Annuncio Live Brings Internet Marketing Campaigns

The Internet changes everything about the customer relationship. The real-time nature of Internet transactions means an organization needs to be able to respond quickly to each customer's unique needs. Attracting and maintaining long-term relationships is a challenge when competing against the shear numbers of products and services available with the click of a mouse. And the 'round-the-clock availability of Internet services demands a new level of responsiveness from organizations.

Meeting the demands of the Internet age is the goal of Annuncio Live, a marketing automation solution enabling one-to-one campaigns, integrated marketing campaigns, customer tracking and profiling, and campaign metrics. The program boosts return on marketing investments by helping organizations build customer relationships, by tracking and measuring campaign results and by providing a reliable system that's ready whenever the customer is.

Annuncio Live manages and automates the entire marketing process- -from planning and segmentation to execution and measurement. While traditional marketing campaigns might take months to design and implement, Annuncio live allows marketing professionals to quickly design, launch and monitor campaigns from the desktop.
The suite supports a variety of campaigns, including incentive programs, loyalty and relationship programs, newsletters and surveys, lead qualification, tracking, maintenance and subscription renewals.

The product includes four main components:

* LiveProfile component is an interactive database that enables marketers to define customer profiles, then capture customer data and update profiles automatically. It also builds a history of all campaign activities and customer responses and maintains profile data for personalized and targeted communications.

* LiveAudience allows organizations to create audiences for delivery of targeted offers and messages. It uses any combination of profile information to create a specific target audience, provides testing of offers and messages and tracks the performance of ad banners, Web links, e-mails and offline marketing.

* LiveCampaign allows professionals to create and manage campaigns from their desktop through a guided, easy-to-use interface. It also automates personalized e-mail and Web interactions to deliver a customized, targeted experience to customers.

* LiveResults enables real-time campaign tracking and analysis of campaign effectiveness. It allows marketers to view results at any time. The system provides built-in campaign metrics and standard reports for response data, curves and test cells.

Using Annuncio Live, Netcenter, Netscape's leading portal site, has been able to uncover important user patterns, says Dorene Wood, direct marketing manager. The ability to provide one-to-one marketing services to its 10 million members was a major goal for Netcenter, Wood says "You can learn more about who your user is and what they want. That's the kind of stuff that was difficult to do before."

"Annuncio is really targeted to doing direct marketing of the audience versus just doing site marketing," she says. "Other companies focus just on bringing members in. Annuncio has tools built in to retain the current member base."

Netcenter implemented a "comments" button on its e-mail campaigns using the product. "In all communications, members have the opportunity to click on the button and provide feedback," Wood says. "When we're testing, we actually get that feedback via e-mail. We've actually made tweaks and changes based on the comments," she says.

Netcenter also uses the product to offer a survey for people who unsubscribe to the service, and it is working on releasing a weekly newsletter.

Annuncio Live begins in the low $100,000 range. Its Windows NT or UNIX Sun Solaris server technology provides scalability, load balancing, failure recovery and easy integration. "Live" database runs on Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server.