Lyris Pushes Web Marketing Toolset Downstream

Lyris has upgraded its flagship product and rolled out a new application for the marketing and advertising industry.

The enhancements to Lyris HQ pave the way for a steady addition of collaboration and social networking tools this year.

Lyris HQ for Agencies, meanwhile, will provide an inroad into a new constituency: advertising and marketing firms that serve multiple clients.

For Agencies

Lyris HQ for Agencies allows agencies and resellers to manage their customers' online marketing campaigns. Its toolset provides support in managing e-mail marketing campaigns, publishing and managing Web site content, creating landing pages, analyzing Web sites and managing pay-per-click campaigns.

These tools are also available in HQ, of course, but they have been refined for the agency submarket.

For instance, users within the internal agency team can create an individual "sub account" -- a full working instance of Lyris HQ that is tied to a master account. The sub account allows users to separate such data as mailing lists, e-mail, Web analytics, landing pages and pay-per-click campaigns for each customer without advanced data access rules.

The expanded feature set is particularly attractive to small and medium-sized businesses -- the primary target for this product, Laurie McCabe, vice president of SMB insights and solutions at AMI Partners, told CRM Buyer.

"What they have done with this release is integrate several interactive marketing capabilities into one solution, allowing users to deploy them incrementally if needed, or all at once as the case may be."

Upgrading HQ

Lyris has retooled the user interface in the new release and added team collaboration tools with an eye toward giving smaller companies the same toolset that larger marketing organizations have, CMO Blaine Mathieu told CRM Buyer. The biggest problem facing smaller firms is that their existing tools do not give them full visibility into their campaigns.

The company also launched a corresponding portal -- LyrisHQ.com -- with its rollout, giving users access to the following:

• EmailLabs, which lets marketers create, send and track e-mail newsletters and campaigns, and is integrated with analytics and content management tools.
• ClickTracks, which shows marketers them how people get to their sites, where they click, and where they exit.
• Hot Banana, a Web content management platform that lets marketers build and manage Web sites, landing pages, e-mail creative, intranets, extranets and micro sites.
• EmailAdvisor, an analytics tool that allows users to track in-box delivery rates by Internet service provider, identify and fix e-mail design flaws, and analyze content for potential spam problems.
• BidHero, a Web-based pay-per-click campaign management application that lets marketers use the HQ interface to set up and manage keyword bidding for multiple search engines and other ad networks.