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TreeHouse Spruces Up Marketing, Builds Analytics Addition

Among the many announcements that will no doubt be emanating from Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce conference next week will be this: TreeHouse Interactive, a SaaS partner relationship management provider, will join AppExchange. When it does, it will provide the first independent PRM offering on the site, outside of Salesforce.com’s own PRM functionality.

The debut on AppExchange is a timely one for TreeHouse: The company has just upgraded its Marketing View software — the demand generation and marketing automation application that is part of its suite.

treehouse

New features include easier integration with outside billing and service systems, as well as with social media.

The upgrade also includes a layer of Web analytics — TreeHouse’s first foray into this space.

“Web analytics and the ability to target folks based on purchases and the things they didn’t purchase — combined with purchase activity and total lifetime value — is a powerful tool,” TreeHouse CEO Erich Flynn told CRM Buyer.

Web Analytics to Sell Better

The new Web tracking and targeting functionality, called “Reveal Web Analytics,” includes the ability to track unknown company visits to websites.

The application can track people as they move onto a company’s site or a partner’s site, Chris Frank, director of marketing, told CRM Buyer. “It can tell you what someone looked at before he made a purchase, or how they are interacting with the site in general.”

Using that data, a company can make an offer based on past browsing or purchasing behavior, he said.

The application can also identify company-level visits — that is, when a visitor comes from a particular company. The application may not know specifically who it is, but for business-to-business sales, that is not always necessary, Frank said. “You can still send a promotional email out to the relevant sales or purchasing people.”

In cases when a visitor comes from a corporate prospect and there is no contact information for that company in the user’s database, the TreeHouse application can produce a list of prospects at the company, for a price.

The application now can score behavior based on company-level visits as well, Flynn said. “In the past, we could only score based on purchase history — rating how valuable they are to a company. Now we can do it based on individual visits and company visits.”

HTTP Send

TreeHouse has also added HTTP Send, which lets users integrate Marketing View with outside order management or customer service applications without using an API or Web services.

This is especially helpful among e-tailers, Frank said. “If their site can accept a form post — an online form of any kind — then they can use this feature.”

Examples include integration of webinar event registration data, which would then be directed to the marketing automation system in order to pursue leads or service calls that are integrated into the marketing application for later reference.

Facebook Posting

A third upgrade to Marketing View is the ability for companies to share or create forms for posting on Facebook. This is trickier than one would expect, Frank said, as such integration can be “messy and ugly.”

The new forms functionality automatically generates compatible code, however.

“All the user does is click a button and the application spits out the code to place a particular form on the Facebook page,” explained Frank.

As more marketers leverage Facebook as a database to reach out their customers with promotions, such automation has become essentially, he said, noting that TreeHouse is among the first companies to give users this ability.

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