Leading marketers today are looking past one-message-at-a-time email marketing. Instead, they envision the individual email as part of an ongoing dialog with their prospects or customers, a dialog that is in sync with the other sales and marketing programs going on around it.

That is well-nigh impossible to achieve with traditional campaign tools. But it can be done with campaign automation where we use special software to manage and run all aspects of a campaign(s) without the need for marketer involvement at every step.

Here's an example of how it has been used for prospecting. One of our pharmaceutical clients wanted to woo doctors to attend a seminar. So the marketing team planned a series of email broadcasts to accomplish this, starting with an introductory message and then proceeding through a series of personalized messages over several months, triggered by what the doctor did or didn't do. When a doctor registered and attended the seminar, the initial series of messages would end and a second ("attended the seminar") series would begin.

But instead of the marketers burying themselves for months handling all the response analysis and mailings, we built a custom campaign application that did everything for them automatically. We worked with the marketers to develop the necessary campaign rules, put them into the campaign application and let it do the rest.

We even automated the lead management process for them in SalesForce.com. Since their sales force used SalesForce.com, our campaign application automatically pulled new leads from it, included them in the mailings, and later updated the Salesforce records with the mailing results.

Campaign automation provides a powerful new tool with great benefits for email marketers. They can achieve higher ROI because of the intelligent and consistent contact strategy it allows. They are able to apply the latest email technology - behavioral targeting, triggered events, dynamic personalization and CRM integration - consistently across all their campaign mailings. And they increase their own productivity because of all the time they save in doing it.