ColdSpark Blog

News & Views from ColdSpark

Options for Bridging Your Email Technology Gap

Posted by bdreller on March 11, 2010

Managing email delivery can be tricky. And even with all the great and often free software available, if you’re doing it in-house you still have to administer the hardware and software, keep constant tabs on deliverability, and stay fully informed on latest trends in email authentication. So if you’ve got the means to produce quality email but don’t necessarily have the ability to deliver it with the same level of quality, consider letting someone else do it for you. It’s important.

Bryan Dreller, Account Services Director

In the spirit of full disclosure, ColdSpark offers managed delivery-only services and indeed has customers who have been saved by it. My purpose in mentioning this is to illustrate that there is a very real gap between systems that want to send email and systems—and people—that are forced to. We found that we could fill this gap.        

“So what’s the gap? Sending email is easy.” I agree completely, sending email is very easy. But it’s the making sure it arrives on time at its destination that I worry about. Then there’s bounce management, automated inbound email handling, and ISP friendly neighbor policies. Surprisingly, even the mightiest of enterprise CRM and campaign management systems rely on open source MTAs that are typically racked and managed by you. And sometimes not even that; you may have to grow your own email farm.        

If you’re lucky enough to be in charge of administrating your CRM or CMS email delivery, you know very well that it’s a constant struggle to keep on top of the ever-evolving delivery and configuration requirements placed on you; and that’s only for the ones your organization knows about. Are you signing your messages with DKIM? If so, have you considered occasionally rotating your keys to prevent fraud? Do you know the maximum concurrent connections allowed to yahoo.com or maximum messages per connection to comcast.net? What do you do if you get rate-limited by hotmail.com? Is it a reputation problem, bad Sender ID record, or are you just sending too fast? And so on and so forth. And if any of these questions are foreign, then I’m afraid you suffer from you don’t know what you don’t know syndrome. There is much to be learned.        

I’m also seeing a huge gap in the cloud computing world. Say you’ve decided to migrate your eCommerce business infrastructure entirely to the cloud (and rightly so with the phenomenal cost savings and scalability it affords). Many of the cloud computing services offered by the likes of Amazon don’t allow outbound SMTP traffic. So you can’t even send a simple purchase confirmation from there. But here’s a hint: post the email via API to a waiting MTA hosted elsewhere. There are many clever ways to get around this gap.        

Regardless of what kinds of email you are required to deliver, championing a quality email delivery management mechanism falls squarely in your court, and it can be tough work. So take comfort in knowing that there are easy outs, and consider pushing the hard parts on someone else so you can focus instead on growing your business.   

Posted in Enterprise Messaging, Managed E-mail Services | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

The State of Healthcare Communications & Access to Information

Posted by adownie on March 5, 2010

While perusing the Healthcare Information Management & Security Society (HIMSS) show in Atlanta earlier this week, I reached the conclusion that I had been thinking about the healthcare space in the wrong way, as one is want to do when they come into a new vertical.

Walking the show floor, all 900 or so vendors of it, I realized that the healthcare IT space is as specialized (and fragmented) as the physicians it serves.  From oncology-specific electronic health records to remote imaging solutions that can be air-dropped into combat zones, each solution has a unique use case, and unique communications requirements.

Portals, for example, were a big talking point at the show.  Everyone talked about the patients having access to information via portals and the need to communicate more efficiently with them through this secure, web-based solution.  A very cool direction for the industry to be taking, but it isn’t the whole story.  Behind the patient portals (or member-portals for the insurance payers) are a plethora of other portals and connections to the physicians, partners, public health systems, emergency services, drug companies, boards, donors, etc.

The one thing that is apparent is that many of these specialized solutions and portals will need to communicate with multiple constituencies via multiple channels.  So, more than ever, a centralized digital messaging platform is important for the healthcare organizations. Not only so they can control the look and feel of their messaging, but to integrate recipient-specific information, track interaction with the messaging to determine if other notification channels are required, ensure archival and compliance requirements are met, and so on.

What will be key in addressing this space is having a flexible platform to address multiple inbound and outbound channels and that can perform actions on the content as required.  Lucky for me, I happen to know of such a solution…

Posted in Compliance, Enterprise Messaging, Healthcare, Managed E-mail Services | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Don’t Underestimate the Power of Your Customer Communications

Posted by kristinlindquist on March 4, 2010

A bank with which I do business has an online portal that makes it difficult to pay my credit card bill if no balance is currently due.  By difficult, I mean it is at least 2-3 extra clicks from the landing page, and every time I have to poke around until I find it.  In conversation, I mention this difficultly as a reason why I don’t trust this bank- I think they make this difficult in hopes I’ll keep a balance and thus pay interest.  My interpretation of this scenario is extremely subjective- my distrust stems from just a few extra clicks- and yet I tell others I don’t trust that bank because of it.

In his blog, futurist Patrick Dixon says, “The truth is that our future is being shaped by technology or innovation, but will be driven by emotion.”  The customer’s emotion is such an interesting and powerful facet of doing business.  Emotion is not a behavior of the masses, where a person is a mere statistic- emotion is a behavior of an individual.  In order to capture the positive emotions with customers, they must be handled as individuals, knowing that their needs, wants and concerns are highly personal.

Now I won’t claim that consumers have particularly deep or complex emotions when it comes to their relationships with banks or insurers.  However, the level of trust they feel affects how and where they do business, and how they are treated in the course of doing business greatly influences their level of satisfaction.   The path to establishing (or destroying) trust and satisfaction is wrought with human emotion, subjective reasoning, and individual interpretation.

For example, I have a relationship with a financial institution that sends me newsletters and promotional material that doesn’t interest me in the slightest.  Or I should say, the one to two messages I’ve actually read don’t interest me in the slightest- I haven’t opened the rest.  I delete those messages as soon as I receive them.  My reaction to this sender is that they send me irrelevant messages clearly meant to appeal to different people in a different demographic.  They don’t know me and they aren’t even trying.  While the service is satisfactory, it isn’t differentiated and as a result I feel no loyalty.

Communication is an opportunity to differentiate products and services, in a couple of ways.  To quote Patrick Dixon again, “Sometimes we use technology in the wrong way- to take human beings away from the one place where we can build an emotional relationship- where the customer is in trouble and they need help fast.”  In this category I’d put genuinely helpful communications.  If a business can help a customer when they urgently need help, they have an opportunity to make a customer for life.  Beyond urgency, however, exist many opportunities to help the customer.  Low balance, approaching credit limit, and fraud alerts, to name a few.  In many cases, properly targeted advocacy messages are also genuinely helpful.

Additionally, a business can differentiate themselves with interesting communications.  My favorite example, which nobody has properly translated to messaging, is Amazon’s product recommendations.  I consider myself generally skeptical of advertising efforts, but I have to admit I look at my Amazon recommendations and make purchases on that basis!  Amazon markets me products that I actually want to buy, and as a result, I not only spend more money, but I’m loyal because those individualized recommendations differentiate Amazon from my other online purchasing options.

To determine what communications are helpful or interesting for each individual, businesses need to know their customer’s current context (preferences, demographics, reasons for doing business).  They must also constantly measure how their customers are responding (what they are reading, clicking, opening, purchasing, etc) to update their knowledge of the customer and her motivations.  With this data, what, how and when one communicates can be adjusted to maximize the customer experience.  By basing communications on the customer’s context, providing an individualized experience based on their needs and wants, they will feel satisfaction and trust rather than irritation or apathy.

In my next post, I’ll talk about using cadence, channel, and content to act on the customer’s context.

See http://www.globalchange.com/technology-innovation-future-trends.htm for more on Patrick Dixon’s thoughts on the future.

Posted in Enterprise Messaging, Financial Services, Managed E-mail Services | Leave a Comment »

Tips for Success When Going Paperless

Posted by adownie on February 28, 2010

As ColdSpark announces the release of its new Managed Services for our Paperless Notifications Solution, I thought it would be a good time to discuss some best practices around handling failure for automated notification systems.

Sending out notifications is a rather straightforward concept.  After all, it’s an email message and we send those all the time, right?  You can create and send an SMTP message and then just assume that the message was delivered, but problems start to arise when there is an issue delivering that message.  Perhaps an email address is wrong and you get a soft bounce due to reputation, or, it could be that the account simply doesn’t exist.  How are you to know and what you should do about it?

First, let’s look at the how.  Use of traditional email systems result in difficult retrieval of specific information around delivery and failures.  So the first thing you will need to do is either write a tool to parse and translate your log files, or go with a solution, such as ColdSpark, which does this work for you and categorizes your failure information so it’s actionable.  Once you have this actionable information, you can make informed decisions on how to best handle individual situations.

For example, if a new subscriber’s email address fails, you might decide to push that failed message data back to your customer management system so that you can trigger the printing and delivery of paper-based correspondence, or trigger a customer service call to update the information.

What if you are seeing failures on a grander scale?  Perhaps all of your messages to Yahoo are getting rejected.  This would be indicative of a reputation problem with that recipient domain and bears investigation by whomever you have managing your deliverability.  You do have someone managing the deliverability of all your customer communications streams, right?  If not, you should because deliverability isn’t just a marketing issue, to be sure.

Your customers are choosing to provide you their digital messaging preferences for a reason.  Ensuring you act properly when those messages fail is key to continuing a proper customer experience with your organization.  So, be sure to establish an infrastructure that provides you the detailed failure information you need, and be sure to act on it.  The fact of the matter is that if your notifications are not getting delivered, and you aren’t acting on the delivery failures, your customers will opt out of your paperless initiative, which will reduce any potential cost savings.

Posted in Enterprise Messaging, Managed E-mail Services | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

« Previous Entries