Bridgeline Digital
Improving Digital Presence through Personalized Marketing

With the number of customers glued to their mobile screens, “personalized marketing” is becoming the norm in the digital marketing space today. This paradigm shift has brought renewed focus to persuasive and custom experiences within the digital space and the necessary software to build those experiences. “The main trends we see all center around one thing: Creating compelling and consistent user experiences,” asserts Ari Kahn, COO, Bridgeline Digital. “It’s the age-old goal of marketing, but with the changing landscape that translates into a clear need to focus on personalized, cross-channel and cross-device experiences.”

Burlington, MA based Bridgeline Digital created the iAPPS product suite to do just that, with an integrated set of functionality to support the changing needs of digital marketers. The suite brings together web content management, eCommerce capabilities, email and social media marketing and campaign management. The key focus here is clear: Bridgeline recognized early on that a collection of bolt-on products can translate into more vendors to manage, more products to navigate and more challenges in taking action from the unending data that is produced.

“CIO’s are being inundated with a technological boom: Mobile, Social, Data, Wearables, Cloud, the list keeps growing. Dozens of new applications to address these and more are being released at a staggering pace. And, aligning all the pieces across the organization to support this innovation is challenging at best,” describes Kahn. “This struggle is really at the heart of the iAPPS roadmap—we built iAPPS on a scalable framework that allows for simple sharing of information across all of an organization’s digital channels.”

One of the key components of the iAPPS suite, iAPPS Content Manager, offers marketers the ability to manage their entire web presence—including their primary web property, micro sites, and landing pages. Since information sits at the heart of websites, intranets, or web stores, the inherent integration with iAPPS ensures data is seamlessly shared with other modules to enable marketers to create compelling experiences and measure their effectiveness. Another component within the product suite, iAPPS Commerce, handles core shopping cart functionality paired with advanced product catalog management, real time reporting, and internationalization.

“The power here is that eCommerce marketers can use the highly flexible promotions engine within iAPPS Commerce and then easily push that promotion through all of their marketing channels,” describes Kahn.

Apart from assisting marketers to manage their content and eCommerce platform, iAPPS’ power comes from the integrated marketing campaigns it can produce. iAPPS Marketier, iAPPS Analyzer and iAPPS Social work side by side to manage campaign setup, deployment via email and social media, and measurement. “What we’ve focused on here is making it easy for marketers to identify a goal, setup the campaigns to drive that goal and—most importantly—understand the impact with data-driven recommendations to improve their campaign,” says Kahn.

Bridgeline has assisted a myriad of customers across industries in order to boost their marketing efforts in the ever-changing digital marketing space. To exemplify one of their customers’ success stories, The UPS Store approached Bridgeline looking for a platform to empower their 4,300 locally owned stores with robust, editable micro sites. Using iAPPSds—a distributed network platform using the core iAPPS framework. The UPS Store incorporated a responsive, mobile-friendly layout in the new micro sites and focused on driving significant increases in organic traffic. The end result was double-digit growth to both the website and in-store traffic.

Understanding, creating, and measuring customer experience remains our ongoing priority

As a future course of action, Bridgeline aims to leverage the benefits of big data to gain to help marketers efficiently promote their products and services. “Understanding, creating, and measuring customer experience remains our ongoing priority,” concludes Kahn.