The Terra Lycos global network compliments its marketing plan with interactive customer emails

With some 111 million unique visitors per month to its network of websites, Terra Lycos is one of the leading Internet companies in the world. Its significant global presence and clear focus on profitability and growth has generated over 4 million access subscribers to date, averaging 500 million page views a day featuring products and services from more than 3,000 advertising customers. The group's network of websites includes Wired News (Wired.com), Quote.com, HotBot.com, Gamesville.com, Angelfire.com, Matchmaker.com and more.

Terra Lycos’ goal of profitable growth is achieved by efficiently managing resources and generating recurrent revenue from paying subscribers. Part of this efficiency is to compliment existing and future marketing strategy with cost-effective email marketing.

Challenge: Remove the outbound email choke factor
The marketing department at Terra Lycos had a problem. Their email software would choke each time they would send an outbound email marketing campaign involving more than 250,000 emails. Terra Lycos’ Terra.com division has over one million subscribers in its Oracle 9i database, and issues email newsletters to the entire database every two weeks.

Campaign Enterprise’s Bulletproof Mailer technology solves outbound email choking problems by using technology which monitors SMTP server performance and adjusts accordingly. If the SMTP server is slow, the program slows the mail delivery and waits for the server to catch its breath; if the server disconnects, the program will pause before retrying the connection.

Alex Karamanoglou, direct marketing manager at Terra Lycos’ Terra.com division office in Miami, Fla., also said the company’s previous email application didn’t have the capacity to provide enough information on the response level of individual campaigns. “It would just send emails without accounting for any bounces or tracking,” he said. “We felt lost as to the effectiveness of our email campaigns.”

One of the specific goals of Terra Lycos’ email campaigns is to compliment current marketing strategies—results almost impossible to measure without the instantaneous writeback features of Campaign Enterprise. “We want to gain as much insight as possible as to the efficacy of our campaigns, and to react appropriately to any trends,” Karamanoglou said.

Terra.com subscribers are segmented by age, location (state) and opt-in status. “We are thrilled to have a very active user base that is very responsive to our emails… and who don't mind giving us information about their likes and dislikes,” Karamanoglou said. “We try to listen as much as we can, to provide them with the best experience possible when visiting our portal.”

Solution: Campaign Found
Karamanoglou initially found Campaign Enterprise through a search using Google.com. “I was desperate for a better solution, and (a competing application) was completely outside what our budget would allow… I was very surprised to find that Arial Software offered an application that was just as flexible at a much more affordable price,” he said.

Karamanoglou cites speed, flexibility, dependability and reporting capabilities as the most important components of email marketing software that his department needs. “Click thru and email open tracking are paramount for us,” he said. “Also, knowing immediately which emails have bounced—so we can immediately remove them from our email list—is also critical,” Karamanoglou said.

The marketing division of Terra Lycos is currently in the process of completely integrating Campaign Enterprise into its Oracle database, where, once complete, email campaigns issued by the company will be fully customized, including first and last name email fields, as well as tracking opened emails and click thrus. The company will also move the subscribe/unsubscribe functions of its email to its Campaign software, versus sending its users to a separate web page, where they must first log in before changing their user preferences.

“We want to make it as convenient as possible for our user base to interact with us and be able to change settings at their leisure,” Karamanoglou said. “The flexibility that Campaign offers us with using stored procedures will allow us to perform many other functions that were not possible with previous applications.”

Besides the marketing department, Terra Lycos’ client services and web traffic departments also use Campaign Enterprise.

Results and Customer Oriented
Terra Lycos has an ongoing commitment to customer satisfaction, now further enhanced with personalized email messages using Campaign Enterprise permission email marketing software. The result of this customer-oriented approach is an increased number of paying subscribers to the network.

Since Campaign was integrated, Terra Lycos has seen a significant increase in subscribers and open rates. “The writeback reports we created allow us to see what our users are responding to, and lets us change with them,” he said.

“Campaign Enterprise has had a huge positive impact on our business,” Karamanoglou said. “It’s dependable, predictable, flexible, fast, and comes with fantastic tech support… I would recommend this software to any companies looking for an internal email marketing solution, without reservation.”

About Terra Lycos
Terra Lycos is a global Internet group which resulted from Terra Networks, S.A's acquisition of Lycos, Inc. in October 2000. It operates some of the most widely visited websites in the U.S., Europe, Asia and Latin America, and is the largest access provider in Spain and Latin America. Terra Lycos' network of websites includes Terra in 18 countries, Lycos in 22 countries.

About Arial Software
Founded in 1993, Arial Software LLC is widely considered the industry leader in comprehensive software designed exclusively for relationship marketing through personalized email messaging. Arial’s mission is to be a universal provider of software tools to automate, personalize and measure meaningful email communications.

If you are interested in a Campaign Enterprise email best practices case study, contact the Arial Software Media & Press Relations department here.