Data-Mail, Inc. is one of the nation's largest direct marketing service providers, and focuses on meeting the needs of Fortune 500 companies including some of the largest US financial institutions. The largest retail bank in North America leverages Data-Mail to design and execute complex cross media upsell programs including direct mail and email communications. The objective of these programs is to capitalize on the flexibility of electronic communications to cost effectively deliver regular and highly personalized offers to an audience of approximately 7 million Individuals.

With personalization variables in the hundreds, the task of building a large (and growing) number of content rules using conventional tools and processes results in rampant costs and increasing difficulties in meeting deadlines. In addition, the challenges associated with auditing tens of thousands of versions was a significant and growing concern as any error in content not only impact the customer experience, it jeopardizes the banks regulatory compliance status. Getting it done right and getting it done quickly is critical to the success of the program. Because of the client's production schedule the entire process from data upload to delivery must be completed within five days. The email version of the customer communication must be delivered in under 48 hours in order to comply with the Bank's CAN-SPAM policy. The current process took eight to ten days, which was more than three days over the required schedule. Even with the Data-Mail team working at capacity, the existing vendor limitations and resulting processes required far too many resources, manual intervention, and work-arounds to guarantee quality.

The first step in the solution was to use Conversen's proprietary software to cut data upload time by 70%. Independent modules process high volumes of data separately, reducing bottlenecks and improving overall performance in ways that were never before possible.

Step two of the process involved using dynamic content rules in the Conversen platform to render the Personalization variables of each communication. Leveraging a drag and drop user interface the production time to build these rules was greatly reduced. Once created the business used are re-usable, and redeployed in future communications thus saving additional time and resources by cutting down on the need to do the same tasks repeatedly for each version.

Email Deliverability is improved by using Conversen's proprietary Campaign Send Algorithm, which utilizes information about the recipient, their previous responses and their ISP (EX: Yahoo!) to ensure delivery within the specified time frame.

By using the Conversen platform, Data-Mail dramatically reduced the amount of time they spend on sending out customer communications and increased overall customer satisfaction. What once took eight to ten days now happens in less than four days. Data-Mail's setup time is much quicker and easier and subsequent communications can be effortlessly duplicated since many components can be reused.