By James Lawson.

Online marketing services are big business. With thousands of companies visiting websites every day to buy and clean customer data, competition is intense between service providers who are continually developing their offerings. New channels, extra reference files and hosting options are just some of the recent developments.

What’s new?

“Consumers are able to carry out more and more day-to-day tasks, transactions and activities online, and marketers vie to engage customers in the digital world,” says Adam Leslie, Head of Data at Callcredit. “It makes sense that marketers are able to obtain more marketing services online.”

Online services started 12 years ago in April 2000 when Synectics Solutions launched the original Intact service. The initial rationale behind online self-service was to employ automation to offer lower volume list sales and cleansing to smaller businesses that might be put off by minimum order values. This market is still very much there, but companies of all sizes now use these services to buy and process data, while a number of sites have expanded from verifying small list volumes to become true data portals.

Hosting as a fully-integrated part of a marketing services site has the potential to transform how a client uses online services. Rather than just a handy way to occasionally clean a list or two, using a site to host the central campaign database means clients may well use it instead of in-house or MSP-hosted databases and applications.

The UKChanges>online service is now in this position, offering the ability to upload and host customer data alongside a suite of simple-to-use analysis and visualisation tools that can generate profiles using geodems codes, RFV scores and so forth. Providing data management as part of a fully-integrated portal has been a longstanding aim of a number of providers, but UKChanges is the first to get there.

“We needed to make it easy to load data and view it,” says UKChanges director Steve Day. “Now you can pull campaign results back into the database and compare them to the target list with a few clicks. We’re working with both end users and agencies that want to host, segment and access their clients’ data.”

UKChanges has already signed up a number of end user clients as well as agencies such as Cogent Elliott and Sports CRM specialists Goodform which use the service to manage campaigns on behalf of their own clients. Though Day is adamant that he is not competing with marketing software suites, his company’s site has evolved to the point where its rich functionality certainly offers a strong alternative.

The campaign management tool employs standard DM methods such as pack codes, stationary codes and control cells, and can also log campaign codes on the database against the relevant records. Multi-file deduping with full merge/purge arrived recently, while the ability to profile hosted data and then use that profile to buy prospect data is imminent. Ark Group’s National Deceased Register has just joined the roster of reference files and a standard email package will soon provide broadcasting and real-time reporting capabilities. Next to arrive is UK Mail’s imail “print, post and deliver” service.

Developing online services with this level of capability is a nerve-wracking business. UK marketers can be timid creatures who usually prefer to offload their data worries onto a friendly bureau and tend to reject anything that looks too complex.

“Hosting was a challenging thing to do,” says Day. “It’s always a balance between ease of use and complexity, and it can take a while for people to understand what it is we are offering. We had to identify clients’ needs. Would they do it? Well, it’s a reality now, it’s out there and people are using it.”

Online services are simply a different delivery route for a company’s existing offerings, and suppliers are gradually adding extra options for users rather than asking them to take a giant leap into the dark. Callcredit has taken this route with its 20 million opted-in email list, offering an online appending service via its improvemydata site. In a further update, users can also now choose to upload a third-party suppression file to employ alongside the service’s line-up of reference files.

“Marketers should have the options to pick and choose between offline and online, depending on their needs, personal preference and expertise,” says Leslie.

Meta-morphix aims its meta-morphix Online cleansing and enhancement service at experienced data professionals rather than small-volume, low-expertise users. Speed is the big advantage, according to Guy Smith, the company’s Head of Online Sales.

“As far as I’m aware, we have the fastest online processing service in terms of our ability to generate comprehensive data audits and turn around jobs without losing service quality,” he says. “We offer time-saving, pre-defined audit options or more in-depth, customised options.”

The company recently brought b2b processing into the online fold along with teleappending from the Business OSIS file, and has also added the Business Suppression File and the Corporate TPS to its stable of b2b reference data sets.

“We have completed a full redesign of the online bureau service, which includes the addition of an improved file layout preview function,” says Smith. “We have made a number of small but vital tweaks to our online offering including simplifying the upload process, increasing the processing speed and reducing our job turnaround times, which all helps to improve the performance of the service overall.”

Data Discoveries takes two different approaches to the use of online services in cleansing. Clients install its Enhance application in-house and then run it themselves to clean their data. But though the ER and PAF files are held locally, other reference files reside at Data Discoveries’ head office and the software accesses them remotely. Encoded records go over one at a time to be checked against the reference files.

“We decided to hold deceased and goneaway files remotely for security reasons,” explains Aitken. “

Then there’s the View service, introduced three years ago. View is a conventional browser-based service, where clients upload files, select and run services, then download cleansed data. But rather than focusing on occasional users, it employs client-specific templates and a limited set of options.

“View is an SME tool,” says David Aitken, technical director at Data Discoveries. “We find that most clients need between two and seven templates depending on whether they are processing prospect or customer data, or enhancing or suppressing records. It’s designed for repeat use and we both invest in the process of setting it up.”

By making sure that every element of a processing job is set up in advance, View is close to foolproof, even when used by non-technical staff. This doesn’t mean it’s in any way limited however. It uses the Enhance engine and has features like a configurable file hierarchy for deduping, variable matching “tightness” based on confidence scores, and a very wide choice of reference files.

“It’s fully automatic,” says Aitken, “No-one can press the wrong button. It’s a different approach to the others which are more about self-service. It’s easy to use, but deceptively powerful because of how we set it up.”

Talking to his clients, Aitken sees online services continuing to rise in popularity. With security an oft-cited criticism of the online approach, he admits that some clients still prefer to see the whole cleansing process carried out within their own environment. “We’re looking at a private version of View, where they can hold all the data behind their firewall,” he says.

Callcredit’s Adam Leslie takes a similar view on the spread of online services. “I don’t believe there are any insurmountable problems to providing online marketing services,” he says. “An online service can exist for all products in one form or another, though different versions of online services may be needed for different users. After all, car makers don’t make one model for all drivers; they offer smaller cars more affordable cars, people carriers for families and high-end sporty models for thrill seekers.”

The line between software and services has been blurring for some years now and this certainly applies to online marketing services. At UKChanges, Steve Day notes that they are, “increasingly giving clients the site API so they can access all services directly from their own systems,” and are looking to make their services directly available from within remote applications.

Data8’s clients can already call up Integr8 from their desktop software to validate website registration data automatically in real time and to perform many other tasks. In each case, the actual processing is run remotely via the Internet on Data8’s servers and must be configured in advance, choosing the services, reference data sets and fields to be validated.

When using an application, all the user needs to do is click on a hot key and pay per use from then on. The company’s most recent innovation is the Click to Check TPS service; right-clicking on a highlighted phone number within an application brings up a contextual menu with TPS/CTPS checking options. Choosing one of these runs a live check against Data8’s files.

“We’re seeing a lot of growth and new users on the integration side,” says Data8’s managing director Antony Allen. “You can create a list or extract in something like CRM Dynamics, hit the ‘D8’ button and the data is automatically checked and re-entered to the CRM database.”

Online delivery also makes it straightforward for clients to access a wide range of reference data and related services that go beyond cleansing and validation. Data8’s recent additions include consumer identity checking and business credit scoring, as well as a data processing portal for the travel and tourism sector set up for swift mailing file processing.

Rather than paying stiff licence fees to hold reference files in-house, pay-per-use is a much more attractive prospect for light users. With a little preliminary set-up, it’s relatively simple to feed data straight to the relevant user’s desktop application.

“We can take a company’s details and immediately feed back a credit score based on the rules set up by the client,” explains Allen. “There’s an option to use a “traffic light” system: a green light means that record is approved and can be passed straight to sales with a credit limit attached.”

There’s also increasing demand for the tools that can be used to supply online marketing services, whether as a commercial operation, or for internal agency or client use. Many sites are now simply “white label” versions of another vendor’s platform. For example, Royal Mail’s Clear Prospects services is run by UKChanges while Blue Tahiti Software (BTS) enables many of the services provided by agencies to their own clients.

BTS’s Bureau Suite package incorporates standard cleansing tools like deduplication, suppression, enhancement, reporting and auditing, while the Prospect Creator package lets data owners, list owners and list managers move their list sales online. The company supports its own direct clients by offering them the tools to run cleansing jobs themselves or by stepping in to provide the services themselves. BTS’s suite functionality goes well beyond standard cleansing to include segmentation, RFM and LTV scoring, list profiling, predictive modelling and sophisticated reporting.

“We’re currently expanding across Europe with Creditsafe,” says Phillippe Werey, managing director at BTS, which has provided systems and secure hosting for Creditsafe’s online list sales operation since 2007. “We still work with agencies and take care of cleansing and enhancement work for our own direct clients, but our hosted services offer a full online campaign management centre with very similar functions to installed marketing software.”

Fast implementation and reduced risk are key benefits of this type of web-based software. Though similar to the SaaS delivery model, it mixes standard software with custom data management services.

“Cloud-based services alone can only ever meet part of the requirements of a data-driven marketing operation,” says Werey. “Blue Tahiti’s online applications are a delivery platform for the complex back office data services that are an essential component in providing value to the marketer.”

Continuing convergence

As the Internet continues to ease the supply of digital information, the number of users and the breadth of online marketing services they can access can only increase. The success of SaaS tools like salesforce means business users trust online services far more than they did a few years ago.

Web-based delivery also suits today’s direct marketing where smaller amounts of money are being spent on across more channels. With smaller volumes and multiple data types, the online marketing services model looks increasingly attractive compared to installing software and licensing multiple reference files in-house.

As UKChanges’ Steve Day says, “Why do you need an executable programme when you can log in and use a reliable service?” Today’s marketers will be equally happy using both.