« Privacy Act Changes | Chocolate Direct Mail »
LookWho'sClicking
I had a chance to catch up with Erik Charles from MindFireInc this week. For those who aren't familar with MindFireInc, they specialise in offering a personalised URL service for direct marketing. There appears to be some misconception across the industry regarding MindFireInc's business model—their Web site doesn't give too much away. MindFireInc provide an ASP model, commonly referred today as Software as a Service, or 'SaaS'. Their product, LookWho'sClicking, or LWC, enables users to create and deploy personalised micro sites through a wizard-based interface and track responses. I thought I'd share what I learnt from my call with Erik and explain what their product actually does.
Creating a campaign in LWC is fairly straightforward and doesn't require programming knowledge. An intuitive browser-based wizard guides you through the process, and lets you add as many HTML or Flash pages that you require in your micro site. Essentially they've built a browser-based basic HTML editor. Once you've determined the different pages you want to include on your site, the wizard then steps you through adding text, image and fields to each page. Alternatively, you can pick from a selection of pre-built templates and customise accordingly. You can review some template micro sites at www.johnsample.lwcautomotive.com and www.johndoe.lwceduc.com (ignore the email field).
As the wizard offers basic functionality, you're naturally limited in what you can actually design. However, those who are comfortable with working in HTML can paste their HTML code to each page instead of using the wizard.
Building a micro site using the browser-based wizard
To create personalised URLs, you upload your recipient data file, and LWC appends a unique personalised URL and optional password to each record in the data file. You can then download this file and use it with VDP software to incorporate the personalised URL into your mail piece. For the URLs, you're not limited by domain names, you can purchase a domain name through a provider of your choice, then assign it to an IP address allocated by MindFireInc.
The real value in LWC is its reporting functionality. You can login to the LWC console and step through a series of views, which display the site activity (number of visitors, etc) in both tabular and graphical form, and it also features a handy ROI calculator.
Tracking visits to individual pages
Calculating campaign ROI
For their licencing model, LWC has an initial licence fee of US$9.5K, followed by an annual maintenance fee of US$2K. On top of the licence and maintenance fees, you pay a fee-per-use that is based on records imported per month. This fee ranges from under 5c per record (for under 50,000 records), though to 2 cents for 1,000,000+ records.
In summary, LWC is a neatly packaged solution for service providers who want to offer web campaigns with personalised URLs, without investing in additional hardware infrastructure or skills. As I pointed out in an earlier entry (Magical PURLs), it's fairly straightforward to build your own Web site with personalised URLs without programming knowledge. If you've purchased Adobe Creative Suite 3 Design Premium, then you already have this capability through Dreamweaver. However, SaaS models such as LookWho'sClicking or easypersonalisedurls.com let you get up and running quickly, without having to use Dreamweaver, sort out web hosting and build a campaign tracking interface.
But it's important to note that SaaS isn't the only option. Both XMPie and Bitstream offer cross-media software. Through this shrink wrapped software, you’ll get a higher level of control and customisation in creating personalised web pages. For example, XMPie lets you apply business rules to variable elements on each page, and apply rules to any data submitted from a page. And like LWC, it also offers it's own campaign analysis system through their Marketing Console.
If you're shopping the cross-media market, my advice would be to evaluate both SaaS and shrinkwrap options, taking into account what features you require and the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of your investment, based on frequency of campaigns and their size. Good luck!
Posted on Thursday, 24 April 2008 at 3:20 PM | TrackBack: http://www.veedeepee.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/124