Inbox Insider: Integration tools help to sort through data

Integrating data is one of the major challenges e-mail marketers face today. While e-mail campaigns allow marketers to collect many types of data, they are often faced with difficult decisions on how to use this information and apply it to future campaigns.

E-mail service provider e-Dialog is addressing this challenge with a segmentation tool, called Insight Builder, that debuted March 30. The tool helps marketers analyze their data and create new campaigns based on the information.

Using the platform, marketers can create and prioritize audience segments so subscribers receive targeted messages based on select criteria, such as their place in the customer lifecycle or their behavioral, demographic or preference data. Marketers can then distribute segmented messages to these audiences in real time and make changes as they see fit.

Publishers Clearing House, which sends daily e-mails to about 30 audiences, is using the tool. For large mailings, it sends e-mail messages to more than 100 audiences. Sal Tripi, director of operations at PCH, has tested the tool in beta for several months. He says it helped him send better-targeted mailings and create test segments, then run these segments against additional audience criteria. These test segments are created daily as consumers interact with the brand and as it gathers new data.

Tripi also told DMNews that this approach to using data has cut down the time it takes to create a campaign by hours each day.