Media Dojo

Jokes are among the oldest and most effective forms of human communication. From etchings made by a bored Centurion on Hadrian’s Wall (“A Roman and a Greek were debating in the Forum one day….”) to the latest YouTube postings, the ability to take in communication, make it your own, and pass it along strums a deep cord within people—if it’s done well.

That’s one of key benchmarks for a newer breed of service providers using cloud computing to change how outbound communications via email and text are done by organizations to reach their customers and partners. I spoke with Dale McCrory, a top product manager at Exact Target out of Indianapolis. Earlier this month, Exact Target raised a whopping $70m VC round in the midst of economic turmoil. More about the company here: Media Dojo Tear Sheet: Exacttarget

I found that many of the social rules we’ve learned over time about context, consent and content of a good joke go a long way toward making the social value of it work. What cloud computing does, it allow the infrastructure to respond in tune with what a savvy marketer would like to do.

Media Dojo: Tell me about Exact Target and its DNA

Dale McCrory: We’re a SaaS-based one-to-one communications provider for companies wanting to reach their customers. We started as SaaS marketing to send out messages, primarily via email. We’ve now expanded our footprint to other one to one communications mediums like SMS.

MD: Where does cloud computing fit into that?

DM: There’s a portion of the cloud that allows a marketer to upload files that contain the email addresses that constitute their opt-in customer base. Our service connects to a back-end database on the customer premise. The data goes into the cloud at that point in time.

MD: So what problem are you solving?

DM: We enable marketers of all sizes to deliver direct communication (email, SMS, voicemail) to their customers and have all the tracking and analysis tied back to their goals and projections. We also have a content management landing page so people can build websites in our system. The main problem we’re attacking is that if you can’t find a way to quickly organize, personalize, send and track your marketing communications, it quickly defaults to spam in the customer’s mind. Aside from working the logistics of ensuring the right message to the right person in the right context, we also help our customers maintain their legal compliance with legislation such as the Canned Spam Act.

MD: So where is email marketing going as a business process? As an “art” form?

DM: It used to be only about the message: its content, its delivery, its tracking back to goals and outcomes. That’s still important but we’re also seeing email as a vehicle for allowing the consumer to repurpose good content across social channels. So it’s a customer being able to say, “the content of this email is important or funny enough for me to want to forward and display it on my Facebook wall”. Being able to facilitate that interaction while maintaining the essence of the message is crucial because now you’re introducing your content to people who weren’t experienced it before.

Secondly, it’s the ability within an email to actually change images on the fly. An example would be that you have a coupon that goes out via email that after three days you want that coupon offer to change into something else if it hasn’t yet been opened. We can do that with technology called Live Content.

MD: What cost areas are you attacking with cloud computing?

DM: If you look at a traditional web hosting today, if a SME marketer chooses to build a web presence that relies on regular email communication, most web hosts throttle back emails to about 100 per hour. The reason that most hosting companies limit you to about 100 is that there is a something called an IP address reputation. All spam collectors look at an IP address and ask whether the volume is too great. If the email volume exceeds a certain threshold, the host will start blocking everything coming from that IP address. The hosting providers have to do that because they have their own IP reputation to maintain with other hosting providers and peers. The individual host might have 500 customers sending email through that one IP address and if any one of those exceeds that threshold they can end up punishing the rest of them. So there’s a huge cost to doing that.

Take it up to the enterprise level and imagine that you need to send out 200K emails for a legitimate reason on a particular business morning. if your business is going to make money by getting those 200K emails out that particular morning and you’re on a system that can’t send out those messages fast enough, so it takes you 8 hrs to get those 200K emails out, you’ve lost money. By using the cloud, you’re able to get out your message and not worry about whether you put enough hardware to solve the problem. You’ll also need someone monitoring your IP address to ensure that not only do the sends go through, you’re also complying with your opt-in/opt-out lists. According to the Canned Spam act, you have to process someone within 36 hours who wants to unsubscribe. If you don’t meet that request, then you’re in violation of the law.

MD: Last question, what new things does cloud computing enable you to do from a communications point-of-view?

DM: One thing the cloud enables is for us to become a hub for data. It enables us to interact with other cloud providers, for example Salesforce.com. You can mix data from SF such as support data or it might be sales prospecting data, combine it with the rest of your email marketing data, and do advanced segmentations by bringing together all these disparate sources in to a single system. A key cloud advantage is that you need to bring multiple systems together in a standard way and you need to have the scale to do that.

Another aspect is that having the same communications platform on the cloud allows the customer to explore different messaging types such as SMS without leaving the basic system. So the marketer might want to know the customer’s communication preference, which might change depending on the type of message or even the time of day. It might be better to send a SMS instead of an email to let a customer know that their pre-ordered item is now in stock. That would be a huge undertaking if you needed separate systems.

Comments are closed.