23 Jan 2012: Callcredit Marketing Solutions has launched a new service that helps marketers tap into the lucrative home mover market by identifying consumers at every stage of the moving cycle – from putting their home on the market and securing a mortgage, through to completing the sale or signing a new rental contract.

The Home Move Triggers Daily Alert service helps marketers capitalise on the fact that research shows that home movers spend an average of £5,000 on products and services related to their move, but this is also the time when consumers are most likely to change providers, with 65% of people switching to a new supplier when they move.

Home Move Triggers can help companies retain valuable business – and win new customers – by identifying these consumers at an early stage.

The service provides daily feeds of address-level information on up to 200,000 pre-mover prospects each month – the largest volume of home mover data on the market – using ‘triggers’ including For Sale or To Let boards being raised, a property going under offer, mortgage funds being secured, a sale completing or a new rental contract being signed, and Royal Mail redirects being implemented.

This mailing list can then be matched to an existing customer database, or enhanced with names, phone numbers and email lists where available for customer acquisition. It can also be combined with insights such as CAMEO geodemographics and nGauge credit risk data for fine-tuned targeting.

The service, which covers both the sale and rental markets, will be particularly useful in the financial services, insurance, utilities, telecoms and sky/cable TV sectors.

Chris Savage, Managing Director of Callcredit Marketing Solutions, said: “Consumers who are in the process of moving home will typically be looking for a range of new products and services, and most will spend more in the first six months of moving than in the next five years. What’s more startling is the colossal amount of revenue lost each year through customer churn, as in the majority of cases movers will look to change their mortgage, insurance, utilities and telecoms providers, making them a highly valuable market for retention.

“Our Home Move Triggers service can help companies minimise this risk – and even grow their customer base – by identifying movers from the moment their home goes on the market and following them through the move cycle. This presents an invaluable opportunity for businesses to be proactive and contact customers with a wide spectrum of offers, at exactly the time they’re thinking of switching. And with the majority of moves occurring in March and September, there’s no better time to start looking at the service.”

Callcredit’s market-leading home mover data is collected between two and 12 weeks prior to the move, and can be supplied on a daily or a weekly basis for matching. Callcredit can also provide an end-to-end managed service, which includes matching data and managing the customer communication process on behalf of clients.

Headline speakers include Innocent Drinks’ co-founder Richard Reed, explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes OBE, and digital illusionist and TED crowd favourite, Marco Tempest.

This is the perfect event to help you stay ahead in digital marketing. In just one day, you will learn how to connect further with your customers by discussing the latest challenges and opportunities facing the digital world. The agenda will include top brands as well as well-known inspirational figures and the day will be finished off with eCircle's Incognito After-Party. Visit the conference website for more information and to register.

Contact Caroline Manson for more info: c.manson@ecircle.com

by Carolyn Bondi, Business Development Director at CRM & data agency Blueberry Wave

This year more than ever, sales figures need to be busily multiplying. But if you suspect that your campaigns could be DOA, it’s time to check your CRM strategy for the Seven Signs of Life. If you feel your strategy may be falling short, there are plenty of things you can do to administer first aid. Follow our seven-step guide to putting the life back into your CRM campaign:

1. Movement: Is there movement out there? Are you harnessing all your customers and prospect touch points correctly via the web, email, DM response, in-store, social media, delivery and operations? Think about every touch point as an opportunity. It’s imperative you gather the right information in the right format. Make sure you seek appropriate permission from customers to contact them, and don’t forget to get their postal address – it makes all the other jobs possible. Email only or badly permissioned data can render your customers unreachable, unhygienic or prematurely ageing!

2. Respiration: Is your database breathing? You can only tell if you have a working Single Customer View. Get your individual customers into one place, have one household address, prioritise the household and align everyone’s recorded sales and interactions with you across all your products, brands and channels.

3. Sensitivity: How sensitive are you to your customers and prospects? Do you have a thorough understanding of their needs? If you collected address details it’s now time for some analysis – what do they do (their purchase patterns, buying behavior, channel they use, what they buy) and who are they (lifestyle and demographics)? Build a portrait of your customers that takes everything possible into account, focusing on the areas in your business with the most potential.

4. Growth: Take the time to assess which parts of your strategy to nurture and grow. Put them in the right order, ranking them from best to worst. Build a propensity model on the area of your business that has the biggest potential to grow or requires immediate focus, as you’ll need to be able to target existing customers who have the highest likelihood to re-purchase in future.

5. Reproduction: This is where it gets exciting – a great contact and communications strategy can really help your customer base multiply! Create a bespoke plan that shows you when to talk to them, by what channel, about what and how to position your message or offer to them. This helps your customers feel understood and valued, and ultimately they will buy more. By making your campaign relevant and timely you will increase your likelihood to get a sale. Your plan should give you a basis to springboard into the future with an improved structure and the ability to measure success and report on it.

6. Output: Implementing your campaigns effectively is very important. One size doesn’t fit all and in 2012 we shouldn’t be just blasting everyone with the same message – that’s so 2002! You’ll be using all this rich information to create the right message in either HTML email format or with a DM pack for your customers, as well as prospect campaigns. To save time and cost, you can get clever with one design but split messaging for different customer segments and prospects, as well as people you just won’t mail this time! Remember – quality, not quantity.  

7. Nutrition: Now you need to feed this wonderful stuff back into your database. Jargon alert – ‘closing the feedback loop’. So take all the responders, non-responders, opens, clicks, buyers, transactions, order values and abandoned baskets, and make sure you capture it on each customer and prospect record. Only when you truly track and record the outcome can you provide the board with a campaign ROI. Putting the outcomes at an individual level back onto your Single Customer View completes the campaign history and enables the analysis of how it went. It provides you with the measurement tools to either fine-tune your campaign or do it all again (only bigger!) and plan for the next one! But have a cup of tea first…

So that’s the basic biology of CRM – there is of course a lot more to it but by just getting these Seven Signs of Life going, you will be in much better shape and will avoid needing a defibrillator on your campaigns.

by James Lawson.

17 Feb 2012: With email marketing continuing to grow rapidly, delivering the very best possible email is the only sure way to stand out from the crowd. Just as in direct mail, testing multiple versions is the way to optimise – and to avoid wasting budget on mailers that are fundamentally flawed. We took advice from the UK’s top ESPs on the methods and software features that will maximise email response and income.

Test and test again

“If there is one word we email-marketers use, and use a lot, it’s ‘test’,” says Kate Gowers, Account Director at Adestra. “Email is unique in that it is cheap, easy and effective to test many elements of a campaign, and the results are quick and measureable.”

Before any work takes place, defining the testing process and the metrics to be employed will help ensure that comparisons are valid. Keep adequate records of test findings too – what happens when the marketing manager moves on? This applies to all campaigns: feeding learning from each campaign into the next to determine which general rules work best is even more valuable than campaign-specific testing and will help focus quickly on the most rewarding approaches in future campaign development.

“State and document the hypothesis of the test in advance,” says Paul Gibson, StrongMail’s Head of Sales for UK and EMEA. “This sets expectations internally regarding the anticipated performance of the test.”When starting a new series of campaigns, Cathryn Tuffnell, Digital Campaign Manager at Communicator Corp, recommends testing contrasting treatments to establish what works best for the customer base or a banker list. For example, pitting specific against general or positive versus negative subject lines, or trying warm, “As a valued customer…”, or urgent, “Hurry, only five remaining”, treatments. Personalisation based on previous buying behaviour can also work well in subject lines: “Big discounts on similar products purchased”.

“Only test one thing at a time,” she advises. “If doing an A/B split test on subject line, only test that. Keep the time and date constant and once you have established the subject line that prompted the highest open rate, then move on to test variables.” For those selling internationally, test emails locally in each country in which a company operates. It’s generally better for a native speaker to draft new subject lines from scratch, if not the whole copy.Subject line, call to action and offer are standard test targets as are the landing page, tone of voice, image number, size and location: all these are valid targets for optimisation.

Other possibilities include text length, navigation menu location, call to action placement, and sending time of day or day of the week. Testing is really only limited by the time available.Most good software will offer some testing functionality, typically A/B splits and subsequent reporting. Packages like Omniture’s Test & Target or Silverpop’s suite go a good deal further. The latter’s multivariate evaluation tools mean that multiple emails can be tested simultaneously, allowing users to break the “one-at-a-time” rule. 

Where appropriate, Silverpop can also optimise as a campaign goes out, effectively using the first sends as the testing phase. By analysing the real-time results, the software determines what is working best and so changes the content for subsequent emails. Cleverly, it can also change the images supplied to previously sent, but as-yet unopened emails once it has pinpointed the best combination.Silverpop also has a built-in send time optimisation function. By looking back over historical data on previous opening times, it can infer the best time to send each individual email in a campaign. Client Little Tykes saw a 75% increase in email-generated revenue by picking the right send time.

“Reaching customers at the time set aside for Internet activity meant clickthrough and time-on-site metrics went through the roof,” says Richard Evans, Director of Marketing, EMEA at Silverpop, who also highlights the need to report on a wider range of metrics rather than being obsessed with open and clickthrough.

“Little Tykes saw tiny fluctuations in open and clickthrough, 0.3-0.5%,” he explains. “But when they looked at page views, order rate and revenue, they noticed a huge difference.”Statistically valid samples are essential in every test, otherwise results are inconclusive at best and wastefully misleading at worst. Depending on the size and quality of the database being used, testing for each main segment is desirable and a well-resourced marketing operation will have different treatments for each segment. This might involve variable text or image content within the same broad template or a completely different treatment altogether.

“Know your sample size,” says Gowers. “This may seem obvious, but you do need a decent-sized list to get meaningful results from your testing programme.”Free applications are available online to help work out the valid sample size for a given list and many email packages now have this built in. Another key point is to take a representative 1-in-N selection from your list to test to, not a random one.

Don’t forget the control group either. The champion-challenger approach to improving an existing campaign must also be of sufficient size to offer statistically valid comparison results.“When testing, it is important to measure the incremental lift in the test from a normalized baseline,” says Gibson. “In order to do this, you should always hold out a statistically significant control group to measure against. This allows you to know how the program would have performed when approached in the same manner as usual and then to measure the test against the audience to determine the impact it had on the recipients.”

Separate from evaluating content and list performance is pre-send testing of how email creative will look in various browsers. For years, this has been a standard – and vital – step, but the plethora of new platforms arriving over the last couple of years has complicated the issue massively.

“Testing for rendering and message display across multiple devices is the most challenging and the most essential part of testing,” says Evans. “There were 14 new tablets in 2011 alone.” With tablets and mobiles increasingly the preferred place to read email, checking that messages display as intended is essential. A design style will also vary in effectiveness depending on how it is displayed; mobile clients truncate the “From” name and the subject line is a quarter of its PC-client size. Single-column text layouts tend to be the most versatile, working well across all platforms. 

“Be aware that mobile users use the subject line to ‘triage’ their inbox,” advises Evans. “You also need to make sure the call to action works for a mouse or a fingertip. There should be no need to zoom in.”Pivotal Veracity and Litmus are two popular applications that offer render checking amongst other testing and analytics functionality, and are used by the likes of ExactTarget, Yesmail and Silverpop. Send an email to the Litmus online service and the company sends back screenshots of how it will display in over 30 different devices.Testing by Stoke Park Golf Club and Adestra is a good example of the power of a visible preview subject line.

Tweaking to ensure the call to action was readable in the inbox screen lifted their open rate from 16% to 36%.The other pre-send essential is spam scoring. Good email software will offer this as standard, while the two services above can also vet for spam-like attributes.If the score is too high, there are many options. For example, avoid overusing punctuation or words like free, win or offer as they are well known by ESPs as indications of spam email. Long subjects lines should be cut and reducing the number of images may help too.

“We are regularly sent HTMLs as one long image, which then causes an issue if a recipient has images turned off as they will not view any of the message at all,” says Emily Goodyear, Marketing Manager at WRM-Media. “In these cases, we convert the HTML to text and test both versions. Text versions are always more successful as the majority of the message, if not the design, is not lost.”

Outside of the emails themselves, experts advise advance testing of any bought-in list prior to campaign roll-out to check validity. Here and in the campaign itself, using known seed email addresses will help track and evaluate the real delivery rate of the emails sent. Checking deliverability and response at the last minute using a small sample may avoid extreme disappointment on roll-out.

“We may select a test batch, for instance 100,000 records and assess the results of this, before rolling out an entire campaign,” says Goodyear. “We would compare the nature of the campaign to other similar previous campaigns to anticipate what the data requirement would be to achieve the desired results.”All the advice here applies to b2b as well as b2c emails but the distinctly different nature of the business marketplace must be taken into account. Consumers often buy immediately on impulse.

Business purchases are generally higher value and the buying cycle is far longer, tends to involve more than one person and often requires extensive research on the part of the purchaser. “There are a whole load of factors that can skew the testing process,” says Jamie Gledhill, Managing Director and founder of Emailmovers. “You shouldn’t expect them to bite immediately, it’s a different emotional process.”

According to Gledhill, testing a series of emails is essential to see which ones – or which combinations – tease response from different business buyers. “We use plain text mailers to test before we considering sending HTML and use an autoresponder system that allows immediate feedback from the email rather than trying to force them to click through to a site or fill in a form.”

As well as the number of contacts needed, the creative and proposition are still primary concerns. For example, using a subject line of “Are you sick of late payers?” rather than “Are you owed money?” may well work better when offering factoring services. “You may need to ask in three different ways before they will respond at all,” he says. “The smallest change in the copy can still make a big difference and b2b doesn’t respond as well to HTML as it does to text these days.”

Keep learning

The diversity of the advice above only reflects the infinite variety possible with email marketing. If there is one golden rule, it’s never to stop testing and improving. “There is a tendency for clients to think that once they have tested a campaign they don’t need to test that variable again, but that isn’t the case,” says Tuffnell. “Every campaign should be treated as an on-going test and there is something to be learnt from every campaign dispatched.”

In 2011, the company accelerated its international presence throughout Europe, North America, Brazil and China. All 19 countries contributed to the strong revenue growth and 25% of new sales came from outside of Europe.

Emailvision also launched Campaign Commander Enterprise Edition in Q4 2011, a comprehensive SaaS solution designed to increase the relevance and profitability of online customer relationship marketing programmes.

Emailvision picked up over 850 new clients in 2011 including Office and Republic in the UK. The company also made two major technology acquisitions in 2011. In January, the company acquired ObjectiveMarketer, a pioneer in SaaS solutions for social media marketing, then in June Emailvision completed the acquisition of smartFOCUS, the leading provider of customer intelligence software for relationship marketing.

The collaboration provides automotive marketers with traceable insight into a vehicle’s entire histor, regardless of changes in ownership, service centre or the dealer management system that the data is captured in. The companies believe the system will deliver powerful programmes for sales activities and enable automotive brands to fully understand a customer’s needs and score propensity to repurchase or to buy additional cars.

This insight allows automotive marketers to predicatively target consumers with timely and relevant service offers and reminders. Marketing campaigns will benefit by using historic data, extracted from dealer management systems in the sector, and put directly into the hands of people who can understand the data and use insight to help deliver solutions. This will ensure that marketing campaigns will now be targeted directly at consumers to help improve efficiency and results.

With the capability to extract data from all mainstream global dealer management systems, this collaboration enables automotive marketers to predicatively target drivers with:

• Vehicle maintenance prompts
• Vehicle milestone checks and recommendations
• Predictive wear and tear marketing with Electronic Vehicle Health Check (EVHC) data
• Tyre checks/replacements
• CRM activity 

David Pickering, Chairman and Managing Director, Eclipse Marketing, said: “Establishing the ability for automotive marketers to have the individual insight into a car’s history and tailor marketing and customer service communications to customers accordingly is an exciting prospect. We will be able to now give marketers an empowering level of insight which will then open the door to providing exceptional customer service to automotive customers.”

Carl Lightfoot, Managing Director, Progress Automotive Solutions, commented: “Vehicle data has been something that has long been collected by dealers and service providers, but it has proved almost impossible to do this across different dealers and service centres for different automotive marques and across different territories. We are the only company that has the ability to do this.

“The art of getting data from systems has evolved and cannot be replicated easily. There are a plethora of systems available but we don’t just go for the low hanging fruit – we cover every dealer management system. To be able to offer consistent and clear data across such a broad spectrum of DMS vendors in multiple countries is almost a nirvana for car brands and we’re really excited that collaborating with Eclipse can open up more opportunities to create more effective marketing programmes for the industry.” 

The solution, powered by Celebrus data, allows Belron to identify how individual marketing campaigns have directly affected changes in online visitor behaviour, beyond mere uplift in numbers of visitors. Prior to implementing the solution, the ability of Belron to match campaigns to business performance was limited by the lack of accessibility to centralised data sources. Marketing teams would have to locate and collate campaign performance data from each channel and then manually interrogate the data alongside business performance records – an unreliable and time-consuming approach.

Now the company has access to timely, granular data on how off-line campaigns have influenced customer activity. The campaign attribution strategy will allow budget spend to be constantly assessed and optimised by allowing campaign decisions to be based upon accurate commercial insight on individuals’ historical and current interactions with the marketing campaigns.

Belron also aims to use the Celebrus data to highlight the most successful marketing campaigns across its business by identifying the factors that most affect the campaigns’ success, and adapt these accordingly – for instance the optimum timing, channel and content.

Ian Drake, Media Modelling Manager at Belron, commented: “Belron is home to over 30 different business units with the head office playing the role of sharing best practice across the group. One of the biggest challenges we had was gaining ready access to detailed data. One of the few pieces of shared infrastructure that the business has is the web platform for our consumer website which operates over the majority of the group. By basing our campaign attribution on reliable data provided by Celebrus Technologies – which gives us visibility of individuals’ interactions with our website, both recently and on previous visits – we are able to make far more detailed and informed decisions on what marketing approach is most suitable, effective and ultimately, profitable.”

The campaign attribution solution is based upon data feeds from several international advertising campaigns and is set to initially focus on data drawn from France, Germany and the United States. By being able to track the success of an advertising campaign, Belron will be able to use different response modelling techniques to examine website activity and then extrapolate return on individual advertising investment.

Drake concludes, “Whilst the initial project focuses on data drawn from France, Germany and the United States, the campaign attribution solution will later be rolled out over all of our global businesses in a number of stages. To date, the Celebrus data has been used in a wide variety of ways to enable our local marketing teams across Europe and the Americas to understand their advertising programmes and associated success. We are now able to take this one step further and use the data to closely examine our overall marketing activity to determine where the greatest effect can be found.”

Katharine Hulls, VP of Marketing at Celebrus Technologies, added: “Investment in marketing has been closely watched over the last few years to ensure that tangible results are being seen, and this scrutiny can only be expected to grow in the coming months and even years. As a result, accurate campaign attribution that takes into account a customer’s entire journey, even across multiple channels, and shows where the greatest reward is being seen is absolutely vital. How else can a marketing budget be secured year on year?”

The five data breaches at local authorities all relate to incidents where the councils failed to take appropriate steps to ensure that personal information was kept secure.

• Basingstoke and Deane Borough Council breached the Data Protection Act on four separate occasions during a two month period last year. The breaches included an incident in May when an individual was mistakenly sent information relating to 29 people who were living in supported housing. The Council has now signed an undertaking committing them to take action to address the problems highlighted in each incident. This includes introducing appropriate checks to make sure personal information is handled in compliance with the Act.
• Meanwhile, in July 2011, an employee of Brighton and Hove Council emailed the details of another member of staff’s personnel data to 2,821 council workers. A third party also informed the ICO of a historic breach which occurred in May 2009 when an unencrypted laptop was stolen from the home of a temporary employee. The Council has now committed to ensuring that the personal information they process is secure, including making sure that all portable devices used to store personal data are encrypted.
• Further undertakings have also been signed by Dacorum Borough Council, Bolton Council and Craven District Council, whilst an enforcement notice has been issued to Staffordshire County Council over its mishandling of a subject access request.

Christopher Graham said: “At a time when councils are increasingly working with community partners, when data is shared it is vital that they uphold their legal responsibilities under the Data Protection Act. Failures not only put local residents’ privacy at risk, but also mean that councils could be in line for a sizeable monetary penalty.

“We must also consider the detrimental impact these breaches continue to have on the individuals affected. Disclosing details about someone’s social housing status can be upsetting and damaging for those affected. To help tackle this issue I’ve submitted a business case to the government to ask for them to extend my compulsory audit powers.”

The Information Commissioner has written to councils to remind them of the need to comply with their legal obligations under the Data Protection Act. Full copies of the undertakings and enforcement notice can be viewed here: http://www.ico.gov.uk/what_we_cover/promoting_data_privacy/taking_action.aspx#undertakings

The ICO has produced guidance for local authorities explaining their obligations to keep the personal information they handle secure. The guidance includes advice on the security measures that must be in place.

The ICO has also carried out a number of audits with local authorities to help them identify ways in which they can improve their handling of personal information.

by Antony Begley

14 Feb 2012: Technology for Marketing & Advertising, or TFMA as it’s more unversally known, is something of a phenomenon in the database marketing sector: it’s probably the only event that every database marketer at least considers going to each year. While there’s no question that the event is growing in various spaces only vaguely related to database marketing, there’s also no question that the event remains a very worthwhile use of a few hours out of the office for most database marketers.

Apart from anything else, you’ll get the chance to catch up with the team from Database Marketing magazine (at stand H50), which has got to be worth the trip in itself! But there will be plenty else of interest to catch up with, including a full seminar programme covering everything from CRM and multi-channel marketing to analytics, as well as a hosty of top quality exhibitors.We’ve picked out just a few to whet your appetitite.

ClickSquared – F34

A recognised innovator in terms of its products and services, ClickSquared is among these worth checking out at this year’s TFM&A. On its stand, the company is inviting marketers to visualise first-hand its cross-channel marketing hub with an interactive demo and videos. Technologically advanced yet very user-friendly, it’s certainly worth taking 10 minutes to have a nosy.

Capscan – G46

Visitors to Capscan’s stand will see the latest international address management solutions and data quality services, while Capscan reminds marketers of the consequences of poor data quality management and how finding the right solution is often simple, but highly effective.

Regional Sales Manager Laura Fovargue will also present at TFM&A this year, tackling ‘The dos and don’ts of domestics and international address and data quality management’, providing insightful advice for achieving optimal data quality, illustrated by real-life case studies.

Capscan will be showcasing its full range of solutions including its global address management solution Matchcode International which allows marketers to validate, correct, standardise, and format address data for over 240 territories worldwide. Online data cleansing, suppression and enhancement tool Capscan Integrity will also be on show, as will Capscan OnDemand, a ‘pay-per-search’ web-based ááá ááá addressing service that provides flexible and cost-effective access to UK and premium international addresses, as well as business-to-business, lifestyle and geographic information.

Eloqua – C10

For Eloqua, the biggest issues in database marketing this year will be ROI and data quality. These issues are inherently linked, of course, as Eloqua will be demonstrating to visitors to its stand: guarantee good quality data and better data segmentation and marketers will be able to target the most appropriate sales and marketing leads with the correct messages. Marketers looking to delve deeper into this space can visit Eloqua’s stand which it is sharing with partners CRM Technologies.

Eloqua will also feature heavily in McAfee’s talk on Wednesday, 29th at 12:30 in the Email, Mobility and Analytics Theatre. The talk focuses on how the company used Eloqua to create a lead scoring and lead nurturing programme using email marketing to accelerate sales and help build a team spirit between sales and marketing.

The alignment of sales and marketing is, in fact, Eloqua’s theme for this year’s show and in this, a leap year, the company is challenging marketers to take the initiative and propose a new way of working with their sales teams – a playful spin on the leap year tradition of women proposing to men.

Neolane - C5

Conversational marketing specialist Neolane sees 2012 as presenting five key strategic challenges for marketers, all hinging on taking advantage of ‘Big Data’ and the convergence of social, local and mobile (SoLoMo) to build an ever closer, more relevant and real-time/right time cross-channel relationship with customers.

The company is running a mini-theatre on its stand demonstrating how some of the world’s top brands are using Neolane’s marketing automation to take advantage of SoLoMo and of the Big Data opportunity. Seminars will show how these brands are moving from monologue, to ever-more personal, relevant, right time conversational marketing techniques and how they have transformed siloed messaging and content marketing to present real-time cross channel message consistency.

The results, of course, are improved loyalty, customer lifetime value and overall return on marketing investment.“When it comes to Big Data, much of the vendor noise is aimed at the IT department – how to capture it, access it and analyse it,” said Head of Marketing Martin Smith. “At Neolane, we’re about enabling marketers to take advantage of Big Data, to use such a wealth of data to heighten customer intelligence on every opt-in individual and then transform that data into information that can be used to create more relevant and rewarding customer relationships.” Having just closed a $27m financing round and reported 47% year-over-year growth in 2011 and with 21 of the Fortune Global 100 now rely on Neolane technology, it’s fair to say that the company is worth a visit at this year’s show.

Emailvision - E16

Henry Smith, Pre-Sales Director for Strategic Global Accounts at Emailvision, will be speaking at TFM&A on day one in the Data & Marketing Analytics Theatre, setting the tone for the company’s presence at the show. Keeping up with the pace of customer interactions with brands through multiple channels will be a key challenge for marketers this year, says Smith as well as ensuring timely and relevant communications are in context of that increasingly complex engagement.

At the show, Emailvision will be concentrating on its Campaign Commander Enterprise Edition, launched at the end of last year. The product is the first ever SaaS campaign management solution with fully integrated customer intelligence, and features several industry-firsts by providing SaaS customer intelligence integrated with email, mobile and social campaign management.

Bureau van Dijk – C28

Worth a visit this year will be Bureau van Dijk who will be demonstrating the latest version of its Mint database. First launched in 2004, Mint covers nearly 4 million companies in the UK – though the company also offers international versions. Mint is already widely-used in the B2B environment to create targeted lists, research prospects and new markets, and, increasingly, to seamlessly refresh and enrich in-house CRM content.

The new version includes more intelligent searching, a fresh contemporary interface and more options to customise your results. TFM&A will, in fact, be the first marketing exhibition where the company presents new Mint.

Mardevdm2 - G62

Social media will be a focus at this year’s show for Mardevdm2 which has noted both the enthusiasm for the new channel and the fear attached to it: how will marketers measure effectiveness? Is it just for branding and PR? How will they cope with negative feedback? Which social media channels should they focus on? Are Facebook and YouTube relevant in B2B? Could they generate sales and measure ROI on their investment?

At TFM&A the company will be focusing on its solution which is all about driving demand through the use of social media and the methods for measuring accountability for every pound spent on social media channels.

Mardevdm2 started out as a database marketing company and its business was built around driving response from direct marketing activity, measuring results and doing more of the things that worked. It intends to take these same skills into the digital age. It has embedded technologies including social listening tools and marketing automation platforms and uses them to drive innovative, predictable and better campaigns than ever before for its customers – find out how by dropping by the stand.

It looks like a great event – be there.

MessageFocus's multi-tiered design is ideal for the business structure of publishers, allowing multiple brands or divisions to all exist separately as part of one account. This is unique – no other email service provider has been designed in this way.

Post-email send information, recorded by the comprehensive MessageFocus reporting suite, is then transferred back into PSC reporting all the bounces.  This, combined with other data collected through MessageFocus forms, is added to the PSC database allowing advanced targeting and segmentation. Contact information, therefore, is automatically updated and users of PSC’s software will see a message next to the contact if their information has been flagged as bounced. This means the user can manually contact and update details to keep the data clean.

From one-off broadcasts to more comprehensive integration, the new Adestra/PSC partnership helps marketers co-ordinate and manage multiple direct marketing promotions and handle responses in a reactive manner. This benefits users in a number of ways: giving greater control over their email marketing; improving bounce suppression and deliverability; and, using best practice guidelines, can significantly improve response rates. This, combined with the benefits that the unique structure that Adestra’s MessageFocus brings, makes for a great partnership.

Laurence Cope, Managing Director of PSC, said: "With this addition of PSC's link to Adestra it now means that PSC’s clients can quickly and easily send their selected contacts to Adestra’s MessageFocus where they can send out bulk emails and manage their email campaigns using one of this country’s best email marketing platforms. PSC’s programs consist of a number of inter-connected programs which includes solutions for advertising sales order entry, contact management, accounting, subscription and controlled circulation management and flatplanning.  Whether you are searching for key account information, monitoring sales performance, copy chasing, invoicing, analysing trends or managing workflow, PSC’s ensures increased productivity through shared information which can be tailored to each individual so that for example sales, accounts, production and management can only see and or change what they need to do their jobs.”