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Oracle Marketing Software Review Smart CRM software manufacturers recognize that marketing automation and analytics can be one of the clear areas where a CRM initiative can deliver significant payback. By integrating marketing leads to sales force automation prospects as well as analyzing the rich data tracked back to each marketing campaign, marketing professionals are able to refine campaigns for improved impact and demonstrate clear ROI metrics. Marketing professionals which demonstrate clear ROI are the same marketing professionals who are granted larger marketing budgets each year. While CRM OnDemand offers an intuitive, easy to use and feature rich SFA application, its marketing management is built almost entirely around email-based marketing distributions and offers very limited campaign management and analysis support. Starting with the creation of a campaign, CRM OnDemand tracks only the most primitive campaign information. Simple data elements such as the start date and end date for campaigns are conspicuously absent from the campaign’s profile and must be handled with custom fields (which then may not integrate to other campaign analysis views and reporting). The lack of detailed information continues when setting campaign budgets and performance objectives. Only a few fields can be tracked by default such as manually input cost and revenue fields. The development of some collaterals and content is solid by using an industry standard HTML based content editor tool to author rich e-mail documents. Like most e-mail editors, CRM OnDemand allows the creation of e-mail templates which perform field merges in order to personalize the message content. In building a target distribution list, CRM OnDemand allows you to leverage advanced query tools to select prospects or customers from your SFA system to include in your marketing campaign. The standard process assumes that distribution lists are created from the SFA accounts only so if targets are based on previous purchases or customer support calls, it is necessary to reflect this data on the account in order to reference it for marketing campaigns (or otherwise make arrangements for customization of the data model so these elements are accessible). Sending e-mail distributions can be scheduled in advance, however, we have been told that customers may be assessed a surcharge for their e-mail sent via the marketing system (so be careful that you review this in your agreement with Oracle before committing to your purchase). Since it is largely based on e-mail marketing concepts, Oracle's Marketing On Demand tracks total e-mail distributed as well as bounces, reads, and click-through's. These data points are aggregated and the CRM marketing module can use dashboards and some graphics to track campaign effectiveness. The summary reports are in general reasonable tools that facilitate a quick view of high level campaign metrics. Unfortunately, you will have to revert to reports and data exports to drill into the data for campaign results as there is a lack of direct navigation from the results charts to the underlying sales data. With the growth in online and web-based advertising, there is a conspicuous void for pay-per-click (PPC) management and tracking. PPC and adwords functionality allows for the purchase of online ads or keywords with services such as Google’s Ad Words and then attributes the leads acquired from those services to the specific keywords and to the accounts and sale opportunities. This permits marketers to better determine which keywords are most effective in generating qualified leads and track the ROI from keywords all the way through sales pipelines, sales forecasts and closed says for real-time ROI and other metrics. Salesforce.com offers this service in the CRM at an added cost from one of its many service partners. Others CRM vendors such as RightNow and Aplicor include this type of tracking in their core products. To enable this in Oracle CRM OnDemand requires the user to get creative with the standard trackable links and integration services. Unfortunately, this additional effort translates into added complexity and cost.
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