SC Networks, a visionary German e-marketing service provider, founded in 1999, offers cutting-edge Web technologies that attracted Asian e-Marketing’s attention.

Their next generation email marketing solution, Evalanche V3, is one of the very latest Web-based email marketing solutions (EMS) on the European market, with an open architecture for international utilization and well-suited to the most demanding productivity requirements.

Specially designed for targeted group-oriented marketing campaigns, Evalanche effectively supports in the acquisition of new customers, as well as in interactive and cross-medial dialogue with existing customers.

Asian e-Marketing interviewed Mr. Martin Philipp, SC Networks Head of International Sales & Marketing, to find out more about their newest version of Evalanche. According to him, Evalanche includes all components and functionalities required to implement e-marketing strategically.

It also controls the entire cycle of closed loop marketing, from the generation of addresses, through the layout of the information up to despatch, and supplies detailed data for feedback analysis and success controlling, too.

Graphic 1: Evalanche’s Closed-Loop-Marketing described here, shows the systematic set-up of address profiles based on a few initial information (Source: SC Networks GmbH)

 

The closed-loop idea is simple and is actually just the starting point for marketers, yet it can make a far-reaching impact. The key issue is how you use it. When a ‘closed loop’ is used effectively, the marketing team is much more customer–focused and becomes a kind of Learning Organization’. With every campaign, Evalanche is able to provide dynamically refined profiling of a company’s customer data and ensures in that way, up-to-date and high-quality address profiles at all times.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Graphic 2: Central address generation with continuing profile system (Source: SC Networks GmbH)

Web forms, for the acquisition of addresses, can be easily and intuitively designed on-screen and then adapted and integrated in newsletters or Web pages - with automatically created links to fields in the address database and pre-population of contents per mouse-click. Evalanche provides further templates that can be used to rapidly create professional newsletters without any programming skills. Users just have to add the texts, articles and images of their choice and the correct scaling and representation takes place automatically, as does individualization and personalization for precisely targeted one-to-one communication.

 



















 

Graphic 3: Holistic content management for automated information processing (Source: SC Networks GmbH)

The availability of a state-of-the-art, 24/7 high performance server guarantees a smooth and fast email dispatch, as Evalanche’s certifications and white list entries at service providers assure extremely high mail delivery rates with top-level quality and performance and runs on all standard systems, be it Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Safari under Windows, Mac OS, or Linux.

For sustained successful campaign management, Evalanche also offers numerous statistical valuations which present accurate user behaviour patterns and that in general form the basis for detailed feedback analysis. In this way, the continual improvement of a company’s target group orientation and a more efficient communications strategy for future campaigns can take center stage, while the power of online marketing is put directly into the hands of communications and marketing professionals.

However, the real value of SC Networks’ Web-based email marketing solution has been described by Mr. Philipp in this way:

  1. Evalanche is easy to learn and easy to use, which means marketers can use it to create, manage and measure entire campaigns with a mouse click, without any programming skills at all.
  2. Marketers and organizations gain with Evalanche, a strategic advantage by listening to their customers, getting insights and being able to responding in a flash.

He considers the stand-out new features of Version 3 as:

  1. The implementation of a Content Management System (CMS) which strictly separates design and content and makes in this respect Evalanche unique. The practical result of this CMS approach is that users can easily customize the content of eMails to address the information needs of multiple individual recipients simultaneously - and that, in turn, increases user productivity.
  2. The delivery of messages not just via email but via a wide variety of media, e.g. email, PDF, web page, landing page, RSS, text-to-voice, Podcast, PC, laptop, iPhone, and so on. By choosing the medium that is most acceptable to the recipient and by customizing the content to ensure high relevance, marketers can communicate more effectively and generate higher response rates.

According to Andrew Sanderson, an independent consultant in email marketing, Evalanche V3 is “the result of a fundamental re-thinking and re-design of the Evalanche ASP email Marketing system, as it marries a Content Management System to already comprehensive email Marketing functionality”. His detailed review of Evalanche V3 and more information can be downloaded here: http://www.sc-networks.com/downloads/ansaco_evalanche_en.pdf

Indeed, SC Networks’ spokesperson affirms that the new functionalized version of Evalanche V3 has enjoyed steady growth and increasing interest both internationally as well as at home. Evalanche is also already well-equipped to serve Asian markets, as it supports all languages world-wide, including those with complex character sets (such as Chinese, Korean, Japanese) and those that read right to left (such as Arabic).

“We are already able to provide technical support for agencies and companies in the Asia-Pacific time zone via the combination of our presence in Australasia and Europe. And of course we welcome continued interest from agencies and companies in the Asian region,” Mr. Philipp says. He adds that their service is already used by major international organizations to communicate with contacts in Asian markets, e.g. Singapore, Malaysia, India, Thailand and Japan among others.

 Mr Martin Philipp

 

“Evalanche V3 is the result of five years ongoing research and development,” Philipp explains and claims that the feedback of their customers, all highly enthusiastic users, is the company’s major advantage as it provides them with a constant stream of suggestions for new developments and extensions. Not to mention that “there’s the expertise of our development team, led by Christoph Frick, who takes-up the ideas and make them a reality,” Philipps reveals.

According to him, the challenge for them right now is not just maintaining, but actually improving their high standards of customer service as they grow internationally. He asserts further that SC Networks will be very selective in finding the right partners for long-term business relationships which naturally takes time.

So far, SC-Networks already offers technical training for administrators and programmers on how to set-up and manage an e-marketing system for optimal efficiency as well as end-user training that focuses on knowledge transfer to marketers. The goal is to provide best practices, to minimize the risks of spam perception and above all to show how to acquire contacts for online marketing, nurture them and conduct effective campaigns for customer qualification, retention and loyalty.

Mr. Philipp states that SC Networks is absolutely aware of the fact that analytics capabilities are absolutely essential for companies that want to get a strategic advantage from e-Marketing, telling us: “You can’t expect to win an Olympic gold medal for target shooting if you wear a blindfold – you won’t know if you have hit the target or not. In online marketing, analytics does much more than simply ‘close the loop’.” And indeed, both standard and customized Evalanche reports allow marketers to understand results and generate insights into customer preferences and behavior, which in turn means that they can improve the performance of their campaigns respectively.

Asked what kind of trends he sees in the email marketing arena, Mr. Philipp elaborates: “In online marketing, the biggest long-term trend is the shift away from messages being pushed out by suppliers towards messages being pulled by customers. This trend will continue for many years to come and bring commercial and social changes with it. The evidence is the rapid growth in the use of search engines by customers world-wide over the last ten years. Think of the growth of PPC / Keyword Advertising and the way it has overtaken print in terms of advertising spend? Price competition among keyword advertisers has increased to such an extent that the biggest gainer in ‘share of marketing budget’ in 2009 was SEO. That short-term trend was the result of companies wanting to reinforce their expenditure on keyword advertising.” Mr. Philipp believes as well that in our digital age the shift from “push-marketing by suppliers” to “pull-marketing from customers” will become globally a major driver for email marketing and that it will be the focus of the next wave for marketing optimization. Many organizations have already invested in keyword advertising and SEO to identify the contacts that are actively looking for their products and services. As a result, they have gained valuable lists of opt-in contacts.

Thus, it is only natural that these companies intend to protect their investment by nurturing those contacts. E-mail marketing enables organizations to maintain and develop the relationship with customers by delivering relevant information in a timely manner. “The companies that learn how to use email marketing to respond to customers will undoubtedly increase their market share,” Mr. Philipp claims and “I really do mean ‘respond’ rather than ‘bombard’ the customer - the relevance of a message is essential to its success.”
Commenting on some of the most promising technologies to watch in this arena, he sees “Anything that gives deeper insights into customer needs for e.g. hot-spot technologies that allow marketers to understand how customers respond to the visual layout of an email or web page or geographic analysis that allow gaining insights into customer responses via display of responses on maps. Techniques like these allow marketers to gain even more insights and adapt to customer needs much more effectively." SC Networks even offers a 14 day cost free test period to interested organizations: www.Evalanche.com

By Daniela La Marca

 

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