Traditionally, email marketers buy heavy loads of email addresses, launch massive campaigns, and pick up the few interested people that replied to the offer. Demandbase provides the new generation of email marketing tools. While Demandbase Direct allows you to buy business contacts tailored to your needs, Demandbase Stream lets you see who of those contacts actually visit your Website, in real-time.
Demandbase is located in the San Francisco NorthBeach district, just a few blocks away from the TransAmerica Tower. Christopher Golec is the President and CEO of Demandbase. Demandbase’s founding members are online marketing veterans who grew the need to develop a technology to better target and follow up on email leads.
At the core of the technology is Demandbase Central, the back-end engine that collects and processes millions of business contacts. Demandbase partners with only leading business contact data providers, including LexisNexis Business Information, AccuData, BusinessWatch Network and Hoovers, among many others. Tapping in those reliable sources enables Demandbase to offer premium quality contacts that are constantly updated and scored in relation to the needs of each customer of the platform.
Once processed by the Demandbase Central, the contacts are accessible and purchasable on the Demandbase Direct customer interface. That’s the product the video above focuses on. This interface allows customer to handpick the business contacts they will pay by the unit. The process of searching for contacts is very similar to the search experience of Kayak, or its sister-company Roost: Focused on offering many different search parameters.
The final step that leverages Demandbase’s offer and technology is the new product they launched today: Demandbase Stream. With Demandbase Stream, you paste one line of code in your Website’s template and install a light-weight software (Adobe Air) on your machine. When a person who was targeted in your email campaign visits your Website, Demandbase Stream will display it in the form of a ticker on your machine. As easy as 1,2,3, you can pick up the phone, and call this person to push the lead a little closer to conversion.
I find Demandbase’s new product revolutionary. I have had a few experiences in email marketing, and it was messy: old email listings, no tracking tools, no way to know what happens once you launch a campaign, no way to know who’s interested. Most of my campaigns turned out to be complete disasters and money-losers. Demandbase is a crystal-clear tool, easy to understand, to apply, affordable, fit for all budgets, and it sits on top of a powerful data-processing engine… If you don’t get satisfying results after using Demandbase, consider re-writing your email body copy, because the problem won’t lie anymore in the quality of your contacts.
I also asked Christopher if they were thinking about integrating other social media functionality to Demandbase. It’s not on their priority list so far, but the team has thought of the benefits of integrating Linkedin to their service. This way, marketers will get to know who, of the business contacts targeted, is already connected to them on Linkedin. Even though that’s just an idea for them so far, it shows the potential of this tool for operating more intelligent email campaigns.
Related items:
Demandbase Raises $8 Million For Online Lead Generation Platform – Techcrunch
Demandbase launches lead generation platform with Adobe funding – VentureBeat
How Demandbase Uses AppExchange to Increase Lead Generation Efficiency – Interview with Jason Stewart on SellingPower (login free but required)