Online Marketing Trends

A while ago I told you about Tam Tam’s partnership with Inxmail. After a long search for the best and most flexiible E-Mail Marketing software we decided to go for Inxmail. Tam Tam is the non-exclusive Advanced Partner of Inxmail for the Netherlands.

One of our first implementations is for our longtime customer INREV. INREV acts for investors and other participants in the growing European market for non-listed real estate vehicles. They were already using our selfmade E-Mail mailingsoftware but decided to upgrade to Inxmail because of it’s ease to use and flexibility with the existing CMS. While we have built the Inxmail implementation for the sending and tracking of email messages, the user management interface has been left unaltered.

In a few screenshots I will show you how Inxmail was implemented to use the existing database and CMS.

First we log on to the Tam Tam CMS, the CMS that we built some years ago and was used for content management until we moved over to Microsoft Content Management Server 2002 (MCMS2002). In the Tam Tam CMS we enter some vital information.

After saving, the table is updated:

Now this is the normal procedure of creating new subscribers through the CMS. Nothing has changed here and all possible links to other tables has been left untouched. Underwater though, other things happen. Inxmail needs an TransferTable to INSERT, UPDATE or DELETE recipients. Through some simple triggers the TransferTable is being populated, I will show you the insert trigger:

CREATE TRIGGER [Inxmail_Insert] ON [dbo].[PropertyRecipient]
AFTER INSERT
AS
BEGIN
    INSERT INTO Inxmail ([Name], FullName, Email, Company, CMD_TYPE)
    SELECT prName, prFullName, prEmail, prCompany, ‘INSERT’ FROM inserted

    INSERT INTO Inxmail ([Name], FullName, Email, Company, CMD_TYPE)
    SELECT prName, prFullName, prEmail, prCompany, ‘SUBSCRIBE’ FROM inserted
END

The first row is used by to insert the user to the Inxmail database, the second row is to link the user to the appropriate mailinglist. Note; the table includes a auto-populated column that contains the mailinglist name. The result looks like:

This table is being read by the Inxmail DbSync utility every x seconds. As you can see in the next screenshot of the Inxmail client interface, the subscriber has been inserted.

In my next posting I will show you how easy it is to send a new mailing to the subscribers, using an existing template through an HTTP request. This posting will include more screenshots from the Inxmail interface.

If you have questions, please feel free to respond to this posting or email me directly.

Tam Tam has partnered with Inxmail to provide its existing and new customers a professional platform for E-Mail Marketing.

We have been putting our efforts in E-Mail solutions for years but time after time we see that we are spending too much time re-developing the big wheel that manages the mailings while putting less attention to making the email work. Inxmail now delivers us the big wheel with an extensive list of tracking and bounce management tools. The time we save on developing this big wheel will now be available to making the email work; getting customers interested in your product, building profiles and personalized templates that are compatible with most of the online and offline mailreaders.

Stay tuned as I will give you more information, screenshots etc. in the next few days.

Forrester has published their The Forrester Wave™: Email Marketing Service Providers, Q4 2005 report about well-known E-Mail Marketing providers in the US. Their executive summary descibes in global the outcome of the report;

Despite consumer concern over spam and email fraud, spending on email marketing is still strong. Our review of nine email marketing vendors reveals that integration with other applications, dynamic content capabilities, and flexibility of the data model are primary points of differentiation. Email standalone Responsys shares top honors with Epsilon Interactive. Multichannel capabilities were disappointing, except among B2B application service providers (ASPs) like RightNow Technologies and Premiere Global Services.