Responsys Adds Deep Analytics
E-mail marketing technology firm Responsys Monday launched its Marketing Performance Center, a new Web-based reporting and analytics tool aimed at providing sophisticated and in-depth analysis of multiple metrics across multi-channel marketing campaigns.
Palo Alto, Calif.-based Responsys will provide Marketing Performance Center on the same ASP basis as its outsourced online marketing platform Responsys Interact, with a monthly subscription fee based on the amount of data and the degree of analytics, starting at $1,000 a month.
“We've always had a strong reporting engine, but we found customers were not getting the results they hoped for,” said Responsys vice president of marketing Kathy Gogan. “So we built this analytics platform to do decision support on campaigns.” With the new tools, she said, marketers can understand why, for example, one age group responded better to a certain campaign.
Much of the new analytics capability was built on technology gained with Responsys' purchase of WebAcumen in January of 2002.
While the functionality Responsys offers is on par with many others, said Jupiter Research analyst David Daniels, “What it does do is respond to the marketplace need of marketers to have more sophisticated self-service tools. In an era of doing more with less resources, this type of offering makes it easier.” Daniels said that many Responsys competitors take more of a services approach, assigning an account management team to help the company gather and analyze data.
Marketing Performance Center provides reports on deliverability issues including open and bounce rates, unsubscribes and spam complaints, while it tracks key metrics and response rates by campaign, segment, offer, message type, and domain. It also monitors acquisition, offer and retention effectiveness to aggregate campaign results.
Responsys' suite of products and services integrate with CRM applications and data warehouse and call center systems via APIs and an integration protocol, allowing Responsys to integrate customer and transaction with marketing campaigns for analysis or for offline follow-up. “The responses captured by our system flow into the Marketing Performance Center, where you can do a drill-down analysis, and tune the messaging, either by going back into Interact for another campaign, or back into your CRM system,” Gogan said. She added that a wide variety of data sources can be pulled into the Marketing Performance Center, including online shopping carts and point-of-sale systems.
Daniels said that the Marketing Performance Center was more integrated than some others, “and being able to do that in an automated fashion is of great benefit.” He said there was a growing trend, even among companies with large and complicated on- and offline businesses, to turn to hosted analytics offerings, because it's much faster to get them up and running. An in-house product might take months to get up and running, while a hosted product could take a week or less, with the added benefit the that hosted provider can act as the integrator of the large and disparate systems with the organization. Daniels said, “With the scale and technology required [by complex enterprises], it makes sense to get this piece of the infrastructure outside of the corporate firewall.”
