President of Marketing Growth Strategies LLC, a marketing services firm engaged in research, analysis, lead generation, and client implementation in the Marketing Automation sector since 2009. Dan is also founder and editor of http://www.marketingtechreport.com/ and an Analyst with with VentureBeat's new business intelligence site, VB INSIGHT, which can be found at http://insight.venturebeat.com/report/what-every-marketer...