Email Marketing by the Numbers: How to Use the World’s Greatest Marketing Tool to Take Any Organization to the Next Level

Why Would an Organization Want to Integrate?

There are four major reasons to integrate:

• Sync the database of record. When setting up your email marketing program, you make a choice—either your vendor or your marketing system is the database of record (DoR). However, no matter how well you planned it, changes to the data always flow into the non-DoR (especially subscription, unsubscribe, or bounce information). Integration can help you sync that data, even in real-time.

• Provide email marketing from within other systems. You probably have at least half a dozen IDs and passwords between your machine login, your marketing systems logins, and your personal logins. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could define your recipient criteria and kick off an email to only those who meet it—just by clicking one button? Integration makes that sort of simplification possible.

• Automate. You are always moving data from your marketing systems to your vendor’s database. That means you may be manually exporting email addresses and attribute data and importing into your email system. Or, you may be exporting tracking data (opens, clicks) and importing in to your marketing systems. It’s a lot of back-and-forth, which can be automated via integration as nightly or weekly data feeds.

• Syndicate content. Content already resides in your database or on your website (it may even be categorized by audience). With integration, you’re able to pull that custom content in from your servers or website at email send time and ...