Hot Banana Software, Inc. (www.hotbanana.com), a leader in Web content management for marketing, announces a new white paper from The Gilbane Group that explains how marketers benefit from utilizing a Web CMS-driven eMarketing platform to deliver tangible ROI on marketing investments.

Click here to download the whitepaper

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Hot Banana made the announcement at The Gilbane Conference San Francisco, the industry's premier conference on content management technologies, held at the Palace Hotel through April 12. Hot Banana is exhibiting in Booth #125. David Terry, the company’s vice president of marketing, is presenting at the conference and is on a panel called WCM Tools & Strategies for Marketing, Wednesday, April 11 at 2 p.m.

It explains how a Web CMS-driven eMarketing platform is ideal for bridging disparate marketing, sales and customer service business processes. It also discusses how this approach is key to “bolting together” lead generation and lead conversion efforts so marketers can deliver – and prove – the return on marketing investment (ROMI) that executives increasingly demand.

“’Quick-shot’ email campaigns, generic landing pages, and disorganized Web sites are not delivering the ROI that marketers hoped for. Solution providers that understand the need to increase WCM’s impact on revenue generation rather than simply administrative control are providing eMarketing as an integral platform component,” wrote Leonor Ciarlone, Senior Analyst, The Gilbane Group.

Ciarlone notes that this is “an extremely important industry breakthrough,” and outlines how a Web CMS with built-in eMarketing components helps integrate disparate tools used for search engine optimization, Web analytics and email marketing.

The white paper notes that due to Software as a Service (SaaS) pricing models, small and mid-size organizations can now implement a Web CMS with eMarketing capabilities “with lower upfront costs and reduced risk.”

The Gilbane Group white paper reminds companies of all sizes to consider the need for certain key features in a Web CMS-driven solution, including:

• Centralized management of Web site assets, including HTML pages, forms, and rich media sources such as video and audio.
• Performance management for micro sites as well as landing, registration and survey pages
• Email marketing management, including rules-driven interactivity and dynamic personalization
• SEO tools, including metadata and keyword management
• Analytics capabilities, including tagging, tracking, conversion measurement, automated optimization, and generic Web site behavior reporting
• Integration paths to SFA and CRM resources
• Design tools that promote usability and account for Web accessibility guidelines.

Hot Banana’s latest release, Version 5.5, meets all of the above requirements, empowering marketers to maximize inbound Web site traffic, launch email campaigns, leverage landing pages with A/B testing and Web forms, and transfer leads to customer relationship management and sales force automation systems like Salesforce.com.

“Now more than ever, marketers at small-to-midsize companies need to transform their Web sites into lead-generation engines,” said David Terry, Hot Banana vice president of marketing. “That’s why we built eMarketing capabilities into the very core of Hot Banana’s Web CMS.”

Hot Banana integrates best-of-breed, third-party Web analytics, email marketing and CRM solutions with its intuitive, easy-to-use Web CMS solution, so marketers can build Web sites and easily update content without relying on IT support. Hot Banana solutions are available as either hosted, SaaS offerings or as licensed software.