Open Channels

You are the Marketing Programs Manager for an open source software company.  Your job is to spin flax into gold.  You must progressively engage hundreds of thousands of website visitors, integrate registered contacts with lead lists you’ve sourced from 3rd party providers, drive audience-specific email campaigns to contacts in your target markets, and pass qualified leads to your CRM system for follow-up by your sales team.  On the back end of all this activity, you need to provide your boss with weekly metrics that correlate pipeline and bookings to campaigns and lead sources.

You are an ideal user of LoopFuse OneView, the sales and marketing automation solution from LoopFuse, Inc. of Atlanta, GA.  LoopFuse’s founders (Roy Russo and Tom Elrod) were intensive users of Eloqua, a high-end marketing automation app, when they were helping to build JBoss’ volume distribution engine. Based on their in-the-trenches experience, Russo and Elrod formed the opinion that Eloqua was too complex and too expensive for many small marketing teams; thus, the inspiration behind OneView.

Simplified Sophistication

LoopFuse was founded in 2007 to provide a marketing automation solution that balances rich functionality, breakthrough levels of productivity and game-changing economics.  Delivered via a SaaS platform, OneView’s design objective is to package commonly-used demand generation activities into intuitive modules that can be easily operated by busy marketing professionals.  Further, LoopFuse’s management believes that the legacy divide between marketing and sales operations will disappear, and the need for closed-loop analytics will therefore become essential.  To support its R&D and go-to-market objectives, the company closed a $1.4 Million Series A venture financing round  in January 2009 with True Ventures.

OneView’s functionality is organized around common demand generation and CRM processes:

• Direct Marketing. OneView provides a robust suite of tools for running email campaigns, including customizable templates, personalized emails, calendar and event-based scheduling, and email monitoring.  In addition, OneView tracks website visitor browsing histories and correlates them to email addresses as campaign recipients click through to website landing pages.  This feature adds rich context to lead records, improving both automated and human follow-up.

• Lead Management. Organizations in volume markets must be able to efficiently cultivate large numbers of leads from multiple sources.  OneView provides integrated tools for lead nurturing, scoring, segmentation and analysis.  Nurturing allows leads to be developed via automated campaigns until they are ready for sales follow-up.  Scoring allows leads to be rank-ordered so sales teams pay attention to the highest priority opportunities first.  Segmentation allows leads to be automatically routed to appropriate sales queues based on defined criteria (e.g., geography).  Analysis gives managers the tools to correlate bookings with lead sources, providing valuable information for future sourcing spends.

• Campaign Management. Volume marketing is all about experimentation and tuning – searching for the optimal combination of messages, content and calls-to-action.  OneView provides advanced functionality to manage email, internet and landing page campaigns, down to the level of unique lead flows for each campaign respondent.  OneView’s multi-level grouping feature allows marketers to quickly gain mastery over campaign performance and ROI.

• Analytics and Reporting. Volume marketers live by their metrics.  They constantly study the numbers that inform about website traffic, visitor demographics, search engine statistics, landing page effectiveness, registration conversion rates and adword performance.  While free services like Google Analytics provide a lot of this same insight, OneView’s website analytics dashboards are built right into the marketing automation platform, allowing website metrics to be viewed in the context of other related information.  In addition, OneView provides powerful closed-loop reporting that gives marketers insights about program performance and sales pipeline conversion.  These capabilities are enabled through OneView’s closed-loop CRM integration infrastructure.

Sweet Spot

Leveraging the above functionality, LoopFuse has found early traction with smaller organizations (marketing teams ranging in size from 3-10 members) in volume markets.  It is of no surprise, then, to find many open source companies on LoopFuse’s customer list, including vendors such as Zimbra (a Yahoo! company), MuleSource, Zenoss, XAware, Jitterbit and Acquia.  These organizations represent the sweet spot of LoopFuse’s target market – companies that need well-healed sales and marketing automation solutions, but lack the staff, the time and the budgets to operate expensive, complicated applications.

With subscriptions beginning at $750/month (and conveniently published on the company’s website), LoopFuse seems poised to capture more ground at the low end of the volume distribution market.  The company has maintained a low burn profile and has shown a lot of moxie in winning early deals.  Time will tell whether LoopFuse has the vision and the execution skill to become a break-away player in the marketing automation space, but the early returns are promising.