by James Lawson.

22 Sep 2011: Neolane’s marketing automation suite has few rivals at the top end of the enterprise market. Database Marketing last reviewed this product in 2006, the year after its entry into the UK market. Since then it has gone from strength to strength in both its capabilities and in its number of blue-chip customers. Given the breadth of its functionality, this test drive should give some idea of its key strengths and how its developers focus on adding new tools to cope with the ever-changing world of direct marketing.

Integrated emphasis
Neolane continues to build the latest thinking into its products, be that channel coverage or in its use of the latest web service technologies as part of its Service Oriented Architecture. Its wide-ranging compatibility gives it huge flexibility in working with existing applications and allows it to be deployed as a hosted or in-house solution – or a mixture of both.
With more than 20 modules grouped around the Foundation Platform, this is a product that can handle virtually any kind of data-driven marketing, from keeping track of loyalty programmes to directing sales leads to the correct recipients or inserting variable content into transactional mail.
The modules variously cover customer data management, resource management, B2C campaign management, B2B marketing, analytics and reporting, and much more besides. Output channels include social media, print, SMS, email, MMS, telephone and fax, with inbound marketing also a focus.
Each module is extremely capable in its own right, yet works hand-in-glove with all other relevant modules. Interaction is a good example. As well as what-if optimisation tools to tune prospect, customer or channel selections to match budgetary constraints or income targets, its real-time recommendation engine enables an intelligent multi-step dialogue for digital channels or handles prompting for inbound calls.
Tight integration here means that messaging, branding and so forth can be consistent with those used in outbound campaigns. It also works together with the Message Centre module which, in turn, can link immediately with other tools like Variable Digital Printing and Survey Manager.
Neolane’s excellent external integration capabilities via standards like XML, SOAP and so forth give clients better choice when considering either the proprietary modules or working with third-party tools. There are also numerous pre-built connectors to partners’ software. For example, there are strong querying, segmentation, model building and reporting tools within the suite but it can also connect with external stats tools like SPSS Modeler.
In this case, it means that models can be built externally using the data from Neolane, then the scores imported and used to drive communications with the whole process being co-ordinated centrally. A good roster of partners covers the gamut of MSPs, consultants and IT integrators, as well as software vendors in analytics, databases and so on.
Data Management is well in hand. The suite can use an SCV stored in one of the numerous possible database platforms like SQL Server with Neolane’s own very open data model or pull in records as required from a variety of existing customer databases using Federated Data Access. There’s the full range of data management tools including an ETL module, a Web Services API, plus CRM and ERP replication tools.
The Foundation Platform links these all together and provides the workflow capabilities that allow comprehensive process automation – perhaps the strongest part of the whole application. Despite Neolane’s potential complexity, the logic, clarity and consistency of the interface plus heavy use of wizards makes it user-friendly. Logging in presents a configurable dashboard page and a clear list of tabs across the top lets you get to the main functions quickly.
The steps in building any sort of variable content campaign are almost identical, be it mail, email or web. First open a new or existing “Delivery”, pull up a template and change the outline as necessary using the built-in tools. Setting up the personalisation is again straightforward, then you can work up the conditional text using a series of IF/THEN and other Boolean statements.
The recently-launched Offer Management module offers further sophistication here such as the ability to link each product to certain types of exhibited behaviour. It’s also possible to weight each offer so that the optimum product can be presented based on criteria such as profitability. This can be used in other channels such as the call centre or to drive offer management for an ecommerce site, with Neolane acting as the CMS. The latter is not a trivial ability; apparently Neolane can scale massively here if required.
Then it’s on to the icon-based flowchart-style process builder which remains as compelling as ever. This is used to select target groups and construct workflows for everything from social media campaigns to b2b lead routing. You can build a single mailing in minutes or take a little longer to come up with complex multichannel, multistage operations.
Simply select from the list of icons on the left of the screen and variously link them in order to pull in existing selections, suppress or otherwise exclude groups, split or segment them by treatment or channel. Each item is of course customisable, for example in setting the wait time between the response from an outbound email wave and any subsequent follow-up. It only remains to press the send button or schedule the campaign for later activation. In the latter case, the target selection can be run automatically just before sending so the lists are bang up to date.
The most recent and topical addition to the suite is the Social Marketing module. This makes use of web analytics-type functionality to set cookies and use page tags to track individual site activity. Each anonymous visitor gets their own record within which browsing and other behaviour is recorded until they hopefully identify themselves at a later date.
Again the workflow planning tool is instrumental in automating how the application responds to a site visitor’s behaviour. For example, if someone “likes” the images the application serves to a client Facebook page, it might request email opt-in from that person in order to contact them. Then it can start to compile more information on them which can be piped straight into the database and used to inform future contact. Depending on the success of this approach, the next step might be to solicit opt-in from that person’s “friends”.
Once again this process is made clear and simple, with “share to social” email options and the like. For this, there’s the ability to use images for public Facebook pages that will appeal to a wider audience as opposed to more personalised email creative.
The other recent arrival is Leads, which offers Eloqua-style tools for b2b lead management, web tracking and multichannel marketing. This can connect to MS CRM or SF.com as required. It’s rather more “me too” than the rest of the package but again the key is that it links lead management closely to the rest of the client’s marketing work across all its other channels.

Broad and deep
Automation, architecture, data management, continual development and overall breadth and depth of functionality remain powerful Neolane advantages in the enterprise space. Buyers have a range of deployment options and are unlikely to require many other marketing applications, if any, to cover their various needs. It embodies many best practice elements of direct marketing built up over the decades – the virtuous circle of targeting, measurement and learning – and extends them to today’s live digital channels. Sending the right message at the right time through the right channel to the right person never looked so achievable as is does with this application.

Pricing and Specification

Prices start around £100,000 depending upon various criteria such as the size of the marketing database and number of users as well as the modules selected. It can be installed in-house or rented as an ASP solution. There is also the option to mix and match both in-house software and external services like email delivery which the company calls “mid-sourcing”.

www.neolane.com