What impact will freemium models have on the marketing automation space?

I'm repeating some of what I've posted elsewhere on this....

Nobody disagrees that marketers need to understand concepts that we in the industry are very familiar with – lead nurturing, content marketing, etc, etc. We’re all putting out reams of thought leadership on the subjects and many of us have our own “university” or “Academy” and what not. We all can and do offer free education.

What most vendors can not do, however, is offer a product that is easy – not only to use, but to get to the point of using. With the free version of our demand generation product, a much larger percentage of marketers will begin to be exposed to the concepts we in the industry are well familiar with and constantly evangelizing. And, they’ll be exposed to Genius.com or Loopfuse as the vendor capable of giving them the goods they need to get started without the pressure of a trial period or a sales rep marching them through milestones on the way to signing a contract.

That's where the impact to the market will come into play. Frictionless access and a seamless experience leading to disinter-mediation of the heavy-handed sales person and process existing in most Marketing Automation vendors.

Since launching a little over a month ago, we've already seen a nice number of free users convert to paid. They used the system, they got used to it, they consumed our free resources, and they bought the full package. These new customers are also at or above our normal ASP. We like what we see so far.

Allen:

There are varying opinions on this and I wrote an article for Demand Gen Report a few weeks back on this. Here are a few of the excerpts from the article and then the link to the full article:

"While both of these vendors are looking to expand their presence in the market, and in the words of Genius “provide easier-to-deploy solutions”, the question that begs to be asked is, “Are these “freemium” models really free?” Can we really say that engaging with the buyer via marketing automation has become such a routine process that a free solution can take you to the promised land? Or, is there much more to demand generation and lead management than marketing automation vendors and many companies fail to realize?"

"A recent research study that was conducted by Bulldog Solutions and Frost & Sullivan. The study sampled a group of 250 BtoB marketers. In this study, the question was asked “What are your biggest roadblocks in optimizing your marketing automation platform” – attendees could select as many that applied. Not surprisingly the top three answers came back as follows:

- We don’t have the right or sufficient amount of people – 109 respondents
- We don’t have the right process – 109 responses
- We don’t have sufficient content – 88 responses

Here is the link to the full article: http://www.demandgenreport.com/archives/demanding-views/532-is-it-really-free...

Carlos Hidalgo
The Annuitas Group