This week, a multitude of email marketing gurus convened in Chicago for two back-to-back shows:  the Email Authentication Summit and the MarketingSherpa Email Summit.  Some of the main topics of the combined shows included DomainKeys, SenderID, CertifiedEmail, deliverability, testing, landing page optimization, creative / usability, case studies, etc.

There must have been a discussion on behavioral segmentation at the MarketingSherpa show, because I had quite a few marketers come ask me about it yesterday.  Unfortunately, the concept of driving your email segmentation strategy based on clickstream analytics data is not the silver bullet that vendors make it out to be.  Don't get me wrong...analytics-email integration tests have yielded some amazing conversion rates and WhatCounts has entered into partnerships with three leading Web analytics providers.  But, as a person who has worked in both the analytics industry and the email industry, I can tell you that there are some things that should be considered that will likely rain on your integration parade, regardless of the vendors or platforms you select:

I love when marketers ask me about analytics-email integration.  The first thing I say is "What would you like to do with it?"  Surprisingly, that simple question stumps many people.  An analytics or email marketing salesperson put a bug in his/her ear about this concept, but he/she is not exactly sure what it truly means.  The response might be: "Well, I want to send my clickstream data to my email service provider."  Why?  So you can store that data in two places?  What are you going to do with it?  Here are some feasible possibilities:

• "We would like to send a campaign to people who viewed a particular type of product but didn't place it in their shopping cart"
• "We are going to remarket to people who abandoned their cart."
• "We are going to target people who viewed our Flash demonstration or downloaded our PDF."
• "We are going to try to re-engage people who got a null result from our search box"
• "We would like to weigh the effectiveness of each loyalty marketing method by calculating the true ROI of each email-send in terms of revenue-per-subscriber."

Some of those are great ideas (I say "some" because I personally think that data about product views is not conclusive enough to perform segmentation on), but you don't necessarily need analytics-email integration to accomplish these things. 

• Shopping cart abandonment remarketing is much easier to accomplish by setting up a data feed from your shopping cart than by involving your Web analytics solution. Just make sure to collect contact information during Step One of the conversion sequence so you know who the potential customer was.  (Of course, if the visitor was responding to an email campaign that you sent, you can use a cookie, tag or URL-string parameter to know who he/she is.)
• Likewise, if you place a simple form on your site that collects basic contact information from a visitor before allowing him / her to view your Flash demonstration (or download your PDF), then you don't need to do an integration project to drive campaigns to him / her.
• Null search results are often produced during anonymous visits from first-time visitors. However, if you can identify the person via a cookie, tag or URL-string parameter, your enterprise search solution could do the data feed instead of your Web analytics solution. (Of course, if you are using an enterprise search solution that is producing null results, that's a whole other problem that needs to be solved!) 
• If you would like to tie email marketing reporting and analytics reporting together, you should be able to do everything in your analytics solution without completing a special integration project. Furthermore, most email marketing platforms offer some type of conversion tracking solution for post-landing-page analysis.

Also, keep in mind that there is a lot that your Web analytics solution cannot possibly be certain about.  Face it...unless you have the type of site where your visitors have to log in before browsing, a huge percentage of your site's sessions are anonymous.  Cookie-based identification is hit-and-miss at best, as some people reject first-party cookies, some people reject third-party cookies, 40% of people clean out all of their cookies at least once per month, some people disable JavaScript, some people share computers (or email addresses) and some people use multiple computers or browsers during the course of their buying cycle. 

For the benefit of the doubt, let's pretend that you can accurately identify 50% of your sessions.  That isn't 50% of your visitors...it's 50% of your visits.  So, there will be times when you know its me on your site and there will be times when I am browsing anonymously.  We all know that accurate personalization leads to higher conversion rates, right?  How effective do you think your assumptions about my browsing habits will be if you only capture half of my sessions?  Just because I logged a session duration of six minutes on the weather section of your online newspaper one day doesn't mean I want a bunch of info about the weather all the time.  Maybe I got sidetracked by a phone call and I left my computer unattended during those six minutes.  I may spend at least thirty minutes reading the sports section and the entertainment section during an anonymous session the next day, and your analytics-email integration will be missing the mark.  If effective personalization is exponentially more effective than broadcast messaging, is incorrect personalization based on faulty assumptions exponentially less effective than broadcast messaging?

If you are convinced that you need this type of integration, you don't necessarily need to buy a hybrid solution to get the same benefit.  Sure, it might be cool that everybody at CheetahMail and Harvest Solutions have the word "Experian" on their paychecks now.  The fact that everybody at Fireclick and BlueHornet goes to the same Digital River company party might seem like a differentiator.  But does the fact that two companies share a stock symbol actually make a difference in your marketing strategy?  A data feed is a data feed.  Whether it was created by two partnering companies or two sister companies doesn't change the potential of your behavioral segmentation.  Your EmailLabs - WebSideStory or Responsys-Coremetrics or SilverPOP-Omniture possibilities are probably not much different from your all-in-one Manticore Technology analytics-email solution option.  Make sense?

Make sure to do your due-diligence when vendors tell you that "they are integrated."  Ask them what exactly is integrated...don't just take it at face value.  Find out if they have "press release integration (we plan to do it)" or "case study integration (feel free to talk to our customers who use it)."  If you talk to those "integrated" customers, find out if there truly was a delta in their conversion rates as a result of the work.  What was the opportunity cost of doing the project?  Did they put less emphasis on other segmentation strategies that could have been equally effective?

Overall, if you're not proficiently walking or jogging, why spend a bunch of time investigating fancy running shoes?  It's amazing to me how many email marketers have yet to master simple segmentation, personalization, usability and testing strategies, but they are being told by their higher-ups to look into sophisticated data integration projects.  Due to the reasons listed above, you could feasibly get more of a conversion lift by doing more landing page testing or lifecycle marketing than you can by integrating your analytics platform with your email platform. 

Are you doing the simple stuff right now?  If not, start there, and shelf that analytics-email integration project until next year.