As most marketers know, multi-channel marketing is offering customers more than one way to interact with a company or purchase a product. These channels can include print media, banner ads, ecommerce website, and of course my personal favorite…email.
In my experience, one of the challenges of multi-channel marketing is managing and leveraging the data for each different channel of communication while still providing a cohesive experience to recipients.
That is where APIs and Integration can come to the rescue!
For example, integrating your email initiatives with your web analytics allows for powerful data gathering and manipulation. ExactTarget emails (and links within emails) can be configured to pass over a campaign-specific identifier to your web page, which is then connected to your web analytics package. Web analytics can indicate which purchases were the result of your email and which were not. This can help easily differentiate audiences for you to remarket to.
Additionally, campaign information be pushed both ways: from an ExactTarget email to your web analytics package, and from web analytics back in to ExactTarget. For example, by using the ExactTarget API or program solution, web analytics data can easily be populated back into your account. Once the data is back in your ExactTarget account, it can then be used to send even more targeted, relevant emails for your subscribers.
In many cases, businesses have more systems than just web analytics and an email provider (for example, a CRM, CMS, eCommerce database, or even a home-grown back office system.) It would take too many hours to manually pull all that data together, keep it up to date, and utilize the data for marketing campaigns.
Automating the synch-up of all that data across multiple channels is one of the most appealing parts of using an integration. Integration may not be the beginning or end of multi-channel marketing, but it is the piece of the pie that keeps all the information flowing from point A to point B and back again.
Jessica Koch
Integration Consultant
