This month I've met a couple of really interesting companies who sort of dovetail with what we do in eCRM. Several weeks ago I was at an email round table event for Revolution Magazine, with some highly knowledgeable people both client-side and provider-side. It was fascinating to hear how people view the current state of email marketing, and its future. Topics ranged from managing ISP reputation scores to behaviour-based automation, drivers like client profits and critical success factors like usable design. Everyone in the room was agreed on the critical importance of good segmentation.

I followed up with two of the companies sharing the conversation. One provides straight-through analytics - one of the Holy Grails. The usual way of reporting on eCRM programmes involves extracting information from a variety of separate databases, then stringing together email tracking, mobile, web and e-commerce stats. In a huge step forward, they build a bespoke (free) database behind a fantastic dashboard, which means we can have genuinely end-to-end customer tracking underpinning the eCRM programme, without interfering with existing databases or adding unnecessarily to the cost. The other company sits right at the other end of the process. They make sure emails get delivered and read, through a combination of technical expertise and negotiating power.

We're going to try and bring both companies into what we do, as they'll help us tighten up delivery and tracking. Essentially, while we know that what Underwired does - segmentation strategy and eCRM campaign development, creative and management - drives revenue on a huge scale, there is always much room to improve the technological wiring in such a way that we can improve revenues even more. It's a combination of properly coherent, end to end attention to detail. Where we get the opportunity, bringing together the right partners to support the strategic and creative work will mean incremental revenue for clients in its own right.

ECRM gathers pace, and we're seeing engagement rates of 63% with previous 'brand resistors' and CTRs of 50%+ as a norm. And it feels like summer might be excellent too.