Yesmail, an Infogroup company which powers intelligence customer interactions, released a set of new platform capabilities as part of its product strategy to help marketers deliver optimized email campaigns.

In addition, Yesmail announced the launch of three new email marketing solutions:

At a DemandCon event session earlier this month, Jon Russo, Founder and CEO of B2B Fusion Group, asked a room full of marketers how many were still using Excel spreadsheets to track their performance. About 90% of them raised their hands.

Russo said he wasn't surprised at the show of hands. But he is definitely concerned about it.

"This is risky business for a marketing organization," he said. "Executives are now accustomed to seeing metrics integrated with tools like Salesforce. When they see these reports dumped onto spreadsheets, they're going to question the validity of the data."

Search retargeting – a tactic which employs a simple but profitable intersection of display advertising and search – has long been a popular marketing tool for consumer companies. Now, retargeting is also gaining traction in the B2B market.

While consumer-focused retargeting is relatively simple, however, for B2B firms it will be a more complex process.

“As a B2B company you want to be able to get to the customers that raised their hands,” said Chris Mann, VP of Project Management for Bizo. “For B2B marketers there will be a creative set of solutions to accomplish that.”

Mann is referring to the solutions required to overcome the reach and scale issues that until very recently made B2B search retargeting a lower priority.

Sitecore, a Web content management and digital marketing software company, has announced the results to its recent marketing industry study: “The Multichannel Maturity Mandate.” The report, conducted with Forrester, includes responses from more than 270 marketing professionals across a wide range of industries and geographic regions.

The study indicates that senior level marketers need to adopt a multichannel customer engagement model to increase marketing performance, according to a company release. Most (77%) of marketers agree they will drive more sales and profit by evolving into an effective multichannel organization, while a smaller but significant number (35%) said they have lost business because they are not able to integrate customer interactions across digital, social, mobile and offline channels.

Editor’s Note: The following article is the second in a two-part series highlighting how B2B companies are using social media from cold to close. This installment explores the use of social selling tools.

By Owen McDonald, Contributing Author

Marketing and sales teams today struggle to decode social media streams. They must decide how best to use the information they gather for social sources, and how to analyze its efficacy for their demand generation efforts.

But that cryptic area is now yielding its secrets. Business Intelligence, CRM and marketing automation vendors, as well as providers of social platforms, are refining their systems to monitor social media and to identify genuine prospects based on their social media behavior.

The benefits of integrated marketing automation are extending into new areas of measurement, according to new research from The Lenskold Group. In addition to having improved visibility into ROI metrics, the new study found BtoB organizations employing automated solutions also have a greater probability of having highly effective and efficient marketing strategies.

According to the 2011 Lenskold Group Lead Generation Marketing ROI Study, 39% of marketers that have implemented marketing automation with CRM or sales systems were overall more likely to report and forecast revenue metrics, such as ROI and net present value (NPV), versus 24% of BtoB marketers without marketing automation.

New study: companies acknowledge negative impact of outdated BtoB data

By Kathy Greenler Sexton, Vice President of Marketing, ZoomInfo

Outdated BtoB contact data is pervasive — and, like a runaway train, it’s getting worse by the minute. In the time it takes you to read this, a couple hundred changes will happen in the business landscape that affect contact information (job changes, businesses starting and failing, etc.). Sales and marketing teams are hard pressed to keep pace with the changes. This is one of the findings of a just-published DemandGen Report study.

The benefits of integrated marketing automation are extending into new areas of measurement, according to new research from The Lenskold Group. In addition to having improved visibility into ROI metrics, the new study found BtoB organizations employing automated solutions also have a greater probability of having highly effective and efficient marketing strategies.

According to the 2011 Lenskold Group Lead Generation Marketing ROI Study, 39% of marketers that have implemented marketing automation with CRM or sales systems were overall more likely to report and forecast revenue metrics, such as ROI and net present value (NPV), versus 24% of BtoB marketers without marketing automation.

New Aberdeen Research found that BtoB organizations tapping information from BtoB directory ZoomInfo outperform other companies on key performance indicators (KPIs).

By Peter Ghali, Senior Product Manager, iContact

With 800 million people using Facebook and hundreds of millions logging on to LinkedIn and Twitter, marketers are increasingly looking to reach their customers and prospects through these social media platforms.

But social media marketing isn’t without its challenges. According to a recent survey by iContact, a provider of social media and email marketing solutions, many businesses don’t have time for social media and can’t measure its impact.