I had a very nice conversation with Loren T. McDonald, CMO of JL Halsey , the company bought ClickTracks -
And this is what I put in my Google Calender for the meeting -
Meeting with Loren McDonald, CMO of JL Halsey is presenting a discussion with Jeannie Mullen of Ogilvy One about future trends in email marketing and what practices marketers are really engaging in now.
Turns out we talked more about the strategy of where ClickTracks needs to go - and what JL Halsey's acquisition of ClickTracks, Hot Banana, EmailLabs means in that strategy and how the new platform JL Halsey is building contrasts with Google Analytics on the low end and Omniture, Visual Sciences, Coremetrics, etc - on the high end.
And that was a good conversation to have - and we did get a couple of words in about Email Marketing - that the new platform being built will allow for having a dashboard where you can integrate email marketing with the rest of your web analytics and tie in Content Management Systems (the Hot Banana part).
Loren talked about the "big 4" of Web Analytics and wondered why ClickTracks was not one of them......and then we agreed the audience for the Big 4 are really not the same audience that ClickTracks went after. But...if ClickTracks wanted to go after big, enterprise sites, they could do a lot of case studies with Intuit since Intuit uses ClickTracks and Avinash Kaushik is a very strong supporter of ClickTracks for what it does well (visual representation of traffic patterns and good navigation reports). Besides, John Marshall, the head of ClickTracks, personally services the Intuit account and that always helps.
What Loren has to do now - is come up with the strategy of what ClickTrack does to make sure it is sufficiently differentiated from Google Analytics - which is becoming harder to do as Google keeps adding on capabilities to GA. yet there are places where GA will not go what ClickTracks can live very well, like email marketing..... which brought the circle of our conversation to the point we began.
Loren McDonald helped to build the EmailLabs brand and make the company a leader that it is today. In his AD:TECH session on the future of email marketing, he mentioned that he talked a lot about the real purpose of email marketing – namely, to drive subscribers to take action on a company’s site.
Web analytics are generally superior in measuring and summarizing the impact of email marketing at the strategic level (e.g., conversions, ROI, and the bottom line) - they go beyond click-through and open rates to pinpoint what’s actually occurring on the Web site in terms of conversions.
- Getting good metrics on it and integrating it with ClickTracks - and opening up the platform to allow other email software - working on segmentation of email responses - is a nice place where ClickTracks new platform can live.
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