Zoho last week announced a major change to its marketing offering with the launch of Marketing Automation 2.0.
Marketing Automation brings the majority of its marketing tools together under one platform. Lead management, omni-channel campaign tools, landing pages and pop-ups, journey builders, planning and asset management are all built into what is pretty close to being an all-in-tool for marketers.
It seems likely this tool will pretty much replace Zoho's existing marketing tools, like the original marketing automation tool and also campaigns. Indeed if you have CRM integrated with Campaigns right now you'll have to disable that integration to start using the new Marketing Automation platform.
That is likely to require a significant rethink of how Zoho sells and packages its marketing tools. One would imagine given that Campaigns is part of this solution that is will be deprecated and that will impact its bundles like the marketing suite and CRMPlus. Zoho did suggest at its recent Zoholics event in India that all of the company's marketing tools are going to be integrated in into CRMPlus.
The core of the new Marketing Automation platform is a new lead management module. Zoho has simply called it Contacts, and it integrates tightly with both your leads and contacts from Zoho CRM.
The various marketing tools all integrate tightly into this contacts management platform, pulling in leads from email campaigns, landing pages, pop-ups, social, SMS and more.
The customer journey build lets you then automate lead nurturing across all of these channels and finally there is an enhanced website analytics capability to bring it all together.
The suite borrows some of the capabilities of Page Sense but there doesn't get capabilities like heat maps or session recording so it's not quite a one-stop shop. Surveys aren't part of the engagement tools, either.
