It's a brand new year and I'm looking forward to exploring new opportunities for members to learn, share, and create new relationships through the Council. My resolution for 2006 is to establish more connections between members outside of our regular CouncilTels and meetings. While it's easy to believe you're the only one facing a particular problem, it is very likely that one of your peers in the Council has dealt with a similar issue. My goal is to uncover these issues and help via our network of shared experience. If your business is moving in a new direction in 2006, please let me know and I'd be happy to get you in touch with others on the program or at Forrester to lend some insight and help chart that new territory.

Forrester Wave™ Evaluations On Database Marketing And Email Service Providers
Eric Schmitt and Shar VanBoskirk closed out 2005 with the completion of two very comprehensive Forrester Wave evaluations of the database marketing and email service provider vendor landscapes. The research is especially timely for the Council as members voted "getting the most out of your service provider relationships" as the topic of highest interest in the recent topic survey. Eric will share his thoughts during next week's CouncilTel (Thursday, January 26 at 2:00 p.m. ET). Some insights from the reports include:

• Half the firms we surveyed in the research will increase their spend by more than 5% on outsourced database marketing services in 2006.

• Demand for analytics, data, and strategy is on the upswing. I've noticed a marked increase in member interest in new analytic tools and data mining services over the past year. This plays out in the results from our survey as well.

• Detailed vendor summaries are available on the Forrester site for the 10 evaluated database marketing service providers and nine email service providers. These summaries include insights gleaned from reference interviews and an in-depth breakdown of the vendor's current offering, strategy, and market presence.

• Understand the evaluation criteria. The "Criteria" tab in the spreadsheet includes a description and grading scale for each criterion we scored against. Peruse these descriptions and mark the ones most important to you.

• Change weightings as needed. We weight the evaluation criteria based on what we feel is most important to meet our client base. But every marketing organization is different. For example, companies with traditional high-volume direct mail requirements may want to heavily weight the company's "technology" and its "data and data sourcing services," and decrease "analytics" and "strategy."

• Determine your vendor shortlist with your customized Wave. "The Forrester Wave" tab will automatically update the Wave graphic and vendor ranking, placing the best fits for your needs in the leader category. You may also decide to develop your RFP based on our evaluation criteria, as these are the areas where we identified vendor differentiation.

As always, if you have any questions, need assistance with a project, or would just like to bounce an idea off another Council member, please don't hesitate to contact either Jonah or me. We're here to help!

Best regards,

Justin Bruton
Council Manager

You are receiving this monthly email update as a member of Forrester's Database Marketing Council. As always, I am very interested in your input. If you would like to provide some feedback on or have any questions about these regular emails, contact me at jbruton@forrester.com.

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