Messaging News - August 2008 - (Page 28) TRANSACTIONAL EMAIL transactional messages is no longer assumed to be the best approach. “While in-house technologies scale to handle the large volume of transactional messages required to conduct business, they cannot provide the visibility and functionality required to move beyond “blast” messages,” believes Morgan Stewart, director of research and strategy for ExactTarget, “As a result, the performance of transactional emails as marketing opportunities has not been optimized.” Make It Count In combing through the glowing testimonials on vendor Web sites, the most oft-mentioned benefit of huge number of additional calls into a call center asking ‘Did my product ship?’ Inbound call center costs can be greatly reduced by ensuring stable and consistent delivery.” Deutsch goes on to say that aside from failure reporting, click tracking can also be hugely valuable to an enterprise. According to a MarketingSherpa study commissioned by StrongMail, 75 percent of respondents said that they opened and read transactional messages ‘Frequently’ or ‘Very Often/Always,’ with only 45 percent saying that they open/read other permission mailings as often. “With the higher open rates afforded by transactop of the queries many different dimensions under which the data can be analyzed to glean more information from it.” Data Analysis Onge adds that early on in the startup and configuration process, Acxiom identifies data points, which may be important to the marketers and does not limit them to what he calls the “canned vanilla perspective”—getting data only from opens and clicks by campaign. “We have about 30 reports that come stock with our interface that allow you, on the fly, to generate any construct for different data points, on your own, in real time,” “The first email you send to a subscriber or new customer is often the result of something they’ve done, such as made a purchase or subscribed to your publication. This first ‘welcome email’ is often the most opened or clicked communication a marketer ever sends. It can include commercial information, provided that the email subject line is non-commercial, and that the transactional information precedes the commercial or advertising information.”—Morgan Stewart, ExactTarget transactional email solutions, are the analytics and reporting functions. However valuable the numbers may be, many organizations are not yet utilizing the data to its best advantage. Ryan Deutsch, director of strategic services for StrongMail Systems, points out that transactional email lacks the visibility enjoyed by most email marketing applications and that at the most basic level, failure reporting is often very light or non-existent in transactional email streams. “What this means to businesses is that they often have a very difficult time understanding whether or not recipients are getting transactional emails, if the emails are landing in the inbox or the junk folder, and if the images and links in the emails are viewable. As an example, consider an Internet retailer that delivers purchase confirmations and shipping notifications via transactional email,” Deutsch offers. “If these emails are not delivered, or end up in a recipients’ junk folder, an organization could receive a tional emails, imagine the impact on the same retailer that is able to track interest in product up-sell and cross-sell offers within transactional emails via click tracking statistics,” states Deutsch. “Tracking this activity can drive recipients directly to Web sites for purchase or trigger additional email communications.” According to Mark Ogne, marketing leader for Acxiom’s digital marketing services, analytics are among the most valuable functions his company offers as they can “wrap analytics around what is normally a blind hole for the marketer.” In 2000, Acxiom purchased a company called MindShare, who defined themselves as a ‘customer intelligence and analysis company.’ “What this provided us,” explains Onge, “was the ability to enable our customers to embed lab style queries in their data. This means that it’s not just one dimensional— how many opened, how many this, how many that—we can overlay on says Onge. “That’s a big differentiator for us. Typically, let’s say that you have 20 to 50 different prefab reports, but if you wanted to say, “What if we look at it from this dimension AND that dimension.’ That would take you potentially weeks or months to get an answer from your ESP. One of the key Acxiom advantages is that you can develop those queries on your own, on the fly, and find out the custom questions that you need to answer.” Onge’s perspective on data analysis is that there are two key aspects that need to be addressed, “One is: ‘So you’ve found something out. Do you know what to do with it?’ That’s a marketing strategy type of a question. What does it actually mean to me as a marketer when I’m thinking about trying to improve my program?’ Two is: ‘Okay, I’ve found something out, I’ve thought of something to do with it, but does the product enable me to get that done?’ Each of these things 28 MESSAGING NEWS AUGUST 2008
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