Columbia, Md., March 25, 2009 –- Merkle (www.merkleinc.com), one of the nation's largest and fastest growing database marketing agencies, introduced Integrated Customer Marketing™, an optimization framework designed to help organizations reengineer their customer marketing strategy and business processes to actively manage customer and prospect interactions across sales, marketing and services throughout the customer lifecycle. Integrated Customer Marketing (ICM) helps companies become more customer-centric by informing the total customer experience –- from strategic lifecycle management and marketing mix optimization, to comprehensive program development and the optimization of individual campaigns.

At its core, Integrated Customer Marketing involves enabling three main enterprise capabilities: customer segmentation based on attitudes, values and behaviors; a comprehensive database marketing platform to capture and manage vital information and data about prospects and customers; and a measurement capability to understand the value of customers and the impact that sales, marketing and service activity have on their behaviors.

David Williams, president and CEO, Merkle, said, "The marketing discipline today is at a pivotal moment. Fortune 1000 companies spend billions of dollars each year to drive customer acquisition and loyalty through a wide range of marketing and customer experience initiatives all aimed at driving profitable growth. Yet most of these initiatives fail to deliver on the expected value for the simple reason that marketers are unable to draw a direct, measurable connection between a customer's interactions and the resulting behavior."

Williams continued, "Merkle believes the customer portfolio is the most critical asset an organization has to produce long-term shareholder value and competitive advantage. Integrated Customer Marketing provides a disciplined approach to maximizing the value of the customer portfolio through understanding and managing the critical interactions that drive customer value."

Williams will be presenting Merkle's Integrated Customer Marketing framework during a Webinar on March 26. To register for the Webinar, or to learn more about Integrated...