Next-generation commercial-grade campaign management, marketing and transactional email systems will be able to deliver content into a full range of channels from SMS and instant messaging to RSS feeds and social networks like Facebook and Twitter, the chief of StrongMail Systems Inc has said.
Sam Cece, CEO of the Redwood City, California-based company also said that a market had developed in the past year for off-site, on-demand marketing and transactional email services from a managed environment hosted in the cloud.
“Marketers love the idea of viral marketing campaigns and social networks are perfect in that regard” Cece said.
He explained that the StrongMail Transactional Email Platform is used to convert generic, plain-text transactional email into highly branded, personalised messages. That same platform could be developed to author messages that could be shared across social networks.
To date StrongMail has provided mostly on-premise software that is used by marketing and IT departments, but which Cece confirmed could now also be deployed “on-demand.”
In November CBR reported that the company had an agreement in place with Rackspace Hosting over the StrongMail On-Demand marketing and transactional e-mail services.
The vendor’s software integrates with back-office sales order processing and customer relationship management systems and is used to create, test and prepare for distribution high numbers of outgoing emails.
A business that is sending more than one million emails a month should consider looking at software support, Cece suggested. Charges depend on the capacity or volume of emails sent through the system.
StrongMail software can also be set up to automate online order receipt acknowledgements, goods shipping notices and the like. “Our systems help monetise the email channel” said Cece.
Its systems assure businesses that their important bulk emails are delivered and do not get tied up in ISP anti-spam filters. “We have relationships with post masters at the top 80 ISPs in the world” said Cece.
“Our software provides 100% line of sight visibility on email. Reports and analytics will show how many are sent, opened, bounced or blocked. Customers tell us they expect to see 97% of their email delivered using our software.”
VC-backed by the likes of Sequoia Capital, the company does not release financial filings, but Cece told us the company had seen three record quarters and now had over 425 customers. Travelocity is one of the company’s biggest accounts.
He said that though the pipeline had slowed slightly as the economy slumped, deals were going through. Email marketing is seen as a very low-cost element of the customer service lifecycle, but one where economies can be made using software. Cece cited a Forrester study which concluded that for every dollar spent on marketing and transactional email software there was $45 worth of trackable revenue.
