TreeHouse Interactive Offers Four Key Upgrades

During his college years Craig Flynn lived in an apartment so small you could use the facilities and wash your hands at the same time, jokes his brother Erich Flynn. The apartment, which Erich calls "crummy," was situated above a garage alongside elm and maple trees. And though Craig no longer lives there, its memory continues to serve as a reminder of struggle. That's because when the Flynn brothers started their own company in 1997 they gave it the same nickname they'd given Craig's "crummy" apartment: the TreeHouse.

Today that company, TreeHouse Interactive, delivers a suite of software-as-a-service CRM solutions to small enterprises as well as Fortune 500 companies. The company's Marketing View demand generation and marketing automation software features email marketing automation tools, form builders, and lead management and lead nurturing capabilities. Recently the software was upgraded to include the following:

• Web Services;
• Selective Overwrite for Salesforce.com integration;  
• GoToWebinar integration; and
• Integrated Landing Page Analytics.

"Email marketing is not for the faint of heart," Erich says. "Deliverability is the toughest thing we do. With Marketing View every customer is set up with enterprise-class deliverability."

Prior to the Web Services upgrade Erich says TreeHouse looked at the industry's current marketing automation offerings and found a gap. Now, with TreeHouse's published set of application programming interfaces, customers can retrieve and post data to the system, as opposed to most high-end systems that allow customers the same functionality on a contact level but do not allow survey, landing page, or form submissions to be posted or queried on demand.

"This is something our current customer set is finding very useful," Erich says. "You can take any standard, external, or proprietary system and send data into Marketing View, and based on the change in that data you can create automation."  

Marketing View has been fully integrated with Salesforce.com for the past two years. With the current upgrade new Selective Overwrite Capability gives TreeHouse customers more control over which data is pushed from a landing page or form into Salesforce. Marketers can now choose whether they want to overwrite individual lead or contact object fields.

Erich says TreeHouse received request after request from clients to integrate with major webinar companies. He says a huge frustration for marketers is using a webinar service that forces them to use their forms, thus requiring that marketers manually transfer the information collected in webinar systems over to marketing automation systems. The GoToWebinar Integration allows marketers to essentially post to both systems at the same time.

"We think we're the leader here," says Erich regarding TreeHouse's Integrated Landing Page Analytics. "There is all sorts of stuff you can do at the click of a button with our landing page technology. We now incorporate not only the landing page data but also the Web analytics. I don't have to go to Google or Omniture. It's right here in my marketing system. I can see my conversions, abandons, and visits. The data is centralized so as a marketer I don't have to go to more than one place."

Marketing View's new analytics capabilities integrate form visits, conversions, abandonments, and referral URLs directly into form reports. As a result, when landing pages and emails are shared through social media or other means, marketers can see which sites are responsible for conversions, according to the TreeHouse press release.

"People are starting to understand that [marketing automation] is not just lead generation or marketing anymore," says Jim Dickie, managing partner at research firm CSO Insights. "It's tying together the rest of the enterprise."

Dickie says TreeHouse has provided businesses with exactly what they need: "To have technology interactions go together so that somebody in support doesn't need to become a marketing expert." 

Related Articles

Partner Collaboration Critical to Innovation

Survey reports that working together makes everyone stronger.

TreeHouse Interactive Digs Up the Roots of ROI

New features in the company's Marketing View product focus on demand generation and connecting campaigns to leads.

Partners Bark Up the Right Tree

TreeHouse Interactive's channel management suite gets an overhaul in advance of integration with Oracle CRM On Demand.

Fine-Tuning the Channel

They're not exactly employees, and they're not quite customers, but your channel partners can be equally important -- and you can't just direct them by remote control.

PRM Rides the CRM Tide

Oracle and SAP are the big kahunas in the Forrester Wave for partner management, but there are numerous others to choose from among on-demand and specialty vendors.