This week, Datran Media announced that it has released StormPost 5.0, the latest version of the company’s email marketing and monetization platform. According to the company, StormPost now provides users with additional ways to generate revenue from the email channel through a new intelligent audience reporting capability and a more automated process for selling banner advertising space within newsletters.  Other updates include a cloud based architecture. The company also said that it has increased the depth and breadth of its strategy and services teams. 

Customers cited in the release include well known publishers MediaNews Group, a company with 54 daily newspapers in 11 markets, and The Washington Times.  Michael Petrak, vice president of sales for MediaNews Group said, “We are looking forward to increasing the ways we leverage StormPost to help drive more revenue across our publications, and we were excited to help inform the latest version. To date, StormPost and the team at Datran Media have helped us grow our email programs at a much faster rate than we could have ever done on our own...I expect that StormPost 5.0’s introduction of audience measurement reporting and support for banners advertisements within newsletters will takes us to yet another level.”

Tony D’Anna, General Manager for Datran Media’s StormPost business spoke to digiday:DAILY this morning.

digiday:DAILY:  Many Email Service Providers (ESPs) are announcing new releases and/or features this month. Our readership is chiefly comprised of advertisers and publishers that have a stake in the digital piece of the multi-channel marketing pie. How does StormPost 5.0 speak to the specific needs of our readers?

Datran Media: Alongside retailers and financial service companies, advertisers and publishers are the heart of our client base - hence, the inclusion of two of our more strategic publishers in our StormPost 5.0 announcement. What all these companies need to know is that StormPost takes them beyond email retention and assumption-based targeting to offer one solution for all of their email acquisition, retention and monetization requirements.

In the 5.0 release, built-in access to Datran Media’s proprietary audience measurement reporting helps our clients to define their ideal customers based on household-level demographic, behavioral and geographic information. For ad-supported media companies, the value of this increased insight is the ability to validate the audience that advertising customers are reaching via their email campaigns.  This is not something that has been done before by another ESP.

The latest version of StormPost also streamlines email banner advertisement inventory sales for publishing clients and includes an inventory estimation tool for sales teams to manage and optimize their newsletter banner inventory. Due to the current shift towards digital publishing and resource limitations, this is a highly requested feature across the many publishers that leverage StormPost.  StormPost’s ability to support banners within newsletters provides an effective contextual complement to stand-alone email advertisements and allows advertisers to engage more deeply with their email audience, reducing audience fatigue and improving response and results.

digiday:DAILY: What is the significance of the new cloud-based architectural enhancements, and why should our readers care?

Datran Media: In short, the cloud-based architecture increases flexibility and scalability. This aspect of our update is most interesting to technology architects.

digiday:DAILY: What things did you do to add “depth” and “breadth” to your services teams?

Datran Media: We added more experienced experts and expanded the range offerings we offer in support of substantially higher demand for full-service account management and campaign optimization. We also expanded strategies and services across to support customer demand for audience measurement and validation, multi-dimensional targeting, multi-stage customer lifecycle campaigns focused on increasing the lifetime value (LTV) of client relationships, monetization and dormant customer win-back strategies (especially critical to our retail clients.)

digiday:DAILY: It sounds like your product strategy is fine-tuned to your current client base. Is there any research to indicated the direction you are headed may be well aligned with overall market demand?

Datran Media: Yes. In addition to an annual survey that we deploy to marketers each year and share across the industry, Datran Media’s strengths have also been cited in numerous third party research reports across Forrester Research, Dynamic Logic, eMarketer and others.