February 20, 2013
By Judith Aquino,

TreeHouse Interactive to Roll Out Enhanced Lead Nurturing Tools

Marketing automation provider TreeHouse Interactive Tuesday announced the introduction of a suite of nurturing campaign design tools called Action Studio as part of its Marketing View marketing automation platform. Action Studio is designed to let marketers create personalized nurturing campaigns by accessing behavioral and contact data when creating automated and personalized nurturing paths.

When it comes to lead nurturing, one of the challenges that marketers often face, according to TreeHouse Interactive CEO Erich Flynn, is that the process is too complex. "Many of the solutions out there require you to manually connect each contact with your other data points, and others don't let you see all the pieces that are connected," Flynn asserts. "We focused on giving marketing teams tools that make it easy to tap into behavioral and contact data so that they can quickly and effectively create relevant nurturing campaigns."

With the integration of Action Studio into Marketing View, marketers will receive a set of visual tools that enable them to drag and drop events and actions on their screen, add prospect filtering rules, and create branching paths depending on the prospective customers' actions. The behavioral events that can trigger an action include form submissions, email opens, email link clicks, Web site visits, or specific page views. A change in contact information can also serve as a nurturing trigger, which may have resulted, for example, from a prospect qualification in a connected CRM system.

Action Studio then uses a set of actions to push prospects forward in the buying cycle. These actions include sending timed nurturing emails, sending sales executive alerts, updating external Webinar systems, and sending sales-qualified leads directly into the sales team's CRM system. The new features will be rolled out in the second quarter of this year.

TreeHouse is also in the process of enhancing its social media capabilities. "We were the first to integrate landing pages on Facebook," Flynn says. "And if someone also likes your tweet or what's on your LinkedIn profile, you want to respond to that. Having a multichannel approach to their campaigns is important to our customers, and so we're looking into a lot of interesting stuff."