Ascend2 took a look at the state of marketing automation and found that just 20% of respondents feel they are using their system to its full potential.  Lack of training (39%), resources (32%) and budget (31%) were the most cited obstacles, ranking well ahead of poor integration (16%), missing features (14%) and decentralized data (14%).  This doesn’t mean integration is a solved problem: just 7% of respondents said their marketing automation is fully integrated with other systems and 29% said it’s mostly integrated.

This just in from Lake Wobegon: two-thirds (68%) of respondents to this Lucidpress survey said they’re confident that most of their company’s content is relevant, even though only 32% find other companies are sending relevant content to them. Possibly related: 27% consistently measure the ROI of the content they create. Just 32% say more than half their content is personalized.

Customer engagement platform MessageGears will partner with content localization and translation platform Smartling to streamline email translation and localization for 450+ languages.  The workflow is automated but actual translations are still done by (machine-assisted) humans.