Meet Forrester’s New E-mail Analyst: Julie Katz

With the exception of clients, e-mail service providers take no one more seriously than the analysts who cover their industry.

ESP executives turn to analysts for advice on what types of products, features and services they should be developing, and they hold their collective breath every year waiting for the analysts’ reports ranking them against one another.

So it’s big news when one of the e-mail marketing industry’s two main research firms names a new e-mail analyst, as Forrester Research did in October with Julie Katz.

Katz replaces industry fixture Shar VanBoskirk, who moved up within the organization to research a wider variety of interactive marketing issues.

Katz also has a deeply entrenched competitor in JupiterResearch’s e-mail analyst, David Daniels.

Prior to becoming an analyst, Katz was a researcher for Forrester’s marketing team. She also has real-world direct marketing experience in seven years as a researcher and fundraiser for The Jimmy Fund cancer research charity.

Katz said her experience in fundraising gives her an understanding of the difficulties of marketers’ jobs.

“It gives me an appreciation for how difficult it really is to get a well-written, relevant piece of communication out the door to the right person,” she said. “I understand what folks need to do to get the most appropriate data out of their database, and how to create a segment.”

As for her perception of the state of the e-mail industry, Katz said she’s seeing intense interest from marketers in the ability to segment their customer files for more effective marketing, and the ability to deliver marketing messages triggered by events and behavior.

“But they don’t know exactly where to start or how,” she said. “They don’t know what’s going to be the most profitable segmentation or what’s going to be the most profitable triggered messaging to use.”

As a result, she said, marketers are starving for an understanding of metrics beyond traditional open and click-throughs. Katz said she plans to make the study of post-click behavior and merging Web site analytics data with e-mail campaign data part of her research.

“It’s a really big project,” she said. “And hopefully, throughout the year, I will be interviewing e-mail marketers who have been successful at this sort of thing to give advice to marketers who are looking to start an initiative.”

Not surprisingly, Katz believes e-mail service providers should be focusing on helping marketers figure out how best to exploit their customer databases, and they should do it without being asked.

“A lot of vendors don’t excel at that,” she said. “At a certain point, all of the data just gets overwhelming. A lot of the marketers I speak with are looking for their vendors to be more strategic partners, so they’re going to need to mine some of this data and say: ‘If you look at this particular segment, they’re going to be the most profitable.’ But it’s not an easy job to do that.”

She also said ESPs should work on features that make the data “speak to marketers in their own language.”

She added: “Maybe it’s pulling some of that offline data and tying it to e-mail in a way marketers can understand and act on.”

Katz added that many ESPs are building up their strategic services offerings, “but they need to promote it a little more and they need prove themselves a little more.”