Financial newsletter publisher
solves scalability challenges with Campaign Enterprise
Fusion
InvestorsInsight Publishing, a financial publishing
corporation putting out an assortment of exciting,
professional email newsletters covering global
macro economics, considers time of the essence.
Time as it relates to email delivery speed, that
is.
"We're always looking for more speed. Three
hundred thousand emails an hour sounds good right
now, but in six months it won't," says David
Muir, president of the Dallas-based firm. "That's
just the nature of the beast here."
A growing technical challenge to InvestorsInsight
Publishing is the delivery and tracking of the
increasing number of financial newsletters going
out on a daily basis. Its current audience is
around 1.5 million readers.
Muir knows that adding more clients and growing
subscriber lists eventually cause scalability
challenges. InvestorsInsight Publishing has been
developing email relationships with readers using
Campaign Enterprise since 2003, but the growth
of its client base was testing the capabilities
of the software. "We were reaching some limitations,
and starting to look elsewhere for other products,"
Muir said.
Challenge: Outgrowing
legacy systems
Prior to Campaign Enterprise, InvestorsInsight Publishing
depended on an older legacy email system, which
was more like a hodgepodge of systems "strapped
together to get the email out," Muir says.
This system included a custom database using a combination
of custom scripting and Unix-based qmail to perform
email delivery and handle bounce processing.
When InvestorsInsight Publishing first acquired
Campaign Enterprise software, the first thing
they did was use the strength of the software
to send out the mail. Muir continued using script
to tie Campaign Enterprise into their existing
SQL backend, which transposes the reporting from
the email campaign results recorded by the software
into the SQL repository.
Muir shopped other email
products, but kept running into the same pain
points: flexibility and scalability relative to
price. "Other email systems claim to be flexible,
but they still require a lot of specialized knowledge
and code to make them flexible," Muir said.
"And what you're left with in the end is
a system that's not really very flexible, because
you've had to make so many changes to it. It’s
only flexible if you've got the right skill sets,
plenty of time, and large budgets."
Solution: Speed, reporting control with Campaign
Enterprise Fusion
The release of Campaign
Enterprise Fusion, the latest version of powerful
email marketing software from Arial Software,
came at the right time for Muir and company. "We're
sending a couple hundred thousand (emails) a night
just seeing how the performance is going. All
of the testing has gone very well," Muir
says. The 300k+ per hour delivery speed of a 15k
message they are getting with Campaign Enterprise
Fusion represents an increase in speed of over
100%.
InvestorsInsight Publishing was also looking
for control over the reporting coming from successful
campaigns. Each of the newsletters they send feature
several advertisement inserts, and since most
clients desire to see their campaign's activity,
this information is reported directly to the repository
database by Campaign Enterprise Fusion.
"Now we’re
able to use Campaign Enterprise almost exclusively
for e-mail delivery and metrics accumulation,"
Muir says.
Results: Sustainable delivery with scalability
Muir says one of the most important performance
points of Campaign Enterprise Fusion is its high
rate of deliverability over a sustained period
of time. "Short bursts of high performance
speed don't do a lot for us," he says. "It's
great to see those high numbers, but we're much
more interested in seeing long term performance
at the end of the day." Muir says on any
given day they have 2-to-7 campaigns running concurrently,
each sending out from 100,000 to 1.5 million newsletters
to users. "We need to see a constant 200k
or greater going out the door every day,"
he says.
Muir says this newest database-focused edition
of Campaign Enterprise answers his email scaling
challenges.
"We can now set up a campaign, and the
statistical information generated posts directly
into the SQL repository. We then utilize these
raw numbers to create user friendly reports our
clients expect to see. This newest version of
Campaign Enterprises software, with its close
integration with SQL, has enabled us to shelve
a good deal of unnecessary code and scripting,"
Muir said. "So, from our point of view, Campaign
Enterprise Fusion was nice to see arrive, and
for it to be so mature upon its first release
was an added bonus," he said.
Muir calls the price point for Campaign Enterprise
"a phenomenal benefit," that allows
companies without gigantic direct marketing budgets
to be able to "run with the big boys,"
Muir said. "The price point is attractive,
especially when compared to other things out there.
The problem with many of those solutions is that
you lease them, they're never really yours. And
they’re very expensive."
"Arial Software's
continuous technical advances, such as seen within
this new version, help us out tremendously. This,
combined with superb customer support, really
elevates the company from a simple vendor relationship
to a true strategic partnership," Muir said.
"With Campaign Enterprise Fusion software,
we're not stuck with just a box… anybody
sending out over a million emails a day should
certainly look into this product.”
About InvestorsInsight Publishing
InvestorsInsight
Publishing, Inc. (IIP) is a wholly-owned subsidiary
of Casson Media Group, Inc. IIP publishes three
weekly financial newsletters under the banner
of InvestorsInsight that are authored by internationally-known
investment professionals John F. Mauldin and Gary
D. Halbert. InvestorsInsight also publishes, in
association with Casey Research, the widely acclaimed
weekly e-letter, What We Now Know. A
fifth publication, The Momentum Investor,
is an expanded newswire publication featuring
independent analysis on micro and small-cap stocks
by J.M. Dutton & Associates, Harbinger Research,
and other nationally-recognized independent research
firms. As of April 2006, the circulation of each
publication was approaching 1,500,000 potential
readers, which IIP believes is the largest circulation
in the financial services industry.
About Arial Software
Arial Software LLC is widely considered the industry
leader in email marketing software designed exclusively
for relationship building through personalized
email messaging. More information on Arial Software
can be found at http://www.arialsoftware.com
If you are interested in a Campaign Enterprise
email best practices case study, contact the Arial
Software Media & Press Relations department
here.
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