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Choose Striata eMarketing

Striata's eMarketing platform provides a comprehensive solution for the creation and distribution of customized electronic marketing campaigns.
  • List Manager
  • Refer a Friend
  • eSurvey
  • eRSVP
  • Profile Form
  • Striata SMS
  • Striata Self Serve
  • Reporting
  • Spam Check
  • Sender Authentication
  • Messaging Server Features
  • Whitelisting / accreditation
  • Monitoring
  • Batched sends

Success Stories

The success stories of two diverse organisations provides an illustration of how successfully our eMarketing team has utilised the people, processes and technology at our disposal.
Cinema exhibitor gains significant value from Striata’s electronic messaging solution
South Africa’s largest cinema exhibitor enlisted Striata’s eMarketing services for the delivery of marketing messages by email. They have since experienced a significant improvement in email delivery rates and now have the ability to incorporate members’ email based activity into their marketing statistics.
Striata drives effective, personalised and automated communication for loyalty program
Striata created an effective, efficient and personalised automatic communication solution for South Africa’s leading multi-partner rewards programme. They required a high degree of customization and automation in their communications.

Portfolio

Diners Club: Taking the catalogue online
Diners Club promoted its year end travel and product specials to customers with a one-click action to purchase off its web-site using a digital catalogue.
Old Mutual
A registered financial services provider, Old Mutual, also provides medical and health insurance. This campaign encouraged customers to carefully consider the risks of breast cancer, from a health and financial perspective.
FNB Visa
The VISA brand has provided significant support for international sporting events. FNB used this exposure to launch eMarketing campaigns. The focus was viral marketing where flash-based games encouraged the existing database to forward  the communication to their friends.
Makro
As a bulk retailer with a card carrying membership, Makro uses Striata's eMarketing capabilities to communicate its weekly product and liquor specials to its Makro Card holders, in an attempt to increase sales and drive traffic to its website.

Email Marketing

Initial steps in designing an effective eMarketing campaign include incorporating the client Corporate Identity (CI) in all creative material, determining the nature of the campaign and defining the copy of all messages. This design of the content is where the expertise garnered by Striata’s eMarketing department is most effectively applied.

  • Personalised marketing messages
  • Message batches can be scheduled for automatic start, pause, stop and restart.
  • Reporting on bounce codes, transient failures, and permanent errors.
  • Comprehensive tracking
  • Spam checking

Data Management

There are a number of tools used to maintain and update a database.

Data Hygiene
As part of the setup process, Striata passes each email database through its email hygiene tool, correcting common email address and domain errors.

Email campaign – ‘update-your-details'
A targeted email campaign is sent to the database of customers with email addresses.

SMS campaigns
In conjunction with the email campaign, two essential SMS solutions should be used, these are 'Text-4-email campaign' and 'Text-4-bounce campaign'

Customer Profiling

The data housed in List Manager is used to customize communications to the client base, based on their interests and involvement with the company.

List Manager acts as the base for all communications to be triggered, targeted and customized.

  • Profile form (update your details)
  • Subscription form
  • Text-4-bounce
  • Customer Lifecycle Management

Customer Acquisition

Viral marketing can be used as part of a simple email newsletter, as well as part of a larger marketing campaign or competition.
It is recommended that a profile page be provided, so that customers can update their profile before they refer friends, this gives the company the most up-to-date customer information. When customers refer a friend, the email comes from the referrer and not the company, resulting in a higher open and response rate.

Once referred, the friend is asked to fill in their details using the registration page and by doing so, can opt-in to receive future communications, they will then be added to the company’s database.

eSurvey

The solution encourages the customer to complete feedback forms and questionnaires from the web or within an email browser.
  • Surveys can be sent to your client base within an email.
  • Capture responses and provide the results in real-time.
  • Questions should be easy to complete, making use of drop down boxes, radio buttons or check boxes.
  • Snap polls can be used to promote interaction with your customers from within an email newsletter.
  • Results can be shown to each recipient, as soon as they submit their answer.


eRSVP

The eRSVP solution allows for various interactions, including:
  • Initial invite to the event
  • Follow up emails
  • Reminder to attend
  • Post event communications

Mobile Services

Striata has a number of mobile solutions, all designed to enhance marketing efforts:
  • SMS messaging
  • MMS messaging
  • Short-code campaigns
  • Text-4-email
  • Text-4-bounce
  • Text-2-rate

Successful Newsletters

Five important elements that make an email marketing newsletter’s content successful:
  • Know your readers.
  • Establish the goals of your newsletter.
  • Don’t over-communicate.
  • Invite reader comments.
  • Relevance.
Develop a valuable newsletter
  • Create an emotional connection.
  • Read your newsletter aloud.
  • Talk to them in a manner that they will understand.
  • Become important to your reader.
  • Show how helpful you are.
  • Keep relevant, consistent, and relevant!

Triggered Communications

A typical triggered communications cycle could include:
  • A 'welcome on board' email
  • An 'are you happy?' email a few months later
  • A happy birthday email on the customer’s birthday (repeated every year)
  • A ‘why have you been inactive’ email, to try change behavior
  • A 'You have earned bonus points'- type email each year
  • A digital gift voucher and 'are you still happy' survey email after two years
Properly planned and implemented, such a cycle will maintain effective communications with your customers. It demonstrates that their business is valued and helps to establish a customer-supplier environment, which encourages repeat purchases.

Profiling Customer Data

Once you embark on capturing more data about your customers, you should think about the following points:
  1. If you’re not going to use the information – don’t ask for it.
  2. You need to consider ways in which you can enhance the data you already have, and how to phrase the questions.
  3. Remember that your data ages
  4. Validation of answers are important and should always be built into your profiling questionnaire.
  5. Decide what you want from your data and your reports and design your questionnaire to support that.
  6. You should consider capturing your data at every point of interaction

Once you have a list that you can use for your communications, decide what you want to say and what your goals are and match the message back to the appropriate customer segment.

Mobile tips and strategies

There are important “do’s and don’ts” for marketers.

Do:
  • Ensure there is a reply path.
  • Personalize the message.
  • Brand the message.
  • Regularly check replies.
  • Clearly communicate how to unsubscribe.
  • Report any unsolicited commercial messages.
Do not:
  • Send messages exceeding 160 characters.
  • Use sender ID.
  • Send messages from a premium rated short code.
  • Use capital letters.
  • Use SMS “talk” or “speak”.


Assessing Customer Loyalty

The question: "How likely is it that you would recommend us to a friend?" has proved to be the best predictor of customer loyalty across the vast majority of businesses. The NPS is the percentage of customers who identify themselves as promoters of the company, minus the percentage whose response indicates that they are detractors.

Customers can be divided into three categories:
  • The promoters - loyal enthusiasts who buy from the company and urge others to do the same.
  • The passives - satisfied but unenthusiastic customers who could easily be lured by the opposition.
  • The detractors - unhappy customers who feel trapped in a bad relationship.



Your Customer Contact Database

There are outstanding digital communications channels available today, but unless the customer data is accurate and kept current, the chances of an e-marketing campaign fully achieving its objectives are significantly reduced.
Some of the most common mistakes are:
  • Entering names in the wrong fields
  • Including two email addresses in one field
  • Leaving out the area code in a telephone number
  • Adding comments into data fields
Fortunately there are options to automate the data clean-up process. Email address-cleaning tools or email hygiene software can help, as well as tools allowing customers to easily and simply update their profiles online or at other customer touch-points such as during call centre interaction or at point-of-sale, are also most useful.

Avoiding Spam Filters

There are simple steps you can take to avoid having your email being seen as spam:
  • A close relationship with ISPs.
  • Monitor 100% success rate on domain or 100% bounce rate on a certain domain.
  • Send your emails through a spam checking tool.
  • Ensure that the fonts are a standard size and try not to vary the size of fonts within the email.
  • The word unsubscribe is usually picked up as spam, so vary the wording and use ‘de-list’, or ‘to be removed’ as examples.
  • Subject lines should never sound like spam, so stay away from the hard sell and don’t fool recipients into opening the email .
  • Colours in images don’t really matter, but the colours of text and links should be web-safe.
  • Words never to use: Free;Sex;Money;Profit;Special; Girls;Power;Powerful; Discount;Over 18; Your debt.
  • Avoid: $ signs; Exclamation marks!; Currency values; Click here (use visit the site or go online); Go here; A series of symbols or punctuation marks (#*!); Don’t use CAPS; Spelling errors; Grammatical errors.