By Christopher Saunders
Online sellers can better manage their e-mail marketing in sync with
Web site analytics, thanks to a new partnership between NetIQ and
ExactTarget.
NetIQ,
of course, is the company behind WebTrends, one of the leaders in
Web site metrics. ExactTarget, meanwhile, provides an e-mail
marketing service. With today's deal in place, the two companies
plan next month to offer an integrated product that has advantages
for online merchants who use e-mail for customer acquisition and
retention.
Of
course, to benefit from the integration, you'll have to be a user of
both WebTrends and ExactTarget.
In
essence, Web marketers who are clients of both companies will be
able to factor data from their ExactTarget e-mail campaigns -- such
as delivery rates, click-throughs, and the like -- into their
WebTrends-based Web site analysis. As a result, this could help them
better track the effectiveness of various aspects of their e-mail
marketing.
Site
analytics software already provides a bevy of metrics that can help
merchants compute conversions. But "performance metrics for e-mail
campaign was really just click-through rate," said Jason Palmer,
vice president of product management and marketing at NetIQ. "We
knew that being able to marry click-through rate with on-site
behavior and eventually conversion rate, you'd be able to understand
much better."
ExactTarget users can take advantage of WebTrends' scenario
analysis, which creates visual models of site traffic to help online
merchants figure out and remove obstacles to visitor conversion.
With the release of the integrated solution, e-mail now becomes part
of that process -- enabling marketers to visually analyze conversion
behavior resulting from their online direct marketing.
The
integration also extends WebTrends' SmartView feature. Normally,
that feature of WebTrends 7 shows important metrics about visitor
behavior -- such how many users clicked-throughs or converted after
clicking on a particular link -- alongside links on the merchant's
own site. (Naturally, only the site's owner can see those
statistics.)
Now,
that feature is extended to e-mail campaigns crafted using
ExactTarget's service -- enabling marketers to view data like
conversions and revenue from links in their e-mails.
The
ExactTarget-WebTrends joint offering also makes it simpler for
marketers to segment their e-mail lists and target their campaigns
based on past visitor behavior. For example, a person who visit a
site but doesn't make a purchase can be targeted with an e-mail
offer different from that sent to a person who abandons their
shopping cart.
In
addition to the new synergies that result from combining WebTrends
and ExactTarget, the joint offering also can be helpful to online
merchants because it saves time and effort. The integrated product
frees online businesses from having to monitor two sets of marketing
information -- instead, site managers can look at a single interface
for gauging the behavior of both site visitors and e-mail
recipients.
"Measurement continues to be the hardest task, and in the online
space, a lot of the metrics you're trying to determine are in
multiple applications," Palmer said. "This forces [marketers] to
look at different applications and normalize data between
applications, and provide a common nomenclature to judge performance
of an e-mail campaign."
"We're
focused on really providing some new insight into ... metrics that
they're used to seeing in two different applications, so you can
quickly get into the performance metrics of your e-mail campaign,"
Palmer said.
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