July's Atlanta SugarCRM Meetup marked the 11th Meetup for the group. Mathew Sweezey from Pardot was the guest speaker and presented Marketing Automation and Open Source CRM. Using the Pardot Saas application Mathew provided an unbiased view of how marketing automation tools work. He also provided the group tips for choosing the best marketing automation software for their business.

Here are a few of those tips:

1. Verify that the marketing automation software integrates with your CRM. Many offerings provide and integration out of the box as opposed to having to custom build it.
2. Make sure you look in to how they send their emails, check sender score, check how they authenticate.
3. Verify that the systems captures all of the important information that is required such as action, interest, intent, and demographic.

During the Meetup we were provided a list of other marketing automation companies including:

NeoLane
Eloqua
Pardot
Manticore
Market2Lead
SilverPop
LoopFuse

Of the marketing automation listed we found that Loopfuse and Pardot both had out of the box SugarCRM integration. Outside of the main Saas offering, Pardot also offers a free app called CallerID which allows you to do some in depth tracking of users. We were able to play with this on the CRMStage site and it is pretty amazing how much information it can track for every user that visits. It is a free app so there is no reason that you shouldn't check it out.

If you would like to learn more about marketing automation then feel free to get in touch with Mathew Sweezey at Pardot.