Lots of Character: Lyris's Upgraded Campaign Tool

Lyris Technologies has announced the availability of ListManager 9.0, the latest version of its on-demand email marketing application. In addition to one-click navigation and improved mail queue speed, ListManager 9.0 adds Engagement Index, a highly detailed means of comparing the effectiveness of campaigns against one another. "Engagement Index is one of the most interesting pieces of new functionality," says David Dabbah, director of sales and marketing for Lyris. "It enables [users] to look at two separate campaigns at a high level to see which campaign is more effective." Competitive applications that do this typically only look at opens, clicks, and conversions, according to Dabbah. Engagement Index adds unsubscribes, forwards, and subsequent transactions to the stat pile, comparing it all to industry benchmarks. David Daniels, research director at Jupiter Research, agrees that Engagement Index is a move in the right direction. "This addresses what we've identified as a need for marketers to focus on the right KPIs," Daniels says. "There's been much talk of personalization and greater complexity, but nobody's been engineered to do it." A new A/B split testing allows marketers to fine-tune subject lines, content, and offers with random test segments before campaigns go live; Dabbah notes that multivariable testing is also possible as a customization. ListManager 9 also includes an enhanced Report Dashboard, a snapshot of campaign trends that includes membership, which mailings generated the most purchases, and back-end information like server and ISP performance. The dashboard, and in fact the entire release, includes full integration of AJAX and Flash technology. "[Lyris has] really improved the way reporting and metrics within the application are made available," Daniels says. Other improvements to ListManager include a more efficient mail queue, with send speeds up to six times faster; duplicate detection speed is up to 10 times faster than previous versions. Navigation within the application is now largely a one-click affair, according to Dabbah, whether looking for top-level menu items or subordinate pages. "Of all the [email service providers] in the marketing space, they've definitely joined just a couple that have used AJAX and Flash to the fullest potential," Daniels says. "Lyris is setting the stage for marketers to become more sophisticated." Related articles: Unica Merges Online With Offline 8 Email Marketing Tips Direct Marketing Trends for 2006

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