Email Marketing Insights from Experian CheetahMail’s Sara Ezrin

I recently had the opportunity to chat with Sara Ezrin, senior strategy consultant at Experian CheetahMail. Experian CheetahMail provides email marketing and customer intelligence technologies for enterprise clients. As Omniture has partnered with CheetahMail, I wanted to find out what integration means for online retailers trying to keep their email marketing cutting edge.

• Why is integration so important for online retailers today?

Companies are working with fewer resources and are looking to reach higher goals. This, combined with the fast pace of the Internet, makes data integration across channels essential for marketers to make fast and smart decisions. Online data in particular is rich and relevant to customers but it doesn’t wait for us as marketers. If you cannot use that data quickly you may lose the opportunity to capitalize on it within marketing campaigns.

• What would you recommend to a VP of commerce at a leading Internet retailer using both CheetahMail and Omniture? What would be your top priorities with respect to the joint solution?

The easiest first step is to integrate Omniture tags into your email campaigns so that SiteCatalyst can report on click through activity to calculate the revenue lost from email subscribers that are clicking through but abandoning the site or their shopping cart. The Omniture Genesis program offers robust reporting through the integration of Experian CheetahMail data with the online activity post click through. Genesis also offers integration of shopping cart abandonment data with Experian CheetahMail’s trigger messaging and dynamic content features. The automated CheetahMail-Omniture integration increases clients’ ability to contact highly engaged customers with relevant communication at the appropriate time in their lifecycle with their brands.

• How have some of your more innovative customers been using CheetahMail and Omniture to drive increases in marketing performance?

By working with CheetahMail and Omniture marketers have access to powerful data that they can use to inform all of their email messaging, site optimization and customer segmentation. The integrated reporting has helped clients see when there is significant drop off after the initial click through and used landing page testing or page optimization to improve results. I’ve already mentioned that Web data is very powerful. Clients that leverage browse data to inform their email content and customer segmentation see improved results in click throughs and revenue. One example of this is US Auto Parts Network, which integrated Omniture SiteCatalyst with Experian CheetahMail through Genesis. US Auto Parts measured post-email click behavior to learn about purchasing habits of customers. The company also utilized automatically triggered remarketing messages to cart abandoners that reminded them about products still in their shopping cart and offered a discount to complete the purchase. The integration resulted in a 50x increase in revenue per email and transaction rates

• What aren’t digital marketing professionals thinking about today that they should be?

Integrations have taught us that digital data offers insight into the behavior of our customers which leads to lift in conversion more than most data assets. Marketing professionals should be reevaluating their customer segmentation schemas as well as their online and offline campaigns to find the opportunities to leverage the behavioral data available through digital channels. Offline campaigns are much more costly than online campaigns; the models and customer segmentation are outdated in today’s digital environment. For example, marketers are not adding into their customer segmentation models the value of the promoters (referrers) and ambassadors (reviewers) on their file. RFM models still reign. Digital data offers us the ability to see what customers are actually interested in at this moment and how they interact with us on many levels. Marketers need to focus on putting resources behind digital data from their Web site and email marketing - as well as reviews, recommended items, search terms and more - across channels to enhance customer segmentation and to inform the content used in marketing campaigns.

• What cool enhancements might we expect to see from CheetahMail in the upcoming quarters?

It is a long list! We will be launching some really exciting application enhancements covering topics such as competitive data integration to more robust social networking features. We have strengthened our partner program to offer our clients fast and easy ways to use digital and social data in their email programs to realize the goals we’ve been discussing. We are also piloting different initiatives that integrate our Experian data assets and tools to increase conversion both online and offline.

• Christopher Parkin
• 1 response
•  Marketing Integration, Online Marketing

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