MailTalk

Denmarks premium online poker site, has 140.000 players – and communication
is constant. Weekly newsletters in 11 languages, daily individual emails, winner mails, and various offers and campaigns for different segments. All contact addresses are validated, as new people join, and some leave – everything is managed with MailTalk™.

Sindy Rheaume, consultant at Mermaidpoker, says: MailTalk™ was already up and running, when I joined the company – the main reason that our managing director Pierre Andersen chose MailTalk was functionality and ownership at an extremely reasonable price. The installation on our own server, no email send-out charge, and a total and low setup price made it a very sensible choice.

Another deal maker was the presence of MailTalk in the country where we operate – access to the CTO whenever we had new ideas for managing our digital dialogue. I have a comprehensive e-mail marketing background, and have even worked for several MailTalk™ competitors, so naturally I point out challenges, come up with ideas and suggestions for how I want to run the communication processes. And it’s been really great to have someone pick up the phone immediately, listening with interest and acting on my input. Much more like teamwork than a formal customer/vendor relationship – and that’s how I like to cooperate.

Mermaidpoker has app. 140.000 contacts in our poker system and in Excel. These contacts are updated and validated weekly in MailTalk™, and a lot of digital dialogue takes place. I manage weekly newsletters in 11 languages, and continual individual communication such as winner e-mails and sign-up emails in addition to offers and campaigns for various, changing segments. Everything using MailTalk™. Mermaidpoker is now merging with the very big British site PokerHeaven, and we will continue to use MailTalk™ for some of our future digital dialogue tasks. 140.000 poker players, on-going dialogue, in 11 languages – managed with MailTalk™.

Implementing a completely new ERP system, we had to look for a new campaign system which could integrate with Maconomy. MailTalk™ stood out for two main reasons. One was pricing – we send many mails each month, and this amount increases constantly. All other campaign solutions charge a click-price or a mail fee. Once MailTalk™ is integrated, it’s ours. We can send huge amounts of mails at no further cost. The other reason was integration. It was very simple to integrate MailTalk™ with our back-end systems. MailTalk™ is constructed professionally.

I have a background as a programmer myself, and I value the simple and elegant IT architecture and the little delectable details. They are usually difficult to achieve – and they ensure a smooth execution. We have +30.000 contacts in our database and MailTalk™ automatically keeps them validated and continuously updated.

Before, with our former solution, 5% of any mailing would be returned, and we’d know that 1000-1500 contacts weren’t usable any longer. But not which addresses! MailTalk™ sifts away the invalid addresses and reduces our personal update task. With the updated contacts, we use MailTalk™ to handle all online communication with customers and leads. Content is generated in our CMS, pasted to a mail in MailTalk™, and all segmentation, mailing and evaluation is handled superbly by MailTalk. We really know what works with whom. Our emails are tracked, and we can see exactly which clicks end up in actual sales. We’ve integrated with Google Analytics to monitor any generated traffic on the web site – and we simply know more and more about how our contacts behave.

Apart from the fact that I’m happy with the solution and its capabilities, I’ve experienced an exemplary cooperation from MailTalk. Any challenge, any update issue is immediately remedied and I have never ever been out of action. An additional plus is I’ve also never been skinned, when the invoices arrive…

”Ours is a large communication task – we need to communicate frequently, segmented and thoroughly to several segments, particularly 2 major groups: every interested citizen and every interested healthcare professional, such as general practitioners. Until now, for a number of reasons we have solely used printed newsletters to distribute knowledge of new opportunities. This has been expensive, layout fees and postal fees, and slow and delayed because of the production time. Additionally, it has in every manner appeared old- fashioned, particularly so, because we are digital pioneers. As we were rebuilding our portal, we therefore checked the market meticulously to find a system for digital dialogue and electronic newsletters able to handle all involved parties. At the same time we needed a concept where our cooperation with the regions fit in. The regions abound with very proactive people, who – on behalf of the region – communicate to their general practitioners.

Just like us, they needed to sort and segment news as well as target groups, and they needed to be able to reuse materials and texts for other purposes. Some still used printed news. Others had invested in their own systems and local modules – which had offered a lot of hassle and struggles with set-ups and daily use. 3 out of 5 regions were eager to cooperate about a joint system.

We chose MailTalk™ for the job, and it has been well received. The regions – with fresh recollections of unfortunate incidents with their other mailing systems – were gratified that they could simply import master data from Excel to MailTalk™. The guys from MailTalk™ have really listened to us. Help has been quick, and they have developed and updated continuously to meet precisely our challenges. The process has been extremely positive and MailTalk™ offers a wealth of possibilities. I can’t recall anything we needed, that this system couldn’t deliver. As of yet, we actually only use a small corner of the available functionality: we manage and administrate distributions, we manage and segment via folders and distribution lists, we handle our contacts to target information accurately – and we let the recipients manage which information they choose to receive. Furthermore, we can segment by professional groups. General practitioners form one group, but there are many other healthcare professionals, and we’ve offered information to e.g. physiotherapists, chiropodists, chiropractors, dentists and pharmacists.

Of course we have a task at hand informing every-one that future communication will be digital – and we’ve initiated this dialogue with information on paper and on trade association web sites. Already we’ve received subscriptions from citizens in particular, but also from the various groups of healthcare professionals. We keep an eye on the subscriptions to adapt our resources to meet user needs. We expect to send our first digital news by February 2012.”

”A couple of years ago we were building a new web site, and handling newsletters was part of the specification requirements. Not just sending newsletters, but managing subscribers, ensuring the contact validity, segmenting recipients right down to individuals, managing different issue frequencies and monitoring detailed statistics. We want to know who opens a given newsletter, what the recipient clicks on, and track how far the recipient moves about on our web site etc.

We chose MailTalk and it has run impeccably for 2 years come March 2012. We actually only talk to MailTalk if we have technical problems. Which is very rare. But on those few occasions they have been quick and precise with guidance and help. We have 2 types of newsletters: we issue more than 35 editorial newsletters from aarhus.dk and our sub sites, e.g. Children’s Culture House, Business Aarhus etc. The organizations behind the sub sites assemble their own newsletters and send them out using our CMS. And the newsletter distribution engine is MailTalk. Many of this type of newsletter have more than 1000 subscribers.

And then we also offer the completely individual news communication, where each of our app. 300.000 citizens can checkmark the subjects they have an interest in. Summaries and abstracts from council meetings, agendas from specific committees, culture, societies, information from Municipal Authorities, technology and environment, traffic plans – there are many options.

Fortunately, it is easy for the editors to define the pages that are issued in each type of subscription. They simply checkmark the included pages. Every night, MailTalk runs an automated process which combines the personalized newsletters – offering our citizens individual dialogue every day. These newsletters actually only have 1 subscriber each. On the other hand, each of those citizens finds the information completely relevant and targeted. This allows us to offer our citizens a very high level of detail – and we have the option of promoting areas of particular importance to certain segments.”