Relevance matters - not just in email messages, but in email marketing applications. - Players in a band...

At ExactTarget, we’ve built a great business and an innovative, powerful email marketing application and platform to create, send and track one-to-one marketing messages via multiple modes (email, SMS, mobile, social). Our original premise of being simple, easy to use and suitable for use by any type of business has served us incredibly well. At the same time, market demand and opportunity have prompted us to build that messaging app/platform out to an extremely sophisticated, robust, scalable, secure, highly available enterprise-ready system today.

The investments in time, money, intellectual property and corporate commitment that it took to build our platform is not something that every firm has the desire, wherewithal, or for that matter the stomach to take on. There are firms, however, who would love to have access to a world class platform to build a one-to-one messaging application on.

It makes sense that if you’re going to send messages to your constituents, you’d want to do so on the best platform you can. But why would they build their own application on our platform, rather than simply use ours?

This is the essence of our “Embedded” business - whereby ExactTarget partners build their own messaging applications, powered by our platform. And there are a number of use cases or market demands that this channel solves for:

As the sophistication and breadth of our offering has increased, it has expanded a bit beyond the “ease of use” standard of many micro and small business users. From a packaging perspective, the breadth of the ET product offering can be a bit daunting to a user who is looking for “simple”. A number of our Embedded partners care for this by tapping the power of our platform and the breadth of the feature set, and packaging it in a “skinnied-down” version that simplifies the process of create/send/track email messages - and they offer it to the micro/SMB space at a price point that matches the reduced application set. It helps that the partners who build these apps are doing so because they already have a captive audience of existing customers who they serve for other micro/SMB needs like websites and direct mail marketing.

In the enterprise business space, ET fits best in an environment where a client has built or is building a “best of breed” marketing technology stack. In the mid-market and below, depending on business need, some customers prefer an “all-inclusive suite” approach to their marketing software. Even more appealing to these users is a suite that is “verticalized” - designed for their specific vertical market.

Still other partners are traditional direct marketers who do print and mail for their clients. They already own the database, and are in position to adapt the print and marketing campaigns they are already running into digital. The ability to leverage the existing database technologies and migrate to digital from print, or blend the two, allows them to show their clients a smart transition path - that doesn’t include moving the business to a separate digital vendor.

All of these approaches, and others like them, represent highly strategic partnership opportunities for ET. Building a powerful, robust, scalable, secure, reliable platform, and then making it available for developers and other software vendors to build on to serve whatever unique market segments they have a value proposition for, is the essence of the business web, cloud computing, web 2.0. Supporting those developers and software vendors in their efforts puts one-to-one messaging power in the hands of users we would never reach, or be relevant to, without them.

-Jim Kreller, Partner Team