Company in Spotlight: GreenRope
A recent Business2Community post named “7 Facts About Marketing Automation” predicts that the adoption of marketing automation technology is expected to increase by 22% by 2015. As businesses worldwide began adopting marketing automation to generate more leads and increase productivity, more companies offering such technology began appearing on the horizon. I interviewed one of the players in the marketing automation software category, GreenRope (greenrope.com), to learn more about its product and position in the marketing automation sector.
GreenRope offers a complete marketing automation and CRM (customer relationship management) software platform that allows businesses to automate and track each touchpoint in the sales and marketing cycle, thus delivering personalized experiences to each one of their leads. Alessandra Ceresa, Director of Marketing at GreenRope, explains that GreenRope’s value proposition is “to provide the most innovative and complete sales and marketing platform, backed by the best service and support in the business, to enable maximum ROI and growth for small and mid-sized businesses.”
GreenRope’s target customer base lies in the small and medium businesses market, with most of them being companies of 2-50 employees and earning up to $10 million in revenue per year. SMBs often face the need of automating their marketing and sales operations to better manage their leads, yet cannot afford the hefty cost of most marketing automation software. GreenRope’s comprehensive software platform provides an all-in-one solution that automates all the components in the lead management process including email marketing, social network marketing, lead scoring, predictive analytics, project management, website analytics, and more.
GreenRope’s main competitors include the other companies in the marketing automation software sector such as Marketo, Hubspot, Infusionsoft, Pardot, Act-On, Eloqua, and others. GreenRope differentiates from them due to its level of integration, affordability of pricing, and agility of features. While other marketing automation software such as Hubspot and Marketo may command bigger brand name and larger customer base, GreenRope is the only marketing automation platform with comprehensive feature integration–everything from the key functionality of CRM to additional features such as social media marketing, website building, project management, and much more–so that businesses would not have to invest in other third-party software. GreenRope’s pricing of $169 per month, plus a one-time setup fee of $249, compares favorably to Act-On’s $500 per month, Eloqua’s $2,000 per month, and Marketo’s $3,195 per month. Furthermore, due to its private ownership, GreenRope has enough agility to constantly add new features based on the suggestions of its customers, instead of having to go through a board of directors to develop cutting-edge technology as most corporations do.
As GreenRope continues to grow, they are going to be launching an enterprise solution that targets the enterprise market of $10 million and above in revenue per year. However, educating prospective and current customers on the importance of marketing automation and CRM has become GreenRope’s biggest challenge. They combat this with plenty of educational content as well as exceptional 24/7 customer support, which has become one of the company’s foundational pillars and part of their mission statement. As Ceresa explains, GreenRope “was built from the ground up by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs. Every feature and upgrade is a direct result of conversations with our clients.”
For more insights on the companies in the marketing automation sector, subscribe to my Marketing Automation scan on Venture Scanner.