Got the Less-than-Perfect Profit Blues?
By Larry Zusman, worldwide marketing manager, XMPie, A Xerox Company
The Cleveland House of Blues is a very cool venue for a presentation. That goes without saying. But when you add a room full of attendees at a ‘Lunch ‘N Learn’ that are hungry for the keys to success in cross-media marketing, you have just the right harmony for a successful event.
Yesterday, I had the privilege of meeting and speaking with some of our prospects and customers in the Cleveland Ohio area. It was an eclectic bunch to say the least. There were commercial printers, digital printers, creatives, in-plant managers and marketing professionals — pretty much the entire spectrum of the industry.
The subject of the day was “25 Ways in 25 Minutes to Make Money with Cross-Media Services.” The purpose of the event was to educate attendees on the critical success factors in starting and maintaining a value-added-based business consisting of variable data digital print and cross-media marketing services. On the corporate marketing and in-plant side, the approach was to provide insight into what they can now do in the guise of fully-integrated cross-media campaigns. The topics spanned a wide variety of strategies and technologies that can add more revenue and profit to enterprises and the providers who service them. Subjects included integrated cross-media marketing, mobile marketing, PURLS and RURLS, social media, QR codes, tracking/analytics, and email marketing with image personalization.
What got everyone’s attention was when I showed them the latest technology from XMPie in video personalization. They were excited about the opportunity to use Adobe After Effects with the XMPie solution and create cinematic-quality movies. One customer wanted to know how difficult it was to create the videos if you knew After Effects at a basic level. When they found out it as simple as connecting the variable data to the content using a simple XMPie software plug-in, they were ready to jump right in!
With the interest level of the attendees, it is clear that cross-media marketing, and the services associated with it, will continue to be a hot topic in the coming year. For providers who are looking for growth in 2012 with these offerings, it is the perfect time to evaluate the right solution for your business, implement it across your organization, and assemble the best team to deliver it.
I leave you with my one regret on this event. I really should have worn my John Belushi Blues Brother’s black suit with the super thin tie. But thinking twice on this, it never would have fit anyway.
XMPie is ExactTarget’s “2010 Embedded Partner of the Year”
Filed under: Awards, Cross Media, E-mail, Events, General
By Ranen Goren, VP, Cross-Media Products & Enterprise Solutions, XMPie
ExactTarget, which has been an XMPie partner for the last three years powering the e-mail technology behind the XMPie e-Mail Service, recently presented XMPie with the “2010 Embedded Partner of the Year” Grand Prize Award!
This is an important milestone for the partnership between XMPie and ExactTarget because it shows that interactive marketing experts acknowledge the power of the integrated e-mail service, as provided by ExactTarget, within a complete cross-media solution, as provided by XMPie.
Here’s what the judging committee had to say about the XMPie solution.
XMPie’s embedded ExactTarget offering…
1. Provides seamless integration as part of software and services offering;
2. Enables clients to offer sophisticated use of e-mail;
3. Includes advanced personalization; and
4. Delivers a strong feature set and superior deliverability.
For example, the XMPie e-mail below includes a personalized image, greeting and URL, which are sophisticated features that have proven to increase response rates for us and our customers. XMPie makes it possible to do all of this, with the superior deliverability and tracking of ExactTarget, in one single software package that integrates print, e-mail, Web and SMS together into real cross-media campaigns.
Receiving the ExactTarget award was exciting and timely. Just the day before, I presented XMPie’s latest e-mail features of our one-to-one cross-media solution, PersonalEffect 5.0, at the XMPie Users Group Conference in Orlando, Fla. With the wealth of new features and improvements, together with the new lower pricing options offered by the XMPie e-Mail Service, we had a lot of great news to deliver.
For our customers who are not using the XMPie e-Mail Service, I believe the best news for you is that we now provide a free trial option that allows you to evaluate it very easily and for free, with no commitment at all. With this new option, every XMPie customer 
with the cross-media edition would benefit from checking out our much improved – and affordable – e-mail options.
We were a bit surprised and delighted to see that almost everyone in the audience that came to the e-mail session at the Users Group Conference is already using e-mail in their campaigns. This was a big improvement from previous years when we saw only 30 to 50% using e-mail. It shows again that e-mail has become more than just a “nice-to-have,” but rather a critical ingredient in the cross-media mix.