NEW YORK – Testing and segmentation will catch your customer’s eye, according to panelists at CheetahMail’s Client Summit at the Millennium Broadway Hotel in Times Square.
In her talk, “What Online Marketers Can Do to Drive Customer Centricity,” Elana Andersen, vice president and research director at Forrester Research, addressed the issue how to communicate with a jaded consumer in a world bombarded with marketing messages. Ms. Andersen said marketers must send relevant messaging and align themselves with the customer purchase path through various channels.
“We now have to understand a lot more about consumers to get their attention, but the good news is that the new technologies are useable,” Ms. Andersen said yesterday. “These channels are interactive and let us create a dialog and this gives us a better understanding of our customer.”
David Daniels, vice president and research director at JupiterResearch agreed with that assessment. In his speech, “State of the Industry,” he said that an important factor to running a successful e-mail marketing campaign is through relevance. A good step to relevance is to stay relevant on customer behavior through testing.
“Testing is key to any e-mail marketing campaign,” Mr. Daniels said. “It is important to look at these tests to increase your customer data and increase relevance to your customer.”
Matt Seeley and Fred Lindbergh, CEO and chief technology officer, respectively, of CheetahMail, presented their company’s roadmap for the coming year, which includes a new Web 2.0 version of its e-mail platform for an early 2008 release.
The CheetahMail platform addresses the issues of relevance and segmentation by its ability to deal with larger amounts of data, the speakers said. New functionalities include deeper analysis tools, new drag-and-drop features and the ability to deal with Web 2.0 design components like AJAX and CSS.
CheetahMail recently acquired French e-mail marketing emailing solution for European expansion. The e-mail vendor plans to be involved in Asia in some capacity by 2008.
This vision comes with a new name: CheetahMail is about to rebrand as Experian Digital, clearly identifying with its parent, database and marketing services giant Experian. This new name gives cover to a wider brand with more products.
“It brings us a connection to this trusted partner throughout the world,” Mr. Seeley said. “We’re not going away. We’re still CheetahMail. We’re just expanding to increase our value offer.”
