I have worked with several marketing automation vendors: Eloqua, My Emma, Vtrenz, Constant Contact, Email Brain, etc.
They all seem to have similar designs / features. Some get more “advanced” – and price themselves appropriately so – by adding more features that they feel marketers demand. My take is that most of these applications suffer from the fact that their end user never wants any application they manage to be more complicated than MS Power Point, but, in order to differentiate, the marketing automation vendors add features that they feel they can charge more for. This would be blatantly clear if you were experienced with a robust application like Eloqua and compare it an app like Constant Contact.
Being mindful of the balance between additional functionality (i.e. the Cadillac) and just a plain email broadcast tool (i.e. the Pinto), I recommended Vtrenz as our marketing database. I have it integrated with Salesforce.com so that contact data is sent back-and-forth and is managed for me.
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