Lyris Looks Beyond E-mail with Ad Management Combo
A new Web marketing platform is the culmination of the firm's acquisitions, with technologies from Lyris, EmailLabs, ClickTracks and Hot Banana.
Looking to leave its e-mail marketing-only image behind, Lyris is releasing its online marketing platform as a suite of marketing technologies with a single sign-on dashboard interface.
“We felt that the best way to help marketers get what they need was to get the core technology that gets them online marketing,” said J.D. Peterson, director of products at Lyris, of the new Lyris HQ suite. “It’s really why J.L. Halsey purchased the companies that it purchased.”
Formerly known as J.L. Halsey, Lyris has made a number of acquisitions over the past two years to accumulate the necessary components for Lyris HQ. In 2005, the company purchased the original Lyris, an e-mail marketing player, along with EmailLabs; Web analytics company ClickTracks and Web content management outfit Hot Banana were picked the following year.
Primarily targeting small and medium online digital marketing clients, the Lyris HQ platform has combined technologies from its acquisitions to give clients the ability to schedule and manage e-mail campaigns, coordinate Web content management, and review analytics results to optimize campaigns. The company also introduced a newly developed Web-based PPC campaign management system called BidHero as part of the platform to let advertisers oversee and update PPC keyword bidding on Google, Yahoo and other search ad platforms.
Absent from the platform, however, is display ad management, which the company has “on the roadmap,” according to Peterson.
The two years of development was necessary for Lyris to “shore up” the original Lyris and EmailLabs product lines to use them as the backbone of the new platform, he added.
“The ClickTracks and Hot Banana technology acquisition was only a year ago and we knew those technologies were going to be critical to Lyris HQ. So we’re pretty happy about where we are today.”
Although e-mail campaigns remain one of the highest ROI tools for online marketers, and the company isn’t shying away from the important role it plays in its new product, Lyris as a company is eager to focus on the overall technology needs of marketing campaigns and to move beyond its e-mail-only image, Peterson said.
“E-mail is and will remain a critical component, but we’re a new company now. We’re not just the e-mail marketing software company that we historically have been. We’re an online marketing company in the more general sense,” he said. “We’ve changed as a company and who we are today is a lot different from who we were in the past.”
