Real estate data firm CoStar selects ExactTarget for e-mail

Commercial real estate research and information firm CoStar Group has selected the ExactTarget to power its revamp e-mail marketing efforts.

For CoStar, whose main product is a proprietary database of commercial transactions, e-mail is an important tool for retention.

“Our usage of e-mail revolves around education and retention for our subscribers because our primary goal is to keep the subscribers and users that we have in our database active,” said Dan Kimball, vice president of marketing at CoStar Group. “We've got about 80,000 subscribers to our product. And one of our greatest challenges is making sure that those 80,000 subscribers are well-educated about our product and are engaged in our product.”

CoStar sends e-mails to its list on a daily basis, but these e-mails are highly segmented, based on the types of CoStar products the subscriber uses and how long the subscriber has been on the list. For example, a new subscriber may get a welcome e-mail or an educational e-mail about the product. Whereas a subscriber who has been on the list for a couple of years, may get a more loyalty focused message. CoStar will use the
ExactTarget platform to build and send these personalized property e-mails.

CoStar will also use ExactTarget's Automated Interaction Management to automate data aggregation from its customer relationship management database and Omniture Web analytics to help manage the back end.

The two companies inked the deal last week and will be implementing over the coming weeks.