Execs and Accounts for April 7, 2003

Borders has tapped ForeSee Results to measure and manage the effectiveness of its subscription-based email newsletters. ForeSee will help the book and music retailer, which maintains approximately 12 newsletters, analyze how the mailings impact overall customer satisfaction and cross-channel effectiveness.

Marilyn Slankard, VP of marketing services for Borders, said ForeSee Results was chosen because of its ability to provide “precise, actionable insight on how customers are responding to the newsletters.”

Marketing optimization firm CentrPort is expanding its North American sales organization due to increased market demand. Christopher Seeger, John Geraghty and Richard DeFrancisco will serve as regional vice presidents of sales for the Central, Eastern and Western regions, respectively.

Prior to joining CentrPort, Seeger held positions at Siebel Systems, Oracle and Broadbase; Geraghty served with Exchange Applications and Vantive; and DeFrancisco clocked stints at Teradata and PricewaterhouseCoopers’ systems integration group.

“Despite consumers’ overwhelming adoption of the Internet as a tool for commerce, traditional enterprise CRM solutions continue to ignore the marketing potential of online channels,” said Bill Zierolf, president and CEO of CentrPort. “The increased sophistication of today’s marketers, coupled with their continuing need to do more with less, has created more demand for our technology and solutions.”

E-mail marketing firm Quris has joined the Network Advertising Initiative’s E-mail Service Provider coalition as a charter member. The coalition represents the interests of legitimate opt-in marketers, advocating email as a viable communications tool as the war against spam rages on. One of the organization’s hot button issues is that of “false positives,” which occur when a junk email filter incorrectly screens out legitimate messages.

“Quris is dedicated to helping our Fortune 1000 clients ensure that their legitimate permission email marketing relationships with their customers is not confused with spam,” states John Funk, CEO of Quris.

High tech PR firm Horn Group has picked up eight clients, representing over $1 million in additional billings. They are ActiveState, an anti-spam software firm; Agile Software; publisher Financial Times Prentice Hall; the IM and CRM divisions of Harte-Hanks; Identify Software; Lumeta Corporation; Serena Software and Sophos, a developer of anti-virus tools.

“We are seeing a general warming of business activity in the enterprise software and services market,” commented Sabrina Horn, president and CEO of the Horn Group. “Companies are re-engaging with PR to help drive sales as they see signs of increased IT spending.”

For more breaking news on account action and executive moves, visit ChannelSeven.com.