Leading Edge
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| Gary Palmer test-drives Neolane's comprehensive multichannel
marketing suite |
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While marketers seem happy to work with a vast range of different applications to deliver
various parts of the marketing mix, the marketing function is one of the last to embrace integrated
or process-based IT solutions. Marketing Automation has never caught the corporate imagination in the way that CRM did.
However, there are signs that this may be set to change. Against a backdrop of ever more sophisticated and wary customers,
and diminishing returns realised by many traditional marketing campaigns, new technologies and new approaches now look set to
make Marketing Automation a much more appealing proposition.
In the context of all this the entry of established French software publishers Neolane into the UK market is perhaps unsurprising.
What is more surprising is the degree to which Neolane seems to represent a new breed of marketing automation software.
Since Neolane positions itself as a solution designed to deliver "Enterprise" Marketing Automation, the scope of the offering is
consequently too wide to cover every element in detail in the space available here. Instead the focus will be twofold: to identify
the exact nature of the Neolane proposition and assess how well they succeed in delivering against it; and along the way to examine
in more detail the key functional elements of the data management portion of that proposition.
Neolane take as their starting point a fairly standard view of the "closed-loop" marketing cycle. They break this down into five steps
that will be familiar from any number of direct marketing textbooks: Segmentation and Targeting; Content Management; Personalisation;
Execution; Reporting and Tracking. They then add Data Management to this classic view, sensibly realising that failure to pay explicit
attention to the provision and management of the data resource has been the Achilles heel of too many marketing solutions.
Their approach is then to provide a series of standard application modules providing functionality to support each stage in the cycle,
all wrapped round a kernel that both integrates the modules and provides a workflow engine which can be used to define and run a series
of steps within the cycle as an automated process. Thus a scenario can be set up that will select the correct message content for a
particular customer segment, personalise it based on individual characteristics and deliver it via a chosen channel, be it direct mail,
email or the phone. Response information can then be captured that will trigger further iterations of the cycle.
While the central closed-loop process can be established with the core product, which they refer to as the Foundation Platform, Neolane then go on to offer some twenty additional optional modules to extend and deepen functionality in each of the six key stages.
What makes Neolane stand out is the degree to which they have used new technologies and the latest market standards such as Web Services and Service Oriented Architecture to provide a remarkably open, flexible and scaleable architecture. What this means for anyone starting with a fairly clean sheet is that they can achieve a creditable level of automation out of the box, and add optional functionality as their business model evolves.
The more likely scenario in most organisations is that they already have specialist solutions in place, and here Neolane is designed to become a pivotal point of integration without having to massively disrupt the existing systems landscape. This is achieved by connecting to existing applications using standards (SOAP, HTTP, XML) that the IT department will be comfortable with. Neolane already have a number of connectors in place for popular marketing applications, and are prepared to create new ones as needed as part of the system implementation.
The best way to get a sense of how the Neolane offering looks in use is to walk through one of the six stages in more detail, examining both the Foundation Platform functionality and the additional options in each stage. Data Management is chosen here, as it is so key to the overall success of the whole concept.
Neolane provide a ready-made database, "with documented data schema" to hold what they refer to as profiles - i.e. data on customers, prospects, contacts, recipients, employees etc. Your data can be poured into this repository using wizard-based import routines, or entered directly via interfaces in the application. A nice feature is a graphical module for defining web forms to collect and update data, whether it be to maintain customer records, create surveys or manage newsletter un/subscription.
These two options are characteristic of the user interface throughout. Neolane rely heavily on wizards to make processes accessible to marketers rather than techies. They also make heavy use of web forms and templates. While they assert that forms can be auto-generated from the graphical definition, and key templates created during implementation can easily be copied and modified, it seems likely that any organisation wanting to make the most of Neolane capabilities is going to need someone with XML/HTML expertise available for configuration and customisation work on an ongoing basis.
The standard database comes with built-in tools to deduplicate and merge records, quarantine invalid addresses and administer, monitor and tune the database. There is also functionality designed to standardise and format data based on defined business rules. Interestingly Neolane refer to this in terms of automating data policies - exactly the terminology that is just beginning to be used by vendors of very high end Customer Data Integration and Master Data Management systems. Another example of the way Neolane seem to be building leading edge thinking directly into their functionality.
Also well up with current thinking are well designed modules to handle customer opt-in and opt-out data. These address difficult issues such as storing consents across multiple channels, hard and soft bounce recognition and support for statutory compliance. The handling of subscriptions to information services such as newsletters is particularly strong, with conditional alerts, real-time notifications and confirmation mechanisms such as double opt-in and opt-out all well realised within a coherent framework.
While the standard data model is claimed to handle the needs of the majority of enterprises, there are few organisations that
do not harbour a deep seated conviction that their business model is in some way unique. To cope with this Neolane offer an optional
module they call Data Builder which delivers the ability both to extend the data model and to change the graphical interface to
reflect these changes. This is a fully fledged development environment which can create tables fields and links, add new windows,
track and document changes. All this without the use of programming as it is driven from another wizard-heavy graphical and form-based
environment. The claim is that the ease with which items can be added ensures marketing teams retain the freedom and agility that can
be stifled by traditional development methods.
The Data Builder is once again a radical element within the Neolane offering as it tips the balance of power in evolving the marketing system to meet business needs towards marketers and away from IT departments to a degree seldom before seen. Which is of course something of a double edged sword. While putting the power to change things in the hands of marketers is estimable in principle, the impact in the real world needs thinking through. Many front line marketers have neither the time nor the knowledge to be let loose on tinkering with data structures. Deriving long term benefit from using this functionality surely relies on the organisation having or hiring some of those "marketing hybrids" who are equally at home in the worlds both of marketing and of data architectures and processes.
While the Neolane data model is key to driving many of the central processes, that does not mean organisations with heavy investments in existing customer facing systems such as contact management or CRM need bring all that data into the central database. An optional module called Data Mapper allows Neolane to interface directly with data inside existing data sources. Once again this is functionality which while excellent in execution begs a question about who is going to be responsible for the impact on data flows, data management and data policies.
Also offered as optional models are Data Loader, a tool to extract, transform and load data to the unified marketing data mart and Data Quality Manager, which offers packaged connectors to allow automated processing of postal address and enhancement data in conjunction with outside sources such as Experian Intact.
Overall the flexibility of the data management solution means organisations can configure a solution that will work whatever their existing systems infrastructure. They can choose to work with the generic data structure or extend it, to load data into the resulting structure using Neolane tools or their existing ETL suite, or map Neolane out to existing systems without migrating the data, but with tools in place to maintain data integrity.
The same flexibility is shown at each stage of the cycle. Targeting and Segmentation can be achieved using the standard Neolane Query Editor and Segment Manager, or further enhanced with optional modules for Scoring and Advanced Segmentation, all of them presented with the marketing user in mind through a well designed graphical interface. Third party specialist applications, such as statistical packages from SPSS and SAS, or Business Objects Set Analyzer can also easily be integrated.
Content management, personalisation, execution and reporting all offer the same mix of base and optional extra functionality, or the possibility of using the open architecture to connect to existing specialist applications in that area.
One optional module deserving special mention is Neolane Commander. This exploits the central web services core of Neolane by presenting all the operations and processes through a single graphical environment. Icons which represent customer segments or saved queries, creative content or personalisation routines can be combined with others which represent wait times, schedules or calls to external applications. These can be combined in a flow diagram which defines, and then through the underlying workflow engine can be used to execute, a whole process.
This is the enabler for marketing activates which are both multi stage and combine multiple channels. The result is to open up possibilities for the creation of a fantastic range of automated dialogues with customers: for example relationship mechanisms that will be triggered by stages in their life cycle - response to a promotion, first order, stages in a loyalty programme and so on. This is marketing automation made highly visual and highly accessible, and the Commander module is in many ways the jewel in the crown of the whole Neolane offering.
All in all Neolane represents the careful combination of the latest technologies and the most up-to-date thinking on data management with tried and tested direct marketing principles and techniques. Any organisation that has a serious intention to integrate their marketing channels more closely or to streamline their marketing processes has to treat this as a serious contender.
Like most software publishers, Neolane price their product
on a fairly bewildering matrix of variables including number
of users, number of modules and size of database. They also
offer three different purchasing models: straight purchase of
licences for deployment on site, a hosted or ASP mode where
the services are effectively rented or what they call a mid-source
solution, where the software is run in house but certain services,
such as the handling of email are handled externally.
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