Published on the 09/09/2015 | Written by Beverley Head
Return Path has announced that it is offering an Australian version of its email data cloud services offering insights from the inboxes of 80,000 Australians including Telstra BigPond users…
Return Path tracks around a billion email deliveries and four million email complaints each day. It also makes use of the domain based message authentication, reporting and conformance (DMARC) tools to help authenticate emails.
According to Theo Noel, regional director for Return Path ANZ, the aggregate insights from that analysis can be used by marketing teams to ensure that their emails are sent to the right people, and also help measure the effectiveness of email campaigns.
He said that the company’s analysis of its data showed that in 2014 17 percent of marketing emails did not arrive at the intended recipient.
“It is about optimising email – the issue for marketers is who to send it to, what to send and how to send it,” which Noel claimed Return Path’s Data as a Service or Software as a Service solutions could help determine.
According to Gartner analysis, email as a marketing tool “isn’t dead. It’s still valuable since more email marketing is being consumed on the go, through multiple devices and is still extremely measurable.”
While Return Path has been offering some email analytics services in Australia for the last seven years and has about 150 clients for its email optimisation solutions including Groupon, Woolworths and Fairfax, this is the first time it has offered the cloud service locally.
It is also launching an API for the cloud service so that marketers can more easily integrate with their in house platforms. However Noel declined to say how much the service would cost.
The tool however only tackles the email side of marketing, and does not address broader marketing campaigns which blend email and social. Noel acknowledged marketers would have to use separate tools to track success with social.
This is an issue being explored later this week at a seminar in Tasmania.
Dr Daniel Angus, lecturer in computational social science at the University of Queensland, who will present the seminar, said that full measurement of marketing campaigns required a holistic analysis of the different media, taking into account issues such as inherent bias in data – noting that tweets may not reveal, for example, a complete picture of consumer sentiment.
“When you try to do the analysis you need the right tool for the job,” he said adding that his research focussed on text analytics that could identify brand issues over time. Angus said he had for example used the Leximancer and Discursis tools to explore how the coal seam gas debate in Australia had mutated over time from being a business issue to a social and environmental debate.
Armed with such insights about social, marketers can better hone their campaigns.
