| Hunt
for new email marketing solution leads October
Research Corp. to Campaign Enterprise
 October
Research Corporation is the nation’s leading
provider of market intelligence to the real estate
settlement services industry. Its premium newsletters
and companion websites, The Title Report, The
Legal Description, Appraisal Intelligence and
Real Estate Technology Insight and RESPAnews.com
are all dedicated to covering various aspects
of the real estate transaction.
The Richfield, Ohio-based firm also produces
special reports and industry studies such as the
Independent Title Agent Survey 2004, The National
Real Estate Survey for Title Companies and
The National Appraisal Survey to give brokers,
bankers, mortgage professionals and other industry
executives a competitive edge with timely information
on emerging trends and competitor activity.
Challenge: Move from manual email reports
As a complementary marketing approach to the
four printed newsletters and industry studies,
October Research Corp. issues weekly email news
blasts with the hottest stories from the industry.
Email alerts and breaking news covering industry
issues for the five newsletters, industry surveys,
and seminars maintain an average subscriber base
in excess of 140,000. In addition to delivering
timely news updates, the advertising and marketing
departments also send out promotional product
offers and advertising-supported news features
via subscriber email to its vast customer lists.
The newsflash communications are extremely time-sensitive,
and the advertising support driven by email alerts
also requires a reliable and powerful solution,
all while retaining affordability and allowing
for growth without incurring incremental costs.
October Research Corporation's email lists were
already large, and the minimal tracking for the
individual email messages—including updating
the database with unsubscribes, bad addresses
and soft bounces—had to be done by hand,
according to Rick Harris, ecommerce manager for
October Research. "The tracking we were doing
and the list maintenance were done manually, so
it was key to bring as much automation into these
tasks as possible," Harris said.
Another primary motivation for the firm's interest
in upgrading its ability to track unsubscribes
and bad addresses automatically was its desire
to proactively comply the initiatives set forth
by the federal Can-Spam Act of 2003. October Research
wanted to ensure its ecommerce activity demonstrated
the firm's dedication to responsible citizenry,
and that its lists and emails not only lived up
to the letter of the law, but also optimized email
delivery and customer user experiences with the
recipients' ability to opt-in and unsubscribe.
"We've worked too hard to build our lists
and make sure they are scrubbed of bad addresses.
We wanted to find a program that would automatically
retrieve and optimize our data collection, streamline
the hard bounces and, in general, improve our
ability to deliver relevant content quickly and
efficiently," said Database Administrator
Franci Hutter.
Pricing was also a challenge for the next level
of email solution. The firm talked to service
providers whose pricing structure involved charges
per email message. "With the volume of email
we were doing, this wasn't going to be viable,
because the email news is a free service we provide,"
Harris said. "We do generate subscriptions
for our newsletters from email, but in order for
it to continue to be a functional aspect of our
marketing model, we had to find a solution that
would allow us to continue sending the messages
ourselves."
Solution: Automated database updates with
Campaign
Using Campaign Enterprise email marketing
software to issue its weekly news alerts, October
Research now automatically tracks email usage
such as hyperlink click-though activity and the
unsubscribes for every campaign.
"We track the number of people who open
the email, and we track the number of people who
open specific story headlines, to find out which
stories have the highest interest to our readers,"
Harris said. "We also track the clicks on
our advertisers' banners so we can keep them up-to-date
on how their programs are performing for them."
Results: Improvements in Can-Spam compliance
“Campaign Enterprise has been a great tool
for helping us comply with the various requirements
of the Can-Spam Act,” said Harris. The feature
which provided the most obvious help with compliance
is the opt-out field update, and Campaign also
keeps track of bounce information, messages sent,
opens and click-throughs. "We are able to
use simple queries to identify problem areas and
clean our lists of old, unused addresses,"
Harris said. "This lowers our cost in terms
of network traffic, and gives us more reliable
information for analyzing the results of our campaign."
The October Research ecommerce department is
in charge of the company email campaigns, and
fields assorted requests from the marketing and
editorial departments for different email projects
outside of the normal news service usage. All
of these functions utilize Campaign Enterprise.
"Campaign is a system unto itself. It has
a nice user interface that's easy to learn, which
is also key," Harris said. "We talked
to a couple of other companies and Arial Software
was probably the best when it came to answering
our questions and demonstrating the product."
Harris said Arial's willingness to sit down and
go though everything Campaign Enterprise could
do—including outlining how the software
would fit into their business—before the
company "took the plunge" and made the
purchase, was considered critical.
"Overall it was a good acquisition,"
Harris said.
About October Research Corporation
Based in Richfield, Ohio, October Research Corporation,
publishers of The
Title Report, The
Legal Description, Appraisal
Intelligence, Real
Estate Technology Insight, as well as the
online newsletter RESPAnews.com,
is the nation's fastest growing and most respected
name in real estate publishing and research, exclusively
focused on the real estate settlement services
industry. Through its newsletters, special reports
and audio seminars, the firm's mission is to serve
the real estate and settlement services industries
with best-in-class news coverage, analysis and
feature reporting.
About Arial Software
Founded in 1993, Arial Software is widely considered
the leading industry pioneer in permission email
marketing software. The company's products are
used by thousands of businesses, non-profits,
associations and other groups to compose and send
email newsletters and personalized messages directly
to subscribers, customers, prospects and members.
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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