For many marketers, lead nurturing still consists of drip email campaigns that spit out the same series of messages to everyone no matter who they are or where they are in the buying cycle.

Progressive B2B marketers are moving toward lead nurturing campaigns that offer tailored content based on the buyer’s stage in the purchasing process, industry, role in the organization and product of interest, among other factors. Some industry experts are dubbing this best-in-class strategy “Lead Nurturing Version 2.0.”

InsideView secured $19 million during its latest round of financing, which the company plans to use to accelerate research and development, expand its market share and increase adoption of its CRM Intelligence Platform.

The CRM Intelligence Platform is used by13,000 companies and more than 350,000 marketing, sales and account management professionals, according to company officials. The platform delivers current, validated company and contact data, prospect and company insights and professional connections within existing CRM and marketing automation systems.

Technology and data company V12 Group has announced the release of Launchpad, an automated marketing platform that offers marketers a view of all customer interactions across multiple marketing channels.

This proprietary platform addresses the unique challenges faced by marketers with franchise and other distributed organizations, providing the ability to simultaneously track multiple campaigns in various geographies, according to company officials.

Nearly one quarter (22%) of marketing emails sent during the first half of 2013 with subscribers’ permission never reached their inboxes, according to the Inbox Placement Rate Benchmarks Report from Return Path, an email intelligence solutions provider.

Based on a sample of nearly one trillion messages sent worldwide, the report found that 18% of all marketers’ email messages were either blocked or went missing, while another 4% were delivered to subscribers’ spam or junk folders. That means billions of opt-in messages failed to reach their intended recipients, representing potentially dramatic revenue opportunity losses for marketers, officials noted.

PunchTab, a multichannel loyalty and engagement platform, has released a loyalty app that will work with ExactTarget. The app, which will enable marketers to reward customer engagement and create loyalty from within email, is available on HubExchange, the recently opened app marketplace for ExactTarget.

PunchTab App for ExactTarget HubExchange is designed to integrate consumer behavior across web, social, mobile and retail with ExactTarget email. This provides marketers with a more complete picture of the consumer, according to company officials.

The delineation between marketing and IT is becoming more fluid as data analytics and advanced technologies drive marketing strategies. As the concept of data-driven marketing takes hold and marketing’s responsibilities broaden beyond lead generation, the position of marketing technologist has emerged to bridge the gap.

“IT and marketing are blurring when it comes to marketing technology, probably more than any other department,” said Jason Stewart, VP of Demand Generation at ANNUITAS. “Technologies like marketing automation, social media monitoring and content strategy tools are requiring more marketing expertise and acumen. The need for marketers specializing in the tech aspects of the role is greater than ever.”