The Marketleap Report
Volume IV, Issue #4, July 12, 2004

Internet Agency v3.0
Building a Vision of Integrated Online Marketing
by Keith Boswell

Today, Marketleap was acquired by Digital Impact, one of the premier providers of email marketing services. This acquisition was fueled by a shared vision of the future of marketing.

Internet marketing launched with the dream of revolutionizing the way organizations manage and measure marketing. Marketers were promised a closed loop that would measure performance and optimize success over the history of a customer's lifecycle.

In the 90's, the rapid explosion of web technologies, combined with a sense of panic and a desire to not be left behind, created a rush to build online businesses that weren't planned well enough to deliver on this vision.  

The problem is that even though most online businesses have the capability to move as nimbly as everyone else online, they choose not to. Clients desperately desiring to attract or retain customers for their business often swallow tightly when they are told there is nothing we can do with your current website as it exists today.

As a result, search, email and other forms of online marketing end up splintered and disjointed. This is not in the spirit of organization and growth the Internet was founded on.  

With the combination of Digital Impact and Marketleap, a new agency has been created with the ability to lead its clients into marketing programs driven by closed-loop technology and savvy online marketers. This new agency takes a giant step toward fulfilling the original promise of true closed-loop marketing.  

It offers clients a complete vision of marketing, strategy and planning that lead into specific marketing programs that cover client acquisition through client retention. The goal is to provide clients a platform for managing and understanding their customers through their complete business lifecycle.

The agency begins helping customers by offering strategic marketing services focused on maximizing the lifetime value of customer relationships and developing effective marketing programs that meet client's key business and marketing goals. Once a strategy is developed, a full suite of customer acquisition services is available.

This means offering marketing programs for search engines, contextual advertising, email lists, and other acquisition opportunities to meet the full spectrum of client needs. And from the moment these prospects surface, the agency's expertise in customer retention through email will be leveraged through marketing programs built to maximize their value. The boundary between acquisition and retention marketing fades away, and marketers are the winner as a result.

Another strength of this new organization will be its ability to be faster and more nimble than clients' IT and marketing organizations. By delivering creative services, hosting, dynamic serving and micro-site design that can be independent of the need for client IT involvement, the agency enables its customers to move at the speed of their market.

There is an additional benefit from the rapid pace with which we will be able to impact business metrics. Marketing programs will be measured in days and weeks, rather than months and quarters. By providing performance based acquisition and retention programs, we are working to build a deep trust with our clients and a rich experience for our team.

Over time, we will work actively with our clients to understand and lower acquisition costs, improve retention rates, and demonstrate how other marketing efforts, online and offline, can impact success. Compared to traditional agencies, which can only go so far in demonstrating the value of their marketing programs, we will maintain data from the point of acquisition through current retention campaigns.  

Our goal is to deliver a depth and quality of services that is so well integrated and valuable to the client, future marketing budgets are weighed against the success of the agency's programs. We aim to be a leader and partner in helping businesses deliver excellence through their online marketing and operations.

We're excited by the possibilities of what we're creating, enough that we're inviting you along for the ride. I hope this also explains my prolonged absence from publishing as I've been a busy pup.

Emails from us in the future will come from a Digital Impact address, but we'll be here churning out the intelligence and insights you've come to expect. We thank each and every one of you for all of your support in helping us get here. Welcome to v3.0, we can't wait to build the future.

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