Avenue A Media Launches 1-to-1 Customer Management Tool

Avenue A Media in Seattle launched a new service, Sales Process Management, designed to generate incremental sales by recognizing past visitors, delivering customized ads and returning prospects to the content they were interested in when visiting a client’s site.

Sales Process Management can track, customize, and return visitor information across the entire Internet ad space rather than on just a limited set of pre- determined ad locations, the company said.

“Because we can serve content to virtually the entire Web,” said Mike Leo, vice president of account services, “Avenue A can recognize a client’s customer and instantly deliver a targeted message that brings him back into the sales process.”

The tool uses both Avenue A’s data warehousing and ad serving capabilities to deliver customized messages. Avenue A analysts first work with clients to detail their online sales process and the desired outcome of each interaction.

Avenue A then tracks Web site visitors and stores their use patterns in a data warehouse. The central ad serving system recognizes users and serves up ads customized to preferences and past shopping behavior. When the user clicks on the customized ad, the ad serving system will deliver the user to a specific location, effectively inserting the user back into the appropriate place in the sales process. Although information regarding the visitors’ activities is collected and stored, no personal information is obtained, the company said.

Avenue A said Sales Process Management thus enables advertisers to initiate a user-customized marketing process that begins with serving a banner ad, continues through the site-based sales process and culminates with a sale–a true one-to-one marketing activity linked to results.

Avenue A Media offers media planning, buying, serving and reporting services and collects information in real-time with its new Custom ROI metrics for its clients’ campaigns, then optimizes to emphasize the most effective ads and Web sites.

Custom ROI (the name is trademarked) is a return-on-investment-driven advertising service that links Internet advertising expenditures to a company’s business and marketing objectives.

“We help our clients articulate the ROI metrics that matter most and track them,” said Mike Galgon, Avenue A’s president. “For example, sales are certainly important, but building brand awareness or getting the company’s brochure into a prospect’s hands may also be critical measures of success.”