Responsys' Recommendation Solution Round-Up
Since few of us have time to evaluate personalization data on a customer-by-customer basis, a number of companies now specialize in recommendation solutions to help in that task. As in a lot of 2.0 technologies, it can be very easy to get caught up in shopping for a technology product and end up in paralysis by analysis. Since this data needs to go into a marketing automation solution, would it not make sense for these vendors to help in this process?
Apparently, Responsys thinks so; the marketing automation company last week took the wraps off a set of integrations that make nine recommendation solutions (and a single testing solution) available through its Interact Campaign interface. "We're leveraging a community of innovators and using their technology on our campaigns," said John Berkley, the company's vice president of marketing.
The partners in this integration are Aggregate Knowledge, Baynote, Certona, Coremetrics, MyBuys, Omniture, Proclivity Systems, richrelevance and Strands. Omniture also provides the testing and targeting solutions to provide some validation and analysis of the effectiveness of campaigns driven by the recommendation solutions.
Berkley says the neat thing about the solution is that it allows marketers to avoid the hazards of using a single set of rules to determine messaging for different types of customers, or manually building rules. "All nine vendors' solutions are available through a one-click process, so not only can you find the very best content for each customer but you can match each customer with the best material for cross-sell and up-sell purposes."
Marketers use simple drop-down menus in Interact Campaign to choose the appropriate recommendation, testing or targeting solutions, then deliver content that's dynamically determined when the email campaign is sent.
When used well, that degree of personalization can translate into a quick return on investment. StubHub reported that its integrated campaigns drive 2500 percent more revenue per email than their average marketing campaigns. Another retailer reported that click-throughs had more than doubled.
