Lycos, Datran partner

E-mail to grow, integrate more with other channels in '08: Datran

Online firm Lycos has partnered with e-mail services firm Datran Media in a move to centralize its e-mail marketing and clean up its database.

Lycos, a social publishing, media and search services firm, is using Datran's StormPost platform to manage e-mail newsletters for its 10 million-member network, including the Tripod, Lycos 50, Gamesville and Angelfire properties. The first step was to manage the large database.

“Lycos has been running its own database in-house and it just wasn't working, so we worked with another software company, but we weren't able to manage such a large database with them,” said Brigitte LaMarche, director of marketing for Lycos. “Datran had the metrics and the analytics that we needed.”

Lycos sends e-mail newsletters from each of its properties twice a month. Its property Gamesville recently launched a Gamesville Gold e-mail to its online gaming audience, which skews towards women older than a traditional gamer.

According to LaMarche, since Lycos began working with Datran, its deliverability has gotten better, though she didn't say by how much.

Now that the lists are in better shape, she said, expect more marketing plans to come from Lycos.

“For now we have been working on stabilizing our mailings and making sure that people want to be on the list, but we plan to do more with e-mail in the future,” LaMarche added.