Many companies struggle with integrating data from two channels. Sur La Table combines data from five.

In June the provider of culinary products went live with a new repository for data streaming in from its five customer channels: its 74 retail storefronts, web-site, gift registry, contact center, and culinary schools.

The original database didn't contain feeds and only half the channels were integrated. As a result cus-tomers' Web activity, other than orders, was missing.

Sur La Table is starting slow, targeting one data challenge at a time for now. Neal Cohen, vice president of marketing, says the company's initial goals are to understand the allocation of marketing spend and to change the catalog's circulation strategy as a result of the spend analysis. "There's so much overlapping marketing that happens between email and catalog, and search and the affiliates, in ad-dition to…our culinary program," he explains. "There is a possibility that if we know if some-one is receiving a couple emails per week and they're actively out there on the Web searching for the terms that drive traffic to the site…we won't send catalogs to the same people over and over again."

With the help of Pluris, which built the feeds, Sur La Table also analyzes the data and updates dashboards daily with key performance indicators around growth, demand, channel, and product. Cohen says together the two companies built a set of reports that provide the history of customers' cross-channel shopping and how they migrate between channels. The technology also authenticates each customer with PIN technology at the customer, household, and address levels to help ensure that Sur La Table never overmails into a single household. Cohen's team uses Unica Affinium to develop the multichannel campaigns from the data.

Next, Cohen says, the company wants to tackle sending the right message to the right customer. "Right now we're more one-size-fits-all," he says. He cites a lack of staff bandwidth as a reason for the inability to separate versions of campaigns to create personalized messaging, but expects that to change with the help of the new database. "The more data that we have and the more we can look at the analytics the better we can look at that in a cost effective way."