Neolane White Paper: Neolane s Email Leadership Simplify your 360 degree email process, from targeting, creation and content management, automation, one-to-one personalization, routing onto deliverability management. MARCH 2011
Executive Overview Neolane has a distinct edge when it comes to simplifying adoption of one-to-one email marketing. With support for simplified targeting in the hands of non-technical marketers, streamlined content creation and management, automation, one-to-one personalization, routing and deliverability best practice enforcement, Neolane offers a uniquely integrated solution spanning a software platform, cloud-based services, and expert consulting services. Together, this solution ensures your marketing department rapidly adopts one-toone email best practices. Neolane s Email Leadership Neolane has its roots in the one-to-one email world; initially servicing the needs of large online merchants with requirements for sending millions of one-to-one personalized emails at various stages in the online buyer journey. These capabilities were later adopted by marketers in all industries. Three Best-in-Class Marketing Campaign Management Applications Neolane provides in-depth support for executing finely-personalized email communications. Three distinct marketing campaign management applications, each addressing focused requirements yet built on a single integrated conversational marketing platform, support rapid adoption of world-class one-to-one email marketing best practices. Neolane Campaign for B2C Cross-Channel Campaign Management: Neolane Campaign offers complete cross-channel campaign management features that let you unite outbound marketing channels and implement automated marketing programs that sequence sending of one-to-one personalized emails, direct mail, mobile messages and social messages. Neolane Leads for 360 Degree B2B Marketing Automation: A complete cross-channel B2B marketing automation application, Neolane Leads addresses the full breadth of B2B marketing needs spanning demand generation, customer communications, and lead management. Neolane Delivery for Simplified Email Campaigns: A Neolane application entirely focused on email campaign execution, Neolane Delivery offers you the best of Neolane s email expertise in a lightweight yet complete application. Comprehensive Software Options, Cloud Services, and Expert Services A complete set of Neolane software as well as cloud-based service options, along with expert consulting services expand the scope and coverage of these three core applications: Neolane Email Channel for simplified email targeting, creation and routing: A Neolane software option, Neolane Email Channel offers best-in-class services for facilitating targeting, creation, routing, and delivery of personalized emails. 2
Neolane Email Deliverability to gain control over your marketing reputation and the deliverability of your emails: A combination of optional software features, cloud-based services and expert consulting services, Neolane Email Deliverability let you effectively manage the deliverability of your emails. With proper list hygiene and optimized marketing practices, Neolane may help you achieve over 99% email deliverability Neolane Hosting for turnkey execution of your email and cross-channel campaigns: Neolane may host your entire Neolane conversational marketing software platform. Neolane Mid-sourcing for cloud-based routing of your emails and mobile messages: Neolane customers who wish to deploy Neolane in the data center may entrust Neolane to route their emails and SMS/MMS as a cloud-based service. Three Best-in-Class Marketing Campaign Management Applications: Neolane Campaign, Neolane Leads, and Neolane Delivery Cross-Channel Campaign Management with Neolane Campaign for B2C and Neolane Leads for B2B Email has become the channel of choice for outbound communications, but direct mail remains a key element in many marketers mix. So is outbound telemarketing. Social media including Twitter and Facebook are promising channels. Mobile text messages have proven their effectiveness as B2B and B2C tactics. Neolane Campaign, Neolane s B2C cross-channel marketing campaign automation application, and its B2B counterpart, Neolane Leads offer advanced support for federating all outbound marketing channels into cross-channel campaigns that sequence sending of personalized emails and all other direct marketing tactics including direct mail, mobile text messages, and social messages. An intuitive drag-and-drop environment engineered at the heart of the Neolane conversational marketing platform, Neolane Workflows allows marketers to rapidly design communication programs that orchestrate sending of multiple messages across multiple channels over time. Outbound programs designed with Neolane Workflows can be scheduled or triggered. They are composed of automated tasks including segmentation, creative approval, execution of one-to-one direct mails, emails and SMS/MMS, response collection, and splitting into multiple segments each branching into its own sub-workflow. 3
There is virtually no limit to the type of marketing programs you may deploy. In a step-by-step process, you may progressively deploy one workflow at a time, starting with the most critical, then moving on to innovative programs, learning and perfecting tactics along the way. Simplified Email Campaigns with Neolane Delivery A Neolane application entirely focused on simplified email campaign execution, Neolane Delivery offers the best of Neolane s email expertise in a lightweight yet complete application. Comprehensive Software Options, Cloud Services, and Expert Services Optimized targeting, creation and delivery of emails with the Neolane Email Channel The Neolane Email Channel software option provides best-in-class native support for all phases in the email targeting, creation, and delivery process. An email delivery wizard provides step-by-step guidance to the marketer in all three phases of email execution: Before delivery, the email delivery wizard accompanies marketers in the definition of the email target (main target, control group, trap addresses, etc.) and selection of email content. During delivery, the email delivery wizard monitors receipt, processes bounce messages, and automates the resend process. After delivery, the email delivery wizard provides operational delivery reports and collects behavioral information at the individual click-through level. Reports are made available that summarize clickthroughs and conversions. Noteworthy features of the email delivery wizard include: HTML Editor With support for simple message formatting, HTML code and WYSIWYG preview, insertion of personalization fields and scripts, the integrated HTML editor facilitates creation of simple personalized emails. Image Management Neolane Email Channel automates uploading of email images to an identified, outward-facing server. In certain communications, embedding images directly within outbound messages is preferred. This email standard, known as Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME), is also supported by Neolane. Other noteworthy features include update of HTML code when images are modified, and evaluation of the visibility of images by recipients. 4
Email Content Management & Advanced Personalization with Neolane Content Manager The Neolane Content Manager software option facilitates creation and management of the digital direct communications assets sent by the Neolane platform. Neolane Content Manager allows extended marketing teams to work together to create and maintain all digital messages including emails and mobile text messages sent by the Neolane platform. Neolane Content Manager lets you create personalization rules that take advantage of traditional merge fields and conditional content blocks. Neolane s block-based personalization is central to the platform s one-to-one marketing strengths. Neolane Content Manager enables you to maintain a set number of templates (invitations, reminders, satisfaction survey emails) and a set number of personalization blocks (multiple product messaging, multiple editorials, multiple brands) separately. Blocks are personalized and inserted dynamically into templates at the time of one-to-one message assembly. Neolane blocks and templates together make one-to-one personalization surprisingly simple. Beyond merge field and block-based personalization, the companion Neolane Interaction application and its real-time marketing offer recommendation engine let you go one step further in message personalization. Neolane Email Deliverability Neolane Email Deliverability, a unique combination of integrated software features, cloud-based services, and expert consulting services lets marketing organizations efficiently manage the deliverability of their emails. Neolane Email Deliverability allows organizations to gain full control over their email execution processes and to continuously strengthen their marketing reputation. Neolane Email Deliverability boosts email delivery rates and thus conversion rates and top line revenue. Which Strategies to Adopt to Successfully Lift Email Deliverability? Email is unique amongst direct marketing channels in that it transits over a public infrastructure, the Internet. With the goal of protecting users against unsolicited email, otherwise known as spam, internet service providers and Web-based email services such as Hotmail, Gmail, and Yahoo! have implemented filtering measures, both collective and proprietary. These measures evaluate email senders and assign scores indicative of marketing reputation. These scores, shared at the global level, reflect the degree of trust afforded to every organization that sends emails. These indicators take into account the proportion of emails considered as spam, either by automatic filters or flagged as such by recipients. Good reputation contributes to lifting deliverability. A bad rap can mean slower delivery or a trip to the spam folder instead of the inbox. 5
Good deliverability ranges from 93% to 96%. Below 90%, a data hygiene or filtering issue can be suspected. To ensure that their legitimate emails reach their recipients, marketing teams must continuously adapt their email processes to take into account constantly evolving filtering strategies. Key Levers for Lifting Email Deliverability Data hygiene Quality of opt-in and opt-out mechanisms Relevance of messages, quality copy, and quality HTML formatting Email rendering, inbox rendering and technical monitoring tools Consistency in terms of volume and regularity Neolane Email Channel s deliverability features In support of deliverability objectives, the Neolane Email Channel email delivery wizard offers support for spam scoring and HTML code parsing and correction. Spam Scoring Neolane Email Channel s email delivery wizard includes an advanced spam scoring function that ensures content complies with best email practices. Prior to an email campaign, a score is calculated that gives an estimation of the chances of the email being treated as spam by ISPs. A diagnosis is appended to this score to help marketing or technical users identify any corrective action to be applied to the content. The rules applied by the Neolane spam scoring feature are based on the SpamAssassin tool by the Apache Software Foundation. Easy to use by both marketing and technical teams, the spam scoring features in Neolane Email Channel offer the following benefits: Scores reflect the severity of the errors encountered Notes include suggested corrective action Rules are fully configurable Deliverability of email campaigns is optimized, lifting campaign performance Marketing teams are less dependent on technical teams HTML Code Parser The inclusion in the email delivery wizard of an HTML parsing and correction tool, based on Tidy, a recognized industry-standard tool, has numerous advantages: Transforms HTML code to XHTML Repairs errors and suggests corrections Improves accessibility of content for visually-impaired users Optimizes HTML with automatic removal of redundant code 6
Neolane s Hybrid Software & Cloud-Based Deliverability Services Neolane offers optional inbox rendering and campaign monitoring services. These services are hybrid features composed of built-in product software functionality supplemented with their companion cloud-based services. These optional services are called upon by the email delivery wizard of the Neolane Email Channel at different stages in the email execution process. Before Routing Inbox rendering Neolane offers a set of indicators that gives a true preview of how given messages are displayed or rendered by the most widely-used Web-based email services. Supported services include global leaders such as Yahoo!, AOL, Hotmail and many other regional and national email service providers. This list is continuously extended by Neolane. Labelled inbox rendering, this feature automatically sends a pre-flight copy of the email to a network of test inboxes. You may in turn visualize how your email will render and rapidly make any HTML or image corrections. You may thus rapidly identify if your campaign successfully makes it past the filters of the primary Internet service providers (ISPs) and Web-based email services. The Inbox Rendering feature lets you quickly test may thus easily test you email s deliverability and any display challenges encountered, letting you rapidly correct any display issues and avoid negatively impacting your delivery and response rates. Comprehensive cloud-based inbox rendering service 7
During Routing Delivery Monitoring Indicators Inbox rendering using the network of test addresses may also be used at delivery time. The inbox rendering report may at that point help you better understand campaign results. Neolane also lets you monitor email throughput and verify that email execution is running smoothly and on time. After Routing Email Monitoring The email monitoring report lets you, for every domain name and primary Webmail service providers, measure the number of emails received in the inbox, spam folder, or flagged as undelivered. Furthermore, marketing teams may compare their own statistics to the trends and statistics of all the other Neolane customers using the email monitoring option. Neolane also provides diagnostic reports that allow users to rapidly analyze the reasons of failed deliveries and a granular report that lets you identify deliverability rates and response rates for individual Internet service providers and Web-based email services. With its intuitive layout showing the average deliverability rate and deliverability rate for each domain, identifying domains that have had abnormal fail rates is a snap. Technical Monitoring Intended for a more technical audience, this daily report offers comprehensive diagnostics that bring together the primary indicators of an email delivery platform. Those indicators include SPF verifications, DomainKeys, reverse DNS, connectivity and reporting from the primary RBL lists (real-time black lists) for each IP and domain used during the email delivery process. Neolane thus allows technical teams to rapidly identify the potential root cause of a sudden drop in deliverability. Intuitive inbox monitoring dashboard 8
Expert Advisory Services in White Listing Certification The primary Internet service providers (ISPs) and Web-based email services maintain white lists of known and legitimate email senders. Non-Commercial White Lists Non-commercial white lists are maintained by the primary ISPs and email services such as Yahoo and AOL. Inclusion on those white lists grants faster delivery, including via lifting of the throttling filter. In order to be accepted on those white lists, email senders must pass a series of tests based on a verification of their infrastructure (their email server must not be an open relay and have a static IP address) and of their activity (campaign frequency, volume, number of complaints). If any of these rules are breached, the sender may be removed from the white list. Within the scope of its Neolane Email Deliverability offering, Neolane offers an expert consulting service that accompanies you in the certification process with non commercial white lists. Commercial White Lists Commercial white lists are based on a system that allows the sender to bypass antispam filters altogether or be assigned incremental points as they enter the anti-spam system. Those commercial white lists operate on a CPM (cost per thousand) or annual basis and are offered by independent commercial organizations such as Return Path. Internet service providers are free to use those services and the number of Internet service providers that use each service varies depending on each white list. A sender that has been certified may then be more confident as it executes new campaigns. Some white lists also facilitate opening of images in Webmail interfaces and activation of hyperlinks. Certification on such commercial white lists has undeniable upside for all intense email campaigners. As part of its Neolane Email Deliverabilility offering, Neolane offers advisory services in commercial white list certification including CSA and Return Path Sender Score. 9
All Inclusive Expert Consulting Service Packages In addition to the software and cloud-based components of the Neolane Email Deliverability offering, Neolane offers expert consulting services to let you ramp up your deliverability expertise. A dedicated team works several days a month with your marketing team with the goal of helping end users in understanding issues encountered, and advising steps to overcome those issues. These expert consulting services can go as far as bringing advice and expertise on best marketing practices on specific campaigns. Neolane offers two all inclusive expert deliverability consulting packages: its Gold package, and its Silver package, each covering a distinct set of service levels. For details of these two packages, please contact Neolane. Finally, packages that provide tailored training programs are offered to allow you to better understand the topic of deliverability. Neolane Email Deliverability, a unique combination of integrated software features, cloud-based services, and expert consulting services 10
Neolane Hosting : Turn Key Execution of Email & Cross-Channel Campaigns Neolane can host your entire Neolane conversational marketing software platform. You enjoy all the benefits of an industry leading software platform and world-class service level agreements that guarantee your critical marketing infrastructure is firing on all cylinders at all times. Neolane Mid-Sourcing : Cloud-Based Routing of Your Emails Neolane customers who wish to deploy Neolane in the data center may entrust Neolane to route their emails and SMS/MMS as a cloud-based service. A secured connection is established between your instance of Neolane and Neolane s own email and mobile message routing servers. The Neolane Mid-sourcing offer gives you the best of both worlds: control over your customer datamart or data warehouse and world-class outsourced email and mobile message routing you can count on. Conclusion Amongst marketing automation platform vendors, Neolane has a distinct edge when it comes to simplifying adoption of one-to-one email marketing. With support for simplified targeting in the hands of non technical marketers, streamlined content creation and management, automation, one-to-one personalization, routing and deliverability best practice enforcement, Neolane offers a uniquely integrated solution spanning software platform, cloud-based services, and expert consulting services. Together, this solution ensures your marketing department rapidly adopts one-to-one email best practices. 11
About Neolane Neolane provides the only conversational marketing technology that empowers organizations to build and sustain lifetime one-to-one dialogues, dramatically increasing revenue and marketing efficiency. With best-in-class email and inbound-outbound channel fusion capabilities architected into a single code-based platform, marketers achieve results in record time. Born digital, Neolane is easy and fun to use for both the power and casual user. Future proof, Neolane has a track record of enabling its customers to adapt to new communication challenges and exploit opportunities more quickly than their competition. Neolane is used by more than 300 of the world s leading companies including Sony Music, Alcatel-Lucent, Orange, Sears Canada, and Sephora. Neolane, Inc. One Gateway Center - 7th Floor 300-334 Washington Street Newton, MA 02458 Office: +1 617 467 6760 info@neolane.com www.neolane.com United States United Kingdom France Nordics 2011 Neolane, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This research brief is for informational purposes only. Neolane, Inc. makes no warranties, expressed or implied, in this document. Neolane is a trademark of Neolane Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks contained herein are the property of their respective owners. 12