Elana Anderson commented on my recent response to her article, A Good Email Marketing Program Costs Money. She concluded that I'm suggesting companies "implode all of the operational systems and start from scratch." She said my commentary was nice, but unrealistic for "large, very large companies." I didn’t say to blow up or implode anything. What I suggested is that as an industry, we shouldn’t continually ask marketers to pay more to perpetuate the fragmentation that plagues their interactive marketing operations. For too long, the collective knee-jerk reaction of the industry, as evident from Elana’s original article and follow up comment, has been to accept this as the operational status quo for how things are done. Some believe it’s a fact of life…at Knotice we think it can be fixed. Nothing wrong with a difference of opinion.
I had a chance to observe the “operational status-quo” in its ridiculously inefficient glory earlier this year at a customer summit for a leading analytics provider. During a seminar on analytics-driven email marketing, an hour was spent explaining how to get rudimentary site visitor segments exported out of the analytics package and imported into an ESP so emails could be triggered by browsing behavior (for the record, there were some “large, very large” companies in attendance wanting to know how to do this).
To think that with all of our industry’s digital marketing power, recommending to batch imports and exports is a joke. Perhaps a better alternative is simply to have an email marketing platform that can also store web analytics behavior in real-time so you can be thinking about campaign strategies instead of integration strategies. These types of platforms are out there.
But, as Elana pointed out in her response, online behavioral information is just one piece of the puzzle. In “large, very large” companies, information about customers comes from many systems across many channels. We just can’t implode all of the operational systems and start from scratch. That’s why we recommend web services as a less combustible approach. As part of our webinar a few months ago, Taking Shape: The Online Marketing Database, we provided an introduction of how this can work to streamline implementation, allowing companies to leverage their existing legacy environment instead of making wholesale changes.
