• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, January 6, 2010

Beginning another year with a key executive appointment, direct marketing agency Epsilon on Wednesday named Eric Stein as EVP of Digital Strategy.

Stein joins Epsilon from Google, where he led two key integration projects on the DoubleClick business following Google's acquisition. Prior to that, he managed the Local Markets program. An early employee at DoubleClick, Stein is also credited with leading several key areas of operations leveraging data with online solutions.

Reporting directly to President and CEO Bryan Kennedy, Stein is tasked with evaluating Epsilon's client offerings and strategies across business units to identify and incorporate new opportunities in the digital marketing space to better serve clients and build brands.

"The marketing industry is at a crossroads as new channels emerge and overlap, creating a number of opportunities as well as complexities," said Stein.

Last January, Epsilon named Andrew Frawley as its new president of digital services. Frawley had previously served as CEO of automated email marketing services provider ClickTactics, which has since been named ClickSquared.

Part of the Alliance Data Systems marketing group, Epsilon firmly rooted itself in permission-based email marketing with the acquisition of Bigfoot Interactive for $120 million in 2005.

In early 2006, Epsilon acquired DoubleClick's email business for an estimated $90 million -- and later that year acquired Abacus, which manages databases for catalog companies, from DoubleClick for $435 million.

In a recent review of email service providers conducted by Forrester Research, Epsilon ranked among the "leaders" in the "large enterprise deployment" category.

For the study, Forrester surveyed some 218 clients by phone, and used sixty-nine criteria to gauge ESPs divided into three buckets: current offering, strategy and market presence.

In the report, Forrester also found that client demands may be intensifying. "Email marketing frequency is growing," the report said, because the channel may be a more efficient tactic.