Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

This is a guest post by Katie Hollar, marketing manager at software research site Capterra.

Many companies are adopting marketing automation each day. But they aren’t necessarily changing their marketing habits as a result. So, is this new technology just enabling marketers to essentially spam people?

The current answer is yes, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

In recent years, the marketing automation software industry has exploded in popularity, and it’s become one of the fastest growing segments in the enterprise software space. For instance, the term “marketing automation” has had more Google searches in the beginning months of 2013 than it has at any other point over the past three years. And even on my company Capterra’s site, where millions of people come to search for business software each year, organic traffic for marketing automation software has grown by more than 20 percent year-over-year.

But according to a recent study by iContact, 56 percent of businesses say they plan to increase their use of email marketing in 2013, and on average, they only plan to grow their email lists by 28 percent this year.

So, more companies are buying marketing automation software, and as a result, they’re sending more emails more frequently. But their list of subscribers isn’t growing nearly as quickly as their email sending habits (actually, it’s shrinking at a faster rate due to people unsubscribing).

All this suggests that marketing automation is nothing but a glorified spamming engine. In fact, when I recently explained to my family what I typically do at work, several said, “Oh, so you SPAM people?”

“No,” I protested. “They’re opted-in! These people want to hear from us; they’ve found us through search and other inbound channels, and then filled out a form. Marketing automation just allows us to respond to them more efficiently.”

Despite my best efforts, they didn’t really understand how that was any different than spam. Which is precisely the problem.

To marketers like me, marketing automation has been a glorious solution to our problems. We (and by “we” I mean the general marketing community) knew all along that we shouldn’t be sending batch and blast emails to our entire email database, but without the time to segment lists, A/B test messaging, and send one-off emails the moment someone fills out a form, we were forced to just send out the blasts (and wrestle with the morality of that on our own time). With the advent and adoption of marketing automation software, all those pent-up ideas of how we should be sending emails were suddenly made possible. So we took advantage of the technology and started sending a lot of them.

But to consumers like my family members, the fact that we can now send emails with personalized messaging and specially-tailored offers the moment someone lands on our website doesn’t negate the fact that, at the end of the day, we’re sending them more emails.

Marketers need to catch up to the true capabilities of marketing automation technology, instead of using the technology to catch up on their marketing. We could be using marketing automation to send the same emails we sent before, but at a more relevant time, with more relevant content, and with more emphasis on the prospect. What we’re doing instead is sending the same old batch and blast emails from before, plus all the new, custom-tailored ones we wanted to send all along.

Fellow marketers, let’s agree to put an end to this before it gets too out of hand. Together, we can harness the powers of marketing automation software for good and not evil.

Katie Hollar is marketing manager at software research site Capterra and frequently blogs about B2B marketing.

Businessman sending email via ra2studio/Shutterstock

The San Francisco-based company was founded by Dan Siroker, an engineer who was inspired to launch the startup when working at Obama for America.

Siroker told me he first heard President Barack Obama speak in 2007 when he was working as a product manager at Google. Obama had made the pilgrimage to Silicon Valley to root out analytics tools that would prove beneficial for the campaign.

Siroker was so inspired that he quit Google, and went to work for the campaign as a volunteer. He would later rise up the ranks to become the director of analytics, and would lead a team of analysts using new technology to maximise voter registration and donations. “Even back in ’08, we viewed data as a means to make better decisions,” he explained by phone.

It was during his time working in D.C. that Siroker grew frustrated with the current suite of web optimization tools, such as Adobe’s Test & Target. So Siroker set out to create his own technology, Optimizely, which is billed as “A/B testing software you’ll actually use.”

The Obama and Romney campaigns used Optimizely in 2012, alongside 4,000 other customers. This quarter, it will launch the product in nine languages in 36 countries. The company says its revenue growth rate from March 2012 to March 2013 is 400 percent.

Optimizely’s team claims to be the third highest valued startup to graduate from the prestigious accelerator program Y Combinator — after Dropbox and AirBnB.

As part of the funding, Benchmark’s Peter Fenton will join the company’s board. Bain Capital Ventures, InterWest Partners, and Google Ventures participated in the round.

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Inbound marketing software business HubSpot has raised $35 million in fresh funding to help it grow quickly, a sign that the six-year-old company could be readying to go public.

HubSpot offers marketing software suites that help businesses attract and convert new customers. The company claims to have 8,000 customers in 56 countries. It now has more than 400 employees, up 100 from a year ago, and it expects to hire 55 more folks before the end of this year.

“Our goal has always been to build a successful, enduring, independent company that transforms how the world does marketing. We’re generating revenue at an annualized run rate of $60 million, up more than 80% over last year, and we still see a huge market opportunity ahead of us,” HubSpot CEO and co-founder Brian Halligan said in a statement. “This financing sets us up for big investments in hiring and acquisitions so that we can continue to change the way the world does marketing.”

The new funding was raised from Altimeter Capital, Cross Creek Capital, and “a large, unnamed institutional investor,” and previous investors. HubSpot has raised a total of $101 million to date.

Cambridge, Mass.-based HubSpot was founded in 2006. Along with the funding, NetSuite CFO Ron Gill will join the company’s board of directors. In mid-October, serial entrepreneur and startup advisor Eric Ries joined HubSpot’s advisory board.

Check out a demo of HubSpot’s software below:

HubSpot T-shirt photo via Shashi Bellamkonda

For Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists, yoga is big business.

Bessemer Venture Partners,  Institutional Venture Partners and Catalyst Ventures today invested $35 million into MindBody, a Salesforce-like technology for businesses like yoga studios and hair salons.

With this sixth-round of capital, the San Luis Obispo-based startup is plotting its international expansion — it already has satellite offices in New York and the UK, with a third opening soon in Australia.

MindBody provides a suite of marketing tools, scheduling, analytics, networking and point of sale services for health, beauty and wellness providers. It has been around since 2001, and has witnessed the explosion of competition, primarily online scheduling systems like Schedulicity, SalonBooker, Appointment Plus, and Groupon Scheduler.

To strike ahead of the competition, the company has diversified its software stack. Now, it faces heat from Salesforce, SugarCRM and other major customer relationship management (CRM) systems, which also target small businesses.

MindBody claims it is the only company that can offer the full gamut of software and specifically caters to the health and wellness space– for this reason, it is experiencing impressive growth with 900 businesses signing up per month.

“Our intent is to enable and link the 2 million beauty and wellness businesses operating worldwide with the hundreds of millions of consumers who can use their services to improve their own lives,” Rick Stollmeyer, the company’s CEO (pictured above), told VentureBeat.

Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP) participated in all the previous rounds; with this funding, the company has a total of $58 million in the bank.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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