What is SaaS, you ask? It's an acronym for "software as a service." SaaS is beginning to replace terms like ASP (application service provider), hosted software, etc., that describe software made available over the Web.

So why do I love it?

Reason #1--It's what we do.
The first reason I love SaaS is that it's what we do at Silverpop. We manage the servers, the software and the network as one complete solution for our clients. I've been running or funding companies involved with creating and selling software for almost 25 years, and I can tell you that SaaS is going to change the world of technology.

Reason #2--SaaS is REALLY useful for marketers.
The relationship between marketers and IT is often strained or worse. IT departments thrive on long-term planning, predictable requirements and relatively static software solutions. Marketing, on the other hand, is all about change. If a competitor makes a move, marketers are expected to respond--immediately. If a critical campaign isn't getting the response it needs, marketers must be able to drop everything, change the campaign and re-launch. IT cycles and marketing needs just don't align in most situations.

To put it another way, if an IT solution works well at Coke, then Pepsi would be interested in looking at it, too. But the idea of Coke or Pepsi ever doing anything similar in the marketing departments is so hard to imagine that people use the two companies as an aphorism of competition.

SaaS changes everything for marketers. All of sudden, marketers get an IT solution custom-built for their needs. And, even more important, the support and maintenance of that solution are designed around the cycles and planning needs unique to marketing. Few internal IT departments could afford the kind of minute-to-minute support that marketers crave. Yet when a SaaS company like Silverpop provides a similar solution across hundreds of marketers, the economics start to make a lot of sense.

SaaS isn't going to put IT out of business. Not by a stretch. It will, however, move some (and maybe most) of the software used by marketers out of the corporate data center and into the hands of purpose-built companies that specialize in the service models that marketers demand.

Stay tuned for more reasons why I love SaaS...

Posted by Bill Nussey at 10:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If you measure the momentum of an industry by how many people you have to squeeze by on a tradeshow floor, then interactive marketing as evidenced by ad:tech, is on fire. The conference in New York this week had as much buzz as anything I've seen since 1999. The sessions focused on the typical themes of past ad:techs (affiliate networks, search, email, etc.), but the rooms were all packed. The tradeshow area is what really blew me away, though. A few years ago, it was one section on the second floor of the Hilton. This year, it went on... and on... and on... for several floors, and into the hallways. Wow. Tons of new companies were there, as well as a bunch of familiar names.

I spoke on a panel about the integration of Web analytics and email. We had a great audience, and the questions kept coming until we were kicked out of the room. A few of the take-aways from our panel:

• David Baker, the moderator from Avenue A / Razorfish did a great job of pulling this together. He talked a lot about dashboards, and how to create a single view on your marketing data.
• Margie Chiu, also from Avenue A, shared some great real-world experience on these integrations. One of my favorite points from Margie is the idea that the single, simple, ultimate measurement to use for online campaigns is revenue per campaign. Then, starting with such a high-level view, you can look at why revenue has changed from previous campaigns. I liked this a lot because it gets right to the heart of things and only highlights the drill-down metrics that are affecting the changes (e.g., larger list, reduced opens, etc.).
• Jay Kulkarni from Theorem talked about many of the specific technical challenges in moving email data into analytics systems.
• I talked about how integration between email and Web analytics can occur at several levels: link data (so the analytics tool knows which campaigns to assign clicks to), triggered communications (like shopping cart abandonment) and bi-directional reporting (looking at the data in a single view). And since Silverpop has done integration work with all the major analytics players, I provided a quick overview of our experience with the vendors as well as their relative strengths.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 10:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

For those who haven't heard, the Direct Marketing Association recently released some pretty astounding numbers surrounding email. In its latest Power of Direct economic-impact study, the DMA reports that in 2005, email marketing returned an astonishing $57.25 for every dollar spent. The same study found that the ROI of non-email-related online marketing was $22.52, or less than half.

All told, advertisers spent $12 billion for non-email-related online marketing, but just $300 million for email. Or put another way, email provides more than twice the ROI of other Internet marketing channels, but gets only 2.5 percent of the investment. I suspect we'll see that percentage grow significantly over time as more companies begin to understand email's unique ability to cultivate customer loyalty and high ROI over the long-term. Thanks to Email Data Source CEO Bill McCloskey, who ponders this conundrum in his blog.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 09:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)