Online Marketing Services Come Of Age
Once restricted to basic cleansing and list selection activity, better integration now means that marketers are increasingly likely to make use of online marketing services for more sophisticated tasks such as fully-fledged planning or campaign management work, finds James Lawson.
Providing online marketing services is big business. With thousands of companies visiting these sites every day to buy, clean and now host customer data, the pace of development is still brisk and competition intense between providers. This means that everyone from rank beginners to expert marketers have options to choose from.
WEB DEVELOPMENT
"There's a ready market for online," states Rob Salmon, Managing Director of meta-morphix.
"Online clients tend to be new to us rather than switching from our bureau service. Many of our clients use all three of our services: bureau, online and inline. Just like the rest of the world, the bureau market is switching to multichannel delivery and automation."
Experian Intact kicked off self-service list cleansing online over ten years ago. Today, it's unusual to find a Marketing Service Provider that doesn't offer some sort of web front end to its operation. 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 and the like.
How standard this type of service has become is shown by leading processing software vendor The Software Bureau. It has built web "gateways" into its Cygnus software so that its high volume bureau customers can extend their service out onto the web.
"Although we don't offer an online component to Cygnus ourselves, you can certainly plug online tools into it," says Managing Director Mark Dobson. "Our clients can write custom applications that might enable automatic file drops and processing."
The market has developed to the point where many of sites are "white label" versions of another vendor's development work. For example, Royal Mail uses software developed by both UKChanges and dbg (Formerly The Database Group) while Blue Tahiti's various software modules underpin a number of other vendor's online services as well as its own.
Other web self-service vendors include Callcredit Marketing Solutions which has its improvemydata cleansing site running alongside Cameo Online. One of the latest is MardevOnline, launched earlier this year, while dbg has its Verify service that is already supporting 40 users.
There's also the innovative Real Time Marketing site where users can design, print and send their own postcards and letters, all within one portal, and has been adopted by Royal Mail for its Mailshots Online service.
LEVELS OF SOPHISTICATION
Though many of these services might seem similar, all differ: most notably in the level of sophistication they offer (and so the type of client they tend to attract), the breadth of services and how they integrate different functions like hosting, profiling and data purchase. Another big differentiator is the need to set up an account for some online services in advance versus being able to just turn up, perhaps register, then go ahead and buy using a credit card. Some vendors tend more to the traditional bureau model where online services are customised for each client rather than the more generic supermarket approach that we're concentrating on here.
Better integration is gradually taking sites away from being about straightforward cleansing or list selection into fully-fledged marketing planning and campaign management portals where there is little need to go anywhere else to the get the job done. An important component of this evolution lies in offering the ability to host data, so enabling more advanced analysis work based on a clients own customers, improving marketing effectiveness and also binding the client more tightly to that supplier.
One of the leaders here has to be UKChanges whose UKChanges Online site has long aimed to combine the three staples of online services within one portal: data sales, list cleansing and database hosting. The latter is the subject of the site's most recent upgrade, on that sees it edging closer to full integration. It now offers the ability to upload and host customer data, plus a suite of simple-to-use analysis and visualisation tools that can generate profiles using geodems codes, RFV scores and so forth.
"A Quick and easy data load process allows clients to visualise and better understand their own data," says director Steven Day. "There's no practical size limit, typically it's tens to hundreds of thousands of records."
There's a newly-developed operational campaign management tool that employs standard DM methods such as pack codes, stationary codes and control cells, and that can also log campaign codes on the database against the relevant records. Mapping tools can be used for visualisation and selection, plus there are additional reference and prospect data sets on offer. For more detail on the new site, read the review in last month's issue.
Though the number of tasks possible online has grown, the fullest integration remains elusive. As yet, no-one allows its users to generate a profile from uploaded data and then seamlessly use it to look for matching prospect records - though UKChanges and Data8 are working on it.
All this innovation is encouraging, but Day thinks the key to success is to give the market just what it can handle and no more. Over estimating the data skills and desires of UK marketers is easy to do and the leading websites have gently nudged their users forward with small increases in functionality rather than encouraging them to take a giant leap into the dark.
"We've been developing our site since 2000 and it's difficult to gauge where the market is for online hosting and the like," says Day. "We're not trying to compete with Apteco or smartFocus, our service is aimed at the marketing or customer data manager with no technical background, and data isn't the only thing they have to do."
Marketingfile, the first online list sales site in the UK, also tailors its offering for less expert user to tends to work for a smaller company.
"A specialist organisation like us often has a different business model and ethos on customer service," says Managing Director Kirk Dobie.
"The SME owner spending £500 often needs as much time and effort as the marketing manager in a larger organisation spending £50,000, as it will be the same percentage of their overall budget. Large offline suppliers simply don't have that time and set minimum order levels to stop this happening."
Meta-Morphix takes the opposite tack, aiming its meta-morphix Online cleansing and enhancement service (launched 20 months ago) squarely at experienced data professionals. Managing Director Rob Salmon isn't greatly interested in the small volume, low expertise user.
"It's not a mass market product and we don't want that hotelier with 500 records," he says. "It's for expert users and data professionals because that's where the money is. It doesn't have cartoon characters telling you what to do and it's the fastest site in the marketplace, I have no doubt."
Another example of this approach is the use of the manual field mapping as opposed to automatic which, "makes for a simpler submission process", according to Salmon, and it also lets users vary matching confidence levels for different reference files and applications.
Data8 is another of the leaders in the online cleansing space and recent changes at this site include validation for email and web addresses as well as phone numbers. As this is done in real time, it's possible to use the service to validate web registration data as it is entered.
"One client saw validation results on web registrations go from 30 to 80%," claims managing director Anthony Allen.
There's also a new emphasis on data-related compliance with voluntary environmental standards such as the Royal Mail's Sustainable Mail initiative and closely-linked PAS2020. Sensibly enough, this is branded as Sustainable Data. Complying with Royal Mail's standards can mean a further 4.7% reduction in mailing costs.
One of the most interesting features added to the site to help with PAS2020 compliance is OptOutLive. By Adding a unique tag to each mailed record, client mailers give their recipients the chance to opt out of any further mailings from that company via the OPtOutLive SITE. As the opt-outs are held centrally, the next time the client mails via the Sustainable Data Service these records will automatically be suppressed.
Taking advantage of web service technology, the company's Integr8 and other hygiene applications can also be embedded in a client's own desktop software with the actual cleansing run remotely via the Internet on Data8's servers.
"You integrate all of it or elements of it within your own applications," says Allen. "There's no ongoing licence fee, it's on demand so you can use it where and when you want."
From the other side of the fence, Cygnus's Dobson is planning to adopt the same kind of modern standards to increase the versatility of the company's next generation of software.
"What we want to do is to develop a suite of DQ tools that could be used online or offline," says Dobson. "Using web services technology, we can build in that capacity."
That said, there are already many other marketing services that employ both installed
Software and online access to give their users the widest and most flexible choice. For example, meta-morphix gives larger customers the option of "inline" processing whereby client systems talk to the vendor's servers and, after some initial set-up, can process files automatically as required.
For those marketers that choose to process their own files in-house using installed software, helpIT systems offers its hybrid Suppression and Enhancement Service from within the application on a pay-as-you-go basis.
As all but the largest in-house users are unlikely to be able to afford the annual licence fees for more than one or two reference files, this means less commonly-required reference files are there to be used if needed.
"If a client wants some extra matching work against other files then it's there if they need it," notes Graham Clark, Sales Manager at helpIT systems. "It's most used by small bureaux."
Clark notes that this approach helps support in-house processes. "There's no need to farm it out to a third party," he says. "We're not trying to compete with the likes of intact; this offers our clients more choice in reference files and increases the effectiveness of our software.
CONTINUAL DEVELOPMENT
With high-speed Internet connections becoming both cheaper and faster, it's hard to see what can stop these sites becoming the standard route through which many more marketers by their services. Meta-morphix reports that online sales as a proportion of its revenue have shot from three % up to 20% in the last year.
However, the largest amounts of data are and will continue to be processed offline whether in-house or at a bureau: up- and downloading a 40 million record file is going to take a fair amount of time though the chief concerns aren't really about volume. Some clients simply have to process their own files onsite due to security worries or a corporate data policy that recognises the potential benefits of investing in a full in-house solution.
There's also a limit to the complexity of online processing because of the effort needed to translate tasks like multi-file merge/purge into an understandable web-based process.
"With multi-file dedupes are tricky," says Salmon. "The hierarchy, which source files to take which field from or stripping out characters from fields to prepare data for processing, it all becomes quite complex and it's hard to get that out of the bureau and onto the web.
"It's not about file size," he concludes, "it's about the complete understanding of what's required on the part of client and supplier."
Article from Database Marketing, Aug 2010