Coremetrics, Digital Impact Team Up

E-mail marketer Digital Impact is teaming up with online intelligence firm Coremetrics to roll out a complete package for email campaigns and post-campaign tracking. The deal aims to create an all-in-one shop for planning, managing and tracking email marketing campaigns.

San Francisco-based Digital Impact will lend its technology platform — which handles data management, campaign analytics and execution — to the mix. Meanwhile, San Mateo, Calif.-based Coremetrics will link Digital Impact’s technology with its own Core Data Platform, a customer behavior analysis tool, to provide greater data analysis useful in targeting users before the campaign, and in analyzing results afterwards.

“This alliance offers tremendous value to our joint clients because Coremetrics gathers and provides comprehensive data on all aspects of customer online behavior, and now Digital Impact will leverage that data to further enhance the quality of online direct marketing campaigns,” said Coremetrics president and chief executive Scott Kauffman.

Both companies will market and sell the joint package to current and existing clients, amid sizable competition.

Two-year-old Coremetrics positions its services as a more potent alternative to analyzing server log files, which is typically how online marketers do much of their post-campaign tracking — asking, for instance, whether an email campaign built brand awareness and long-term customers. As a result, it’s also competing with the big players in audience measurement — WebSideStory and WebTrends, for instance.

Digital Impact, meanwhile, brings to the table four years of experience in CRM-focused email marketing, and a client roster that includes Citibank, Dell and MasterCard. Though it, too, faces steep competition from longtime email players like CMGI’s yesmail, which recently announced that it would be moving into the CRM space as well.

As a result, the companies are wagering that together they can make a more compelling offering for marketers.

“A deep understanding of all aspects of customer behavior is invaluable to marketers looking to consistently improve the quality of their online direct marketing campaigns,” said Gerardo Capiel, chief technology officer of Digital Impact. “We are excited about partnering with Coremetrics to further enhance our direct marketing campaign analytics capabilities, by including data gathered from online activities beyond email marketing and offering our customers an even more robust solution.”