HeyButler.com, a savings search engine Web site, recently chose Knotice Ltd., as its direct digital marketing platform. HeyButler.com invested in Knotice's on-demand solution, Concentri, to improve the company’s Web site and e-mail experience for its rapidly growing subscriber base.
Direct digital marketing is marketing that is addressable—meaning you can identify the recipient of the marketing message being distributed. Traditional direct marketing is achieved using a customer’s postal address. With the evolution of direct marketing to direct digital marketing, Knotice CEO Brian Deagan says that addressability comes in one of three forms; an e-mail address, a Web browser cookie, or a mobile phone number.
First launched in 2004, the Concentri direct digital marketing platform brings the three elements of digital marketing addressability together under one platform. According to Deagan, the platform is designed to help businesses get the maximum return possible from their Web sites, increase the relevancy of each digital marketing campaign sent, and to improve conversions.
On-demand Tools for Direct Digital Marketing
The Concentri direct digital marketing platform is an on-demand service, so businesses can choose from a variety of tools, paying only for what they used. The platform features e-mail marketing tools that let you create a campaign using WYSIWYG or HTML editing tools. Concentri provides e-mail reporting for you to analyze and optimize your e-mail marketing. The platform also offers Concentri Mobile to take advantage of SMS mobile campaigns, plus it has embedded tools for live testing of your marketing content.
One of the unique direct marketing tools of the Concentri platform is SiteTarget. This lets you define easy-to-edit areas on your Web site, called live zones, to target content and marketing tests specific to Web site visitors.
One benefit of using Concentri SiteTarget’s live zones is that Web site owners do not need to redesign their pages to inject targeted marketing content. Instead, even the most non-technical of users, can use a WYSIWYG editing environment to create and manage live zone content. Once the live zone content is created, content editors simply apply displays rules to target a specific site visitor segment.
Deagan says that using live zones is like defining the main real estate areas on your Web site for targeting and testing. Companies invest a lot into their Web site infrastructure but at times you may need to add some customer personalization or include relevancy for a specific marketing campaign.
“Adding on-site relevancy should be a low-cost option for site owners. You don’t need to invest in a new site just to address one specific area,” he said. “If you are happy with all other aspects of your Web site, then it is as easy as creating a live zone with Concentri SiteTarget and then editing the template from within the Concentri platform.”
In combination with Concentri’s segmentation tools, you can target customers and the marketing message based on a wide range of criteria including the last time the user visited your site, the customer’s last purchase, or the action taken by the user in the last e-mail campaign you sent.
SiteTarget Reinforces any Digital Marketing Message
For search engine HeyButler.com, Deagan says the company is able to target customers on-site, based on its geographical location. Instead of using multiple pages, HeyButler uses the information the customer provided when he or she signed up on the site. That lets the live on-site targeting provide direct marketing messages that are targeted to the user based on the city they live in. This in turn lets HeyButler offer relevant marketing messages to users as they arrive on the Web site.
You can edit the actual function of the on-site targeting to reinforce any direct digital marketing message. In some cases you can use live zones to replace some of your site’s landing pages for conversion, or use the live zones to reinforce landing page messages.
In some instances where an e-mail subscriber might choose to type your URL into a browser, instead of following a special landing page URL from an e-mail marketing message, you can use live zones to ensure they still see the campaign’s marketing message from your main page URL.
Concentri On-demand Pricing
Knotice's Concentri platform, which includes SiteTarget, E-mailPlus, Mobile, and other direct digital marketing tools, starts at $250 per month plus usage charges. The on-demand platform charges customers only for the services they use.
Vangie Beal is a veteran online seller and frequent contributor to ECommerce-Guide.com. She is also managing editor of Webopedia.com. You can tweet with her online @AuroraGG.
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