Bluecore launches email targeting feature to make marketers’ lives easier

Email automation provider Bluecore is today releasing a new feature so marketers don’t have to bother the folks in IT as much.

Called Live Segments, it lets a marketer segment users for email campaigns via pull-down menus. The users can be targeted by their website behavior and by what might interest them in the product catalog.

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So, a marketer can create an email campaign specifically for all the visitors to a retailer’s website who looked at shoes priced over $100, and include a discount coupon for two different styles of $150+ shoes.

Previously, CEO and cofounder Fayez Mohamood told me, Bluecore allowed a marketer to trigger an email to a site visitor who checked out $100+ shoes, but only immediately afterwards and only in response to the visit. In fact, Bluecore’s name eight months ago was TriggerMail.

And, to find out how many $150+ shoes the retailer offered, he said, the Bluecore-using marketer would have had to ask IT to run an analysis on the product catalog data residing somewhere else, and deliver the results for use in the email campaign. Now, that behavioral and product info is available through the Bluecore dashboard.

Bluecore captures behavioral data on a site through JavaScript tags on its pages, and now it also page-scrapes the text to capture the product info.

Mohamood also noted that Live Segments allows a marketer to create segmented campaigns for registered users who haven’t been on the site in a year, or lookalike matches on a completely new email list, instead of only for recent visitors. It can employ behaviors and product info from a desktop or mobile web site, or, via an API, from an app.

“Depending on the questions you might ask,” he said, the segmentation can be prepared in anywhere from a few hours to a day.

Many other marketing platforms say they can segment and email-target website visitors, but Mohamood said the key differences are time and ease-of-use.

Adobe and other legacy systems, he said, “don’t offer [this] in one system without integration.” He added that it would take much longer to segment something like “people who looked at black shoes under $50.”

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“A lot of legacy platforms were not built to handle this data,” he said.

Bluecore plans to add the capability to build custom queries that aren’t handled by the pulldowns, but you might have to ring up the IT people to help with that.

Live Segments has been tested with three clients over the last two months, Mohamood said, and has reduced the number of batch emails sent out by 50 percent because of better targeting. The company reports that the new feature has also delivered revenue-per-email that was three to four times higher than normal.

Bluecore said its client base, which includes Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, Staples, and Cabela’s, has grown from 70 to 150 brands in the last eight months.

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In a recent VB Insight report, “Buyer’s Guide: How to navigate the email marketing landscape,” author Jon Cifuentes wrote about Bluecore: “They’ve only been in market for 14 months, but early feedback is extremely positive, and they’re on an upward trajectory.”