InStranet Breaks the Marketing Measurement Barrier - Enables Managers to Quantify Effectiveness of Sales, Marketing and Channel Documents and Content
 
New Release of Channels In-Line Application Features Innovative Built-In Analytics
 
NEW YORK, March 13, 2003 - InStranet, Inc., provider of Content-Based Applications for the enterprise, today announced the release of version 3.2 of its Channels In-Line (CIL) application featuring built-in analytics. With a strong emphasis on feedback and measurement, these analytics enable managers to make informed sales and marketing decisions based on market pressures, competition and channel needs. Now, in addition to publishing and syndicating information, companies can measure its effectiveness in real-time, helping drive increased revenue across multiple channels, including the internal sales organization, partners, web sites and resellers.

According to a recent Forrester report, "Mastering Marketing Measurement" (September 2002), Jim Nail has stated that, Marketers must crack the measurement barrier. & What return am I getting from my marketing budget? What mix of tactics and communication channels delivers the highest return? Old attitudinal-based metrics like awareness and purchase intent don't provide the answers. But more data, processing power, and analytical tools have emerged...

"Measurement and feedback is the second half of the document and content challenge," said Stark. "With the tremendous volume of web publishing to the channel, our customers have realized the importance of understanding what information is being used to drive their sales and marketing objectives. Whether it's store compliance, promotions for multiple channels or field readiness, CIL analytics delivers a powerful answer to the challenge."

Many of InStranet's Global 2000 customers have already implemented CIL, recognizing significant cost savings, as well as better visibility in their channels. For example, an international retail organization with over $10B in annual revenue, 10,000 products per store and more than 200,000 annual promotions distributed across multiple channels, has deployed CIL, allowing marketing managers to build and syndicate product offers, track promotion effectiveness in the field, and make adjustments at the point-of-sale in real-time. As a result, same store sales increased over 2 percent, and labor costs were reduced by hundreds of hours per week through associated time savings.

Building on InStranet's history of designing easy-to-deploy and feature-rich applications, CIL 3.2 ships with the following business indicators as part of the new analytics module:

• Field Audit - enables managers to gather structured feedback about a specific sales or marketing program and launch detailed surveys to poll both field and channel.
• Awareness Ratio - enables managers to monitor "field readiness" for an initiative. Documents are tracked across many types of business segments including: geography, region, product line and promotion type.
• Field Readiness Alerts - provides early detection of programs that the field is unprepared to execute. By rectifying these issues and ensuring that field readiness is optimized, managers can maximize the revenue potential of any given program or promotion.
• Document Effectiveness Metric - provides a dashboard view of what documents are being read and how many times each have been read. Further drilldown provides analysis of document effectiveness and potential areas for process improvement.
• Two-way Feedback Messaging - enables the end user, whether a channel partner, sales manager or point-of-sale, to provide real-time qualitative feedback via the intranet, that is automatically sent back to corporate headquarters.

Some of the benefits InStranet customers have recognized by implementing CIL include:

• Increased channel and promotion-related revenue
• Faster and more accurate decision-making
• Faster navigation of sales and marketing content
• Better planning and measurement of sales and marketing resources

CIL is a web-based application that ships with InStranet's Content Application Foundation. It includes the following content and document management modules: publishing, workflow, file system agent, syndication, user management, security, metadata tracking and organization, multi-dimensional segmentation engine and application content exchange. CIL is targeted at companies with multiple distribution channels, large sales organizations, and multiple customer touch points within the following industries: retail, financial, manufacturing, CPG, healthcare and technology.

InStranet is a worldwide leader of multi-channel knowledge business applications. Global 2000 companies rely on InStranet's solutions to automate content and knowledge delivery for contact centers, field sales and Web self-care for servicing and sales initiatives. InStranet's Multi-Channel Knowledge Applications enable businesses to securely create, manage and deploy critical profile-based content for enterprise channels, and to analyze results to identify key successes or areas for improvement.

InStranet applications are currently deployed in many high-profile global enterprises, including 3M, AXA, BNP Paribas, Credit Lyonnais, France Telecom, Manpower, Orange, and Zurich North America. Global partners include Aspect Communications, BEA Systems, Genesys, IBM, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems. InStranet is headquartered in Chicago with offices in Paris, and technology and distribution partnerships throughout Europe and Asia.

For more information, contact:

InStranet, Inc.
InStranet EMEA
Andrew Zinger
(312) 629-4577
azinger@instranet.com