Email Marketing Best Practices:
Integration Tactics that Work
By Megan Ouellet, Director of Marketing for Listrak
February 19, 2008
Marketing managers understand the value of customer data. The smallest details provide insight you can use to target your subscribers with timely, relevant, and targeted email messages. Many organizations have already integrated web analytics into their email marketing solutions as a way to follow their subscribers’ pathways through their web sites from their email campaigns. Doing so shows the marketers what pages each visitor viewed, what order the pages were viewed in, how much time was spent on each page, and the exit point. It also allows them to tie conversion back to a particular campaign.
All of this is valuable information that allows marketers to track results accurately while gaining pertinent profiling data on subscribers’ wants and needs. And, knowing what your subscribers want and sending them the information when they want it is the key to campaign success.
However, the information isn’t complete. Web analytics allows you to track conversion to a specific email campaign, but the purchase information is stored somewhere else. In fact, it is likely that your organization has a lot of customer data stored in a number of applications that you could use to streamline your email campaigns. The question is, how?
Listrak, a leading provider of email marketing solutions, has put together the following white paper that shows you the benefits of integrating your email marketing solution with external applications, such as CRM. It also discusses integration best practices and what you can do to minimize developmental challenges to ensure success. This white paper is intended to give marketing managers an understanding of the integration process and will provide a high level technical overview of web service API integration. It is important for marketers to know what to expect during the integration process. API integration is complex, but with advanced planning, detailed roadmaps, and clearly communicated end goals, the marketing team will pave the way for a smooth integration.
