Portrait Software, a provider of customer interaction optimization software, has acquired Million Handshakes, an outbound campaign management and dialog marketing company. Details for the deal were undisclosed.
Bank of America Prime Brokerage has now integrated Soffront CRM into its customer service operations. The production support group of Bank of America Prime Brokerage reviewed several programs before purchasing Soffront's modules in April 2007. The company, which delivers financing and assists in transactions for its clients, demoed the Soffront products for months before fully implementing them.
Microsoft has partnered with global call center and customer relations management outsourcer EDS to offer Microsoft Dynamics CRM as an EDS enterprise application.
Within the framework of its partnership with Unica Corp., French cheese manufacturer Bel Group has selected Sogec Marketing for its CRM efforts. Bel has contracted the two marketing firms to execute cross-channel marketing campaigns aimed at growing customer relationships.
In general, marketers are good at managing their marketing systems in-house on a day-to-day basis. But the skill sets used to create day-to-day reports and analyses are different than those needed to assess the information in a database to make decisions about how to track customer behavior, what data is needed and how to attack the marketplace.
DMNews' Essential Guide to Lists, Database Marketing & Data Services
Ben Chestnut, co-founder, MailChimp.com March 19, 2008
A while back, CNN Money ran an article called "Kroger's Secret Marketing Weapon" — about how the company is using database mining to market to its customers. Products on Kroger's shelves are assigned a score based on attributes such as price, quality, freshness and size of package. The system then searches for customers whose shopping carts have similar scores, and groups those shoppers together into segments, ranging from budget shoppers to dieting shoppers to family-focused ones.
