by Thomas Wieberneit | Apr 7, 2025 | Analysis, Blog |
The news On April 3, 2025, Nimble introduced e-mail marketing capabilities including a template editor to power scalable campaigns and outreach. This new capability empowers businesses to send unlimited, HTML-powered, and trackable emails, enabling large-scale outreach. This can be used e.g., for newsletters, webinars, product announcements, seasonal promotions, and more — all from within the Nimble platform. According to the press release, Nimble Email Marketing allows users to send unlimited e-mails and to create campaigns using a drg-and-drop editor or pre-delivered templates. Jon Ferrara, founder and CEO of Nimble says that “With Nimble Email Marketing, our customers can now scale their outreach and strengthen relationships like never before.” The e-mail marketing tool leverages existing features like group messaging and sequences. This enables teams to manage outreach, nurturing of leads and deepen relationships. With the combination of these capabilities, Nimble offers the ability to send one-off e-mails to larger audiences as well as to automate a multi-step outreach. Nimble’s e-mail marketing capabilities including the template editor are available as an add-on for Nimble users for the price of $15 per company per month. For this, each user gets an allocation of 1,000 e-mails per month with the option to purchase additional packages as required. The bigger picture There is a lot of scope for full-fledged CRM solutions targeting smaller businesses. Many of the existing solutions correlate smaller companies with lower complexity of requirements. Most of these solutions also cover only a part of the CRM processes, be it marketing, sales, or service, sometimes even being more niche, focusing on engagement only. Although pronounced dead multiple times, e-mail is still one...
by Thomas Wieberneit | Jan 20, 2023 | Blog |
Rest in peace, Social Media! Yes, I know, you have been pronounced dead numerous times already, and that as early as 2011 by the Sillicon Valley Watcher, if not earlier. You lived on. Still, now you really need to admit that you are a dead thing walking. You had a short, yet exhilarating life. And you, admittedly, developed astonishingly fast and far from your humble beginnings in the early 1970s and the first bulletin board systems around 1980. These have been the glory days of FidoNet, CompuServe, or AOL. SixDegrees.com followed later. The early noughts gave us a flurry of messaging systems, LinkedIn and XING, not to forget the infamous 4chan. Anno domini 2004 brought us Facebook, 2005 brought us YouTube, Twitter followed in 2006. Google attempted repeatedly to get the hang of you (Orkut, Google+, anyone?) and still has some messaging services up and running. All of these platforms have in common that they started up with the claim, some of them even with the objective, to make the Internet more social, to foster user generated content and to, ultimately, shift the power balance from corporations to their customers. Who does not remember the war cry “the customer is in control”. This referred to the idea that the customer could get more information that is not controlled by brands, so that they can be better informed, instead of being forced to rely on corporate broadcasts. This should have been achieved by giving customers a voice that is as strong as the corporate one, albeit without the (marketing) budget behind. In line with the definition of social, it enabled...
by Thomas Wieberneit | Jul 15, 2022 | Blog, Sponsored |
One of the most overused buzzwords these days is „hyperpersonalization“. But, apart from the hyperbole around it – pun definitely intended – there are a lot of questions around this term, starting from, what is it? What is the purpose? Does it work at all? Does it have one or is it just a fad? After all, we know personalization since the early 80s, just that we called it 1:1 marketing then. Of course, we didn’t have the technology then to scale it, which is definitely something that we do have now. On the other hand, improving technology is faced by an increased desire for privacy, which is at odds with what hyperpersonalization, personalization in general, stands for. This blog post is based upon a CXChangersTalk that I had with CRM industry analyst Marshall Lager, who observes and shapes the industry since 2004 in various dependent and independent roles, most notably atCRM Magazine, G2 and Informa. In his words, hyperpersonalization “doesn’t go away and evolves constantly.” And, of course, it doesn’t always work! Marshall explains that one of the main reasons for this is that not every business has the right idea of what personalization, let alone hyperpersonalization, is. He continues that “To some, putting somebody’s personal name in an e-mail or in an ad on Facebook is hyperpersonalization because it’s going right to you. It’s your name. Hey Thomas, look at this. Your name is on a t-shirt that I am holding up on this ad. That’s not hyper personalization, that’s mass marketing, that just happens to have your name on it.” But then, how does it work? Or rather: What is...
by Thomas Wieberneit | May 11, 2022 | Analysis, Blog |
The News On May 10, 2022, Zoho released Zoho Marketing Plus, its suite of marketing solutions. You can read the complete press release here. The suite combines multiple Zoho applications including Campaigns, Social, Webinar, Analytics, Marketing Automation, Workdrive, PageSense, Survey, and Backstage. It shall provide digital marketers with a unified platform of integrated capabilities that help them achieve their objectives more easily through a combination of simplification, integration and embedded collaboration capabilities. Zoho Marketing Plus brings together marketing activities throughout the whole campaign life cycle from ideation through creation, execution to measurement. This allows to manage campaigns and provides the whole marketing organization with a single shared view of information. “Consumers and digital marketing continue to evolve at warp-speed, and marketers are struggling to keep up. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to properly manage multiple campaigns, channels, customer profiles, data, and ROI,” said Mani Vembu, Chief Operating Officer at Zoho. “The complexity of data and personalization at-scale only raises pressure on marketers and CMOs to deliver effective campaigns and revenue. By eliminating redundancies and confusion arising from multiple siloed solutions, Zoho Marketing Plus maximizes productivity and teamwork, allowing marketers to stay nimble and collaborative amid evolving customer needs. When marketers aren’t bogged down by operations, they can deliver creative campaigns that promote meaningful relationships between the brand and customers.“ With Zoho Marketing Plus, Zoho addresses mid-market companies with around 250 to 1,000 employees and a structured marketing organization with a progressively thinking leadership. Early customers show themselves impressed with the breadth of the functionality as well as the support for the end-to-end support that is offered by the platform. Says...
by Thomas Wieberneit | Nov 8, 2021 | Analysis, Blog, CRMKonvos |
The news On November 2, 2021, SugarCRM held an analyst summit to share what is going on at the company and to get some candid feedback of the participants. As usual for this type of event, there is quite some information that is still under NDA, so I will be able to cover some of it only in broad strokes rather than the detail that the matters deserve. After a business update by CEO Craig Charlton, the event itself revolved around two themes: customer success stories, including customers describing how they are using SugarCRM to improve their own business by better serving their customers in an interview style formatSugarCRM business development, technology, and its future trajectory. Naturally, this part is largely under NDA. There were breakout sessions covering Sugar Sell, Sugar Service, and Sugar Market As usual, and with the notable exception of the customer interviews, the event was slide-driven with giving the opportunity to ask questions at the end of the respective agenda items plus offering a brief Q&A with the executives. Last, but not least, part of the event is a 1:1 session with a SugarCRM executive a few days after the summit. After a short opening by Sarita Kincaid, Craig Charlton offered a business update, showing how SugarCRM developed in the past twelve months. The company is focusing keenly on the mid-market. Craig painted a bright picture that shows a very high customer retention combined with a good growth rate. Noteworthy are a steep increase of the recurring ARR. He quoted a nearly doubled number of new logos, combined with a more than doubled new/upsell ARR...
