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Marketing managers understand the value of customer data. The smallest details provide insight you can use to target your subscribers with timely, relevant, and targeted email messages. Many organizations have already integrated web analytics into their email marketing solutions as a way to follow their subscribers’ pathways through their web sites from their email campaigns. Doing so shows the marketers what pages each visitor viewed, what order the pages were viewed in, how much time was spent on each page, and the exit point. It also allows them to tie conversion back to a particular campaign.
All of this is valuable information that allows marketers to track results accurately while gaining pertinent profiling data on subscribers’ wants and needs. And, knowing what your subscribers want and sending them the information when they want it is the key to campaign success.
However, the information isn’t complete. Web analytics allows you to track conversion to a specific email campaign, but the purchase information is stored somewhere else. In fact, it is likely that your organization has a lot of customer data stored in a number of applications that you could use to streamline your email campaigns. The question is, how?
Listrak, a leading provider of email marketing solutions, has put together the following white paper that shows you the benefits of integrating your email marketing solution with external applications, such as CRM. It also discusses integration best practices and what you can do to minimize developmental chal-lenges to ensure success. This white paper is intended to give marketing managers an understanding of the integration process and will provide a high level technical overview of web service API integration. It is important for marketers to know what to expect during the integration process. API integration is complex, but with advanced planning, detailed roadmaps, and clearly communicated end goals, the marketing team will pave the way for a smooth integration.
Unify Systems, Automate Processes
API stands for Application Programming Interface. Essentially, an API is a bridge between unrelated soft-ware applications that allows them to communicate with each other, share data, and work together. APIs streamline business processes by automating the transfer of data and eliminating the need for manual, time consuming imports and exports. This ensures that the data is up-to-date and accurate across the multiple applications to help reduce processing errors.
APIs allow you to unify systems to build one major marketing tool. For example, if you integrate your email marketing solution with your CRM application, you gain additional insight into your contacts that you cannot capture through email marketing alone, such as purchase history. While you could manually export the data from the CRM application, then cross-check the customers against your subscriber list in your email marketing solution, then add the purchase history to each subscriber’s profile, and finally sort the data by item purchased, that process is long and involved and prone to mistakes. Instead, an API safeguards the information by allowing you to mine the data directly from the CRM application. This way, you can target customers that purchased a specific item and send them a relevant email containing cross-selling information on a related product.
CRM and sales automation tools are the two most popular applications that organizations are integrating with email marketing solutions as they provide direct, customer-centric data. However, APIs can be used to integrate any system so you can build a one-of-a-kind solution that meets your exact business needs. An e-commerce company could integrate its shopping cart with its email marketing solution to send automated messages to customers that have abandoned their carts, offering a special discount to complete the purchase. An online magazine could integrate its CMS application with its email marketing solution to send automated messages on the new articles it published to all of the contacts that have opted to receive that information. A financial institution could integrate its BAS software with its email marketing solu-tion to send automated customer statements via email, thereby eliminating the need to print and mail the statements, but ensuring that it maintains compliancy with Sarbanes-Oxley. Because all of the processes are automated, it will save each organization a lot of time and money. And because the emails are sent in a timely fashion and contain relevant information, they are increasing their customer satisfaction and overall ROI.
The possibilities of what you can accomplish with an API are virtually limitless. However, it takes careful planning and very specific, defined business rules in order to make it work properly.
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