Look on any marketing vendor's Web site, and they crow about how integrated they are. But what they call integration, I call "arm's length integration": completely separate applications that use application programming interface (API) calls to exchange finite data.

It's as if the applications are standing at arm's length, close enough to be civil and polite, but not close enough to really lend a helping hand. 

As senior vice president of engineering for Lyris, I'm interested in real online marketing integration. That's why my team is working toward a truly integrated online marketing suite that lets you use one tool for your most important online marketing tasks and drive ROI with one 360-degree view of your data. But before I wax poetic about Lyris' take on integration, let's talk about arm's-length integration and how it came to be the norm.

Arm's Length Integration: Better Than Nothing, But Not That Great

Over the last 10-15 years the Internet has made it possible for independent software companies to introduce Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) tools for everything from accounting to sales-force automation to online marketing.

The good news? You can easily implement a wide array of affordable, hosted tools for all facets of online marketing. The bad news? You have to log in to several different sites to perform your online marketing tasks, and then take the time (and the aspirin) to extract meaningful ROI data from all those different tools.

Marketing vendors know this is a pain. They've tried to solve it by partnering and integrating with other vendors using relatively new technologies and approaches, such as service-oriented architectures, Web services and Web-based APIs.

For example, many email-marketing companies have built data-exchange mechanisms, so you can share customer information with corporate databases and CRM systems. Or they've worked with various Web-analytics vendors so you can better track email-conversion rates on your site.

These are all good steps in the right direction, but at the end of the day, it's arm's length integration. You're still dependent on two or more completely separate vendors that work a little bit better together than they initially did alone.

For the record, most marketing-technology providers are genuinely committed to offering enough integration to keep you happy. But at the end of the day, their business models are all about selling you their particular services month after month, not about providing a single, cohesive solution that meets all of your online-marketing needs.

Real Online Marketing Integration: Still Utopia, But Closer Than You Might Think

The difference between arm's length integration and real online marketing integration is that real integration isn't about self-preservation; it's about knocking down walls.

Real integration of online marketing tools is about providing a single ecosystem of marketing tools that still do a great job of performing individual marketing functions, but that also work hand-in-hand with the rest of your key tools. It's about letting you login to one site, not five or 10. It's about summarizing all of your key marketing metrics in one place, so you can easily tell which marketing programs are gold mines and which are land mines.

Few vendors have scratched the surface on this promise, while my engineering team is racing like the wind to make it a reality.

In 2006, Lyris realized that technological partnerships alone could never transport you to the promised land of real integrated marketing. So we bought ClickTracks, a Web-analytics company, and Hot Banana, a Web-CMS provider, to complement our existing email-marketing tools: EmailLabs, Lyris ListManager and EmailAdvisor. And we set out to build a truly integrated online-marketing suite.

Our approach to marketing integration is what I like to call a "federated services model." Each of our applications is still a separate entity that's designed to be best in class for its specific function. But our ultimate goal is to unite our formerly separate tools into a more powerful whole. And actually owning a variety of marketing technologies gives us the freedom to go far beyond an API call here and an API call there.

Here's what we've accomplished to date:

• In November 2007, we launched Lyris HQ, a hosted solution that combines email marketing, deliverability tools, content creation, web analytics, search marketing and mobile marketing.
  
  
• We accomplished our first goal: giving customers the convenience of logging in to all of these tools from one Web site, with just one URL, user id and password to remember.
  
  
• We also introduced a unified interface where marketers could access each application, see some of their most important metrics in a performance dashboard and communicate with each other via a marketing calendar and message board.
  
  
• That was nice, but our first-generation interface was little more than a jumping-off point for accessing the individual applications. So quickly but surely, we've been transferring more and more of the functionality from our individual tools into the unified interface. We've been attacking this monumental task in bite-sized chunks by building, testing and enabling new features every few weeks.
  
  
• We've also been tackling, with all deliberate speed, the challenge of connecting data, functionality and reporting in ways that make an immediate difference to marketers. For example, since your Web site really is your online-marketing nerve center, we've pushed out several deep integrations between Web analytics and the rest of our suite. We won't stop until we've given you high-level ROI dashboards that show you at a glance what's working, without the aspirin and the hard-core spreadsheets.
  
  

Our ultimate goal is to create an integrated online marketing suite that allows every member of your marketing team to login to Lyris HQ at 8 a.m., use the application for every aspect of their jobs and logout at the very end of the day. We know that may mean adding additional capabilities, such as managing job tickets, budgets, assets and workflow. Heck, we'd even love to help you manage campaigns on Twitter, Facebook, iPhones and whatever's next on the what's-cool horizon.

That's what real marketing integration means to us, and we're committed to getting you there. Please comment and let us know what real integration means to you.

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Related Resources:

• Subscribe to Inside Lyris HQ our monthly online-marketing newsletter.
• Download free online-marketing guides, tools and webinars in the Lyris Online-Marketing Resource Center.