This week, I have the pleasure to present an email interview I conducted with Jennifer Wilson, Senior Product Manager at Webtrends. Jennifer takes care of the Marketing Warehouse, Visitor Intelligence, and Score suite of products. Marketing Warehouse is at the heart of the suite, and is a relational database. This allows for connection with other backend corporate systems. It also makes it possible to do analyses at the individual level, not only of visitors, but actual prospects and clients.
Since Jennifier and I share the same initials, I will use our whole names to identify each other. Well, you already know I’m not clever enough to provide the answers anyway.
Jacques Warren – What has been the evolution of Marketing Warehouse, VI and Score in the last couple of years ?
Jennifer Wilson – The evolution of this product line has been driven by rapidly changing market needs over the last 2-3 years. The market has shifted away from broad, general marketing and targeting efforts towards more personalized relevant targeting with individuals in the channels where the customer wants to interact. Along with these shifts, we’ve focused the product line to provide robust segmentation to drive insight and fuel action systems which help organizations:
• Secure revenue through online conversion
• Generate, nurture/mature leads online for off-line conversion
• Grow lifetime customer value and improve customer service
• Mature customer engagement with their organization or brand
Webtrends offers the most complete and accurate data collection methodologies today due to its patented first party cookie technology. Additionally, our unique data enrichment capabilities that allow for tracking individual online behaviors over time and across domains and patented visitor scoring solution provide value to organizations in their targeting efforts. Our Explore and Visitor Intelligence analysis tools provide insight for marketers to help discover additional targeting opportunities. And our industry-leading openness facilitate easy integration with action systems such as CRM, email, and CMS systems.
Jacques Warren – Can you develop on your “unique data enrichment capabilities”? What are they?
Jennifer Wilson – Our unique data enrichment capabilities include scoring and lifetime visitor values. Our patented visitor scoring solution helps organizations quantify visitor behavior so they can use this to segment and then drive targeting or marketing efforts. Because Marketing Warehouse creates profiles of visitors over their lifetime, we can track lifetime visitor values such as lifetime value (revenue) which make segmentation efforts more relevant. Frankly, we’ve seen a huge desire for integrating online and offline customer data to drive revenue and optimize marketing efforts across all customer channels. Industries such as financial services, healthcare, insurance, retail, and telecomm are early adopters of these solutions as they typically have multiple channels in which they interact with customers and can therefore benefit most from this integrated data. Because of this strong market demand, we’ve chosen to focus most on solving the ‘action’ side of the equation and less on the ‘insight’ part. However, we’re currently developing some more robust segmentation capabilities including discovery that will drive insight.
Jacques Warren – Could you clarify what you mean by choosing the “action side” vs the “insight part”?
Jennifer Wilson – Having insight alone doesn’t drive change (i.e. – increased revenue, improved conversion, etc). Rather, taking action is what drives changes. To that point, we’re focused on driving action/interaction with visitors/customers based on behavioral and demographic/psychographic data. In terms of the product, this means that in addition to collecting and enriching the data, we are providing easy ways to integrate this data with marketing actions systems like email, CRM, targeting/personalization, etc as well as integrating this data into organizations’ EDWs.
Jacques Warren – What is the relationship between MW suite and Analytics?
Jennifer Wilson – While both products are fueled by web behavior, they provide a different view of that data in order to serve very different needs. Webtrends Analytics is designed to provide visibility and insight into web behavior at an aggregate level for the purposes of marketing optimization. Marketing Warehouse is designed to provide robust segmentation to drive insight about customer behavior at an individual level which can be leveraged for targeting/marketing efforts at the individual level.
Jacques Warren – Would you say that the combination of MW suite and Analytics is really what brings Webtrends’s distinctive value to the market, instead of just, say, Analytics?
Jennifer Wilson – This is an interesting question. The two products actually solve different needs. Along the lines of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, Analytics meets the more fundamental needs. Only when those are met can you benefit from the needs met by Marketing Warehouse.
P.S. Sorry about the font and size mess; we exchange several emails and I copy/pasted. Couldn’t get the font right everywhere. Don’t know why.
Great read, as always.
One point I find interesting is the MW vs Analytics comment Jennifer made. Yes, Analytics has many fundamental needs and is a brilliant product when you know how to massage it, but I’m switching more and more over to the Warehouse, simply because I can do segmentation on it. That and I absolutely love drilling into all the levels of data, it’s great to be able to start at specific events and work backwards, or start from the whole “All visitors” point. There’s tons of good stuff in there.
Hi Bryan
I totally agree that segmentation IS the thing to do and that Analytics does not do it well (Custom Reports can be, hmm, clunky?). I actually think WT should market the Warehouse series (with VI and Score) way more agressively, especially since what we used to know as the Web Analytics paradigm will probably be owned by the giants’ free stuff.