Long considered the wunderkind in the early growth spurt of the Internet, “electronic mail” propelled the Net’s mainstream adoption from its virtual infancy into adolescence. Today email is facing an identity crisis in its teenage years. The rebellious nature of Spam proliferation and virus infiltration amounts to a kind of malicious mischief. Is it any wonder? Email has grown up in an environment of little to no governance or rules-based order. Disparaging email is a little like accusing television for having bad acting or infomercials. The medium is not responsible for what is on it.
Unless, of course, the communication is part of a customer-service relationship or a bona fide, opt-in dialog between the parties. In that case, email becomes the messaging platform for all variety of transactions, all of them highly rule- and event-oriented. There’s a different utility and value system at work when email arrives bearing confirmation of an order you’ve placed, reminding you of an important occasion, or returning to you the results of an ongoing search query. In this context, email functions as the interface of a database system or the touchpoint of a paging or notification service.
The Seattle firm that is ushering in this era of email transformation is known as WhatCounts, and not surprisingly, its name describes its mission of helping customers to learn what is the most useful and relevant in the email that they transact with their customers. A brilliant example is the added functionality WhatCounts has brought to readers of the Seattle Times Classifieds who are searching for a car to drive or a home to live in. Thanks to WhatCounts, readers can register their individual search criteria with the Times’ NW Classifieds department and be notified every morning whether the car, home or apartment they are seeking has come on the market. That’s email at its best!
Here’s our interview with WhatCounts’ founder and president David Geller. David has understood the unique importance and relevancy of email since he helped ABCNews.com inform thousands of its viewers of the headlines that were most meaningful to them through a service he worked on at Internet pioneer Starwave in concert with Netscape’s In-Box-Direct program. WhatCounts currently employs seven people at its headquarters in Pioneer Square, although as David tells it, the technology they deploy makes that work group seem many times as large.
Seattle24x7: Congratulations on your recent innovation in connection with Northwest Classifieds and The Seattle Times. Suddenly, reading the paper and shopping for a car in the classifieds has new email alerting capabilities.
Geller: Well, we all know that the Web is wonderful but we’re also inundated by how much time and energy we have to spend going and exploring things. So what the Seattle Times has done is said, ‘Look, you’re searching for a car. Give us your criteria, and we’ll perform that search for you every night.’ They’ll run the search on your behalf and, by using WhatCounts, they’ll ship data to us in XML that we’ll pour into some templates they’ve designed, in essence delivering you search results every morning for matches against your criteria. The Seattle Times folks have created a wonderful resource that fits in extremely well with the type of communications we’re offering to companies.
Seattle24x7: You’ve added enormous value to the process.
Geller: People want to search for something but then they grow tired of having to go back and search over and over again. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were these robots that did the work for you and then just used what is arguably the best medium to alert you — email!
Seattle24x7: Are you using similar email alerts or reminders with your other clients?
Geller: We are. In fact, the same technology is being used by other e-commerce clients to deliver shipping notifications when people order products. I think we all value the email we receive from companies like Amazon or eBay that says, hey, your product has shipped. Click here to track it.
WhatCounts lets companies a lot smaller than Amazon or eBay achieve the same sophisticated type of automated event email. Any e-commerce company of any size could have the same kind of thoughtful direct interaction with their customers.
Seattle24x7: Is this capability built into your system?
Geller: It is. One of the coolest applications is a very sophisticated event macro capability that is built into our platform. Here’s the problem. Let’s say a company emails its customers. And sometimes these people opt-out. Well, the company wants to get that information directly in their own system. Maybe it’s SalesForce.com, maybe it’s a tool they’ve built for themselves. We now have the capability to actually tie-in those events and send the data back directly to our clients’ back-end systems.
Seattle24x7: So the email can reflect where the relationship is at any given point?
Geller: Yes. Here’s another example. The Kerry for President campaign uses WhatCounts. They have a very sophisticated tool that they use for their own contact management. Well, they wanted to make sure that events related to their email that occur in WhatCounts automatically synchronize back into their system. So, we’re able to do that with XML and SOAP, the transfer technology, and it’s completely automated.
One of the best applications is tying into a customers eCRM tool and with our event macro capability we can perform all sorts of different types of actions. The implementation we’ve done uses well-known standards and we’ve set it up to be incredibly flexible. Event macros in our platform help create a two-way exchange of information as it relates to email.
Seattle24x7: This type of event-driven email management reminds me of relationship marketing campaigns in terms of the frequency and relevancy of communication. These are all touchpoints in the relationship, such as when someone opens a new account or makes a purchase.
Geller: Exactly. For instance, a small company might have a list sign-up on the front page of their Website. Wouldn’t it be nice if the sales manager of that small company got an email every time someone signed up to receive? with their customers – and prospective customers. With event macros, you can basically decide that anytime someone joins a list, leaves a list, or performs an action against a specific email message, an event will get triggered that causes one or a whole series of specialized events to occur. For the small company that might be the notification email message sent to the sales manager, or to someone managing that territory. For a bigger company it could be a complex series of actions. With this feature we’re really redefining the role of permission email and how it’s used.
Seattle24x7: You are providing a complete outbound email capability?
Geller: We’re strictly an outbound email publishing technology. The only exception would be for bounce management services, which we handle on behalf of our customers. We’re not a traditional mail hosting company. It’s strictly outbound mail publishing.
Seattle24x7: What types of marketing capabilities are available with the system?
Geller: Our customers can use our tool to do lots of segmentation. The difference is they’re segmenting against their own users versus buying lists. We’re not in the list rental business at all. In fact, contractually all of our customers have to engage in permission email. But within the platform they have a rich number of tools to do the segmentation that lets them, say, group by gender, by income, or by geography. Even to break up their list ten ways and send to 20% of that for all sorts of testing. There’s a strong marketing capabilities set.
We also have cell-tracking, so for example, you can run a number of campaigns and then compare against one of your data points like gender or income and see how they compared, break up and test different creatives.
Seattle24x7: You’re also working with RealNetworks and PopMultimedia among others. Are you doing rich multimedia as well?
Geller: We’ve always been content agnostic. When we started this, everyone was excited about the prospect of sending video and sophisticated, embedded rich objects, Flash, and various scripted types of things. Well, that all went down the drain. You just can’t do it today. It doesn’t make sense because all of the restrictions places on users by various Web-based mail clients. Interestingly, I get frequent emails from one of Microsoft’s content groups and when I open it up a dialog pops up and says ‘Warning Active Content, Cannot Display.” Well, it’s there for my own protection but isn’t it silly that Microsoft doesn’t even know that its own Outlook email client, by default, is restricting this type of delivery of content?
We tell clients that the world of sending rich media is over, don’t do it, it’s a waste. We’ve built tools to help them get around that by basically being able to link to a Web page with the same content. They can do it dynamically. So we let people enjoy the same HTML client experience they would have received in an email but on a Web page using their browser. The pages are built dynamically so any kind of personalization our clients expect to deliver remains intact. And that’s when we can then relay people to look at the live video on-demand or the embedded object. But it doesn’t work by default in HTML email anymore.
HTML email remains very important, if used properly. Some of our customers, like Altrec.com on the east side send fantastically detailed and really beautiful emails that are graphically stunning and, I’m sure, contribute to increased sales. Other clients send far more plain looking content.
Seattle24x7: Are you looking at SMS and mobile messaging these days?
Geller: We can address that space through common email interfaces. Most people with SMS capabilities have a corresponding email address to communicate with that device. And although SMS has a spotty record, there will definitely be a need for companies who want to communicate with their users that way. They’re going to need an email partner. And we certainly intend to be one of the partners available to them.
Seattle24x7: We have to ask, ‘What do you think is the solution to the Spam problem?’
Geller: Well, I think the underlying protocol needs to be beefed up. SMTP was really designed with the notion that you can trust everybody. Anybody that’s sending mail, there identity is trusted and doesn’t have to be proven. Well, that’s not true today. The SMTP protocol doesn’t have any built in ability to carry trust certificates. There are add-ons that can be placed into the process but the challenge we all face is how we do this on a large scale that’s backward compatible and works? How do we adapt the world to newer tools? I think we’re really going to have to change SMTP. There are some things being done such as a reverse MX-record model where servers can query the sender of the message and ask for confirmation that show great promise. Things like that can slowly be deployed and begin making a difference. Since there are no geographic boundaries to the Internet, I don’t think legislation is the answer.
Speaking of the global character of the Internet, Voice of America is a client of ours. We are helping them deliver email in about 15 languages today to recipients located throughout the world. VOA uses our tools to tie directly into their publishing system and pull out everything from Persian and Arabic to Russian and Azerbaijani to Spanish to Turkish. Over time they will try and service all 52 of their language services. It’s wonderful to see the positive side of email – and the impact it has on people.
Seattle24x7: We look forward to reporting on your progress. [24×7]
Larry Sivitz is the Managing Editor of Seattle24x7.
