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New ATG Marketing Solution Delivers Targeted, Cross-Channel e-Marketing Capabilities to Business UsersCAMBRIDGE, Mass. --(Business Wire)-- Jan. 26, 2005 -- Enables Marketers to Exploit the Web, e-mail, Contact Center and Direct Mail to Target Customer Segments, Personas and Individuals Based on Previous Interactions ATG (Art Technology Group, Inc., NASDAQ: ARTG) the software provider behind the most consistent and relevant marketing, commerce, and service experiences, today introduced ATG Marketing, a new solution that gives marketers the power to deliver the right message to the right people through the right channel at the right time, and to immediately measure effectiveness. ATG Marketing builds upon ATG's proven customer process flow, interaction management, content/proposition targeting, profile tracking, and segmentation capabilities to build a rich understanding of customers through their interactions, preferences, and behaviors. Marketers can use this activity and history to create more personally relevant and compelling offers, fully integrated across multiple channels, including the Web, e-mail, and contact centers. Further, marketers can easily integrate these electronic campaigns with physical direct marketing campaigns. "Marketers that employ personalization in their e-mail marketing efforts are 40 percent more likely to have average unique conversion rates of more than three percent, compared with those that do not," as indicated in the January 6th JupiterResearch report "Effective E-Mail Marketing: Tactics to Improve Campaign Performance." The report also states: "Further, marketers using segmentation are nearly twice as likely to attain conversion rates of more than three percent, compared with marketers not using segmentation." Unlike other e-marketing platforms that are overly dependent on complicated analytical approaches, and often require custom-made data warehouses in order to work, ATG Marketing is based on a working and operational view of the customer, and drives campaigns that are planned by the business or are automatically triggered by a customer's action or change in circumstance. Marketers may define their market segments and personas using any technique they choose, as broadly as they choose or as fine-grained as individual targeting. Then, using an interface designed for them, rather than for programmers, they create business rules that define the specific content (text, offers, images, navigation, etc.) each of these segments is to receive, for example "present people who do not have a mortgage with us a special refinancing offer when they have viewed the mortgage rates page 3 times without completing an application." Further, as organizations mature in their use of e-marketing, individual, disconnected marketing campaigns are no longer effective on their own. Campaigns need to be choreographed across the Web, e-mail and other channels to be effective and successful. While traditional tools have restricted an e-marketer's campaigns to loosely connected individual channels, ATG Marketing brings together a set of business-oriented tools that give marketers control over both e-mail and Web activities together -- from the initial opt-in all the way to the completion of a transaction. "Attempts have been made in the past by many vendors to track Web interactions within the scope of e-marketing campaigns," says Cliff Conneighton, senior vice president of marketing, ATG. "The problem has been that these vendors require difficult and time-consuming page-level development in order to deploy the most simplistic campaigns, leading to frustration among marketing staff. ATG Marketing gives marketing staff the control they need to create powerful, cross-channel campaigns, without additional IT involvement." ATG Marketing offers the following capabilities: -- Robust customer process flow capabilities enable marketers to define multi-stage, multi-channel campaigns. For example, marketers can create scenarios such as "when prospect registers on Web site, send e-mail, then wait one week, and if they haven't responded, send a physical letter, wait another week, and if they still haven't responded, have agent call." -- Sophisticated customer segmentation capabilities drawing from real-world preferences and behaviors exhibited by each customer. The emergence of "behavioral marketing" promises better targeting and measurable ROI on each campaign. -- Event-driven marketing and pro-active service features not only make responding to customer Web interactions easy, but also helps turn customer service events into up-sell and cross-sell opportunities. -- e-Mail campaigns, from a few e-mails per month to millions, whether to customers with well-known profiles and history or to imported lists of "opt-ins." -- A/B split testing, to help marketers take the guess work out of what offers and navigation work and what doesn't work on their Web sites, and determine which design choices have the most significant positive results on customers' online behavior. -- Optional inbound e-mail response management, rated #1 in the industry by Gartner. -- Fully integrated with ATG Commerce, used by more top etailers than any other e-commerce software package. -- Fully integrated with ATG Adaptive Customer Assistance, the self-service software that delivers personalized, relevant answers. ATG Marketing is already being deployed by companies as diverse as France Telecom, one of the world's leading telecommunications carriers, with over 118 million customers on the five continents, and LaPetite Academy, one of the largest early childhood education companies in the U.S. It is available immediately as traditional licensed software, or as a managed service. About ATG ATG (Art Technology Group, Inc., NASDAQ: ARTG) delivers innovative software to help high-end consumer-facing companies create a richer, more adaptive interactive experience for their customers and partners online, via e-mail and messaging, and through contact centers. ATG has delivered category-leading commerce, marketing and customer service solutions to hundreds of the world's best-known brands including American Eagle Outfitters, Best Buy, Kingfisher, Neiman Marcus, Target, Washington Mutual, Friends Provident, Merrill Lynch, Wells Fargo, HSBC, A&E Networks, Warner Music, AT&T Wireless, T-Mobile, SBC, Yahoo!, France Telecom, Airbus, GE, Boeing, Philips, Procter & Gamble, Hewlett-Packard, American Airlines, InterContinental Hotels Group, US Army, and US Federal Aviation Administration. The company is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with additional locations throughout North America, Europe, and Asia. For more information about ATG, please visit www.atg.com. (C) 2005 Art Technology Group, Inc. ATG and Art Technology Group are registered trademarks of Art Technology Group, Inc. All other product names, service marks, and trademarks mentioned herein are trademarks of their respective owners. This press release contains forward-looking statements for purposes of the safe harbor provisions under The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties that may cause ATG's actual results, levels of activity, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, levels of activity, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Important risk factors affecting ATG's business generally may be found in their periodic reports and registration statements filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission at www.sec.gov. Risk factors related to the subject matter of this press release include the possibility that the ATG product deployment will not be successful, on time or significantly enhance the user's Internet experience or handle user volumes; that those customers leveraging ATG won't have the opportunity to increase revenue and decrease future costs; the need to adapt to rapid changes so products do not become obsolete; the possibility of errors in ATG's software products; the possibility that the solution will not make customer implementations faster or more flexible or permit the customer to meet its customer-facing or infrastructure requirements; that the ATG product will not continue to be integrated with third party applications servers or will not support all Web services enabled systems; that ATG's product strategy may change in the future; the risks and costs of intellectual property litigation; and the risks of potential new legislation that may impact ATG's ability to distribute certain products or functionality . ATG undertakes no obligation to update any of the forward-looking statements after the date of this press release. |
