Emailvision - seminar at the Institute of Directors
I’ve known the people at Emailvision for 6 years, and have worked with them on several occasions, as a client and as a consultant. The company has grown amazingly, especially over the last couple of years. This morning I was at the Institute of Directors for their breakfast seminar about version 6 of the Campaign Commander email marketing platform.
As they explained it, version 6 is about 3 things: easy integration with other web-based applications, better reporting and control over user rights and workflow.
Integration is all about APIs (the interfaces developers use to integrate applications with each other) and web services , a specific kind of API used for web applications. As they explained it, you no longer need to use the Emailvision front-end at all if you don’t want to: you can control and access anything Emailvision can do just by using their APIs. It’s unlikely that anyone is going to write their own user interface to Emailvision’s email platform: there’s a good one already. It does mean that most integrations you might like to do will be possible.
Suppose, for example, you’ve got an e-commerce website that’s been doing its own email marketing, but you’ve grown out of the built-in capabilities. Now you can choose between enhancing your own email platform or building an interface and using Emailvision’s. Given the amount of R&D they do each year, the idea of moving up to their platform could be a lot more attractive than attempting to enhance your solution. If you’re using Salesforce.com or Highrise for your customer relationship management, or Coremetrics for your analytics, you could easily benefit from this integration.
There’s something about this that reminds me of yesterday’s piece about Dopplr: building something very functional and making it easy to plug into (and well-documented) makes it much more likely that people will pick up your application and start doing interesting things with it.
Chris Combemale, Emailvision’s COO, and I were talking about APIs for the Emailvision platform in 2002, so it’s great to see them doing such a comprehensive job now, and placing it at the centre of their product strategy. And very web 2.0!
The reporting enhancements looked very nice, and I would expect so too! This is a very competitive area and keeping the reporting ahead of its rivals is a necessity.
Finally, on workflow and user rights, they’ve implemented controls and structures that remind me very much of those you see today in commercial content management systems. User access can be defined at the role level, and then users can be assigned to different lists (effectively databases) with very specific control over access rights. Different workflows for campaign development and execution can be set up, and these can again vary from list to list. It’s very powerful, allowing customers to set things up so that the CEO can run a dashboard report but can’t inadvertently push the campaign live. Agencies can be allowed to upload creative (and perhaps to test it) but not to create campaigns, if that’s how you want it.
My only reservation on this point is to ask whether they might open up the workflow and user architecture, so that big enterprises can use their existing LDAP or Active Directory for user access, for example. Might a corporate website built on Sharepoint 2007 link to Emailvision for its email campaign management, and use Windows Workflow Foundation to integrate web and email development workflows?
Finally, it’s interesting to see how many pre-configured packages of services Emailvision are offering. Having acquired Barnes & Richardson, the Brussels-based viral experts, last year, they’ve designed a full-service viral solution that looks very competitive. They also have post-sale engagement and up-sell solutions that would benefit a lot of retailers.
