V12 Launchpad Combines Prospect Database with Outbound Campaigns

V12 Group got its start in 2002 by appending demographic, behavioral, and other data to email lists. Since then, the company has added tools to help marketers make better use of this data, culminating in 2012 with Launchpad, which combined email and postal prospect lists, delivery services, display ads, and response analysis. This year V12 further expanded Launchpad by adding the ability to import and enhance clients’ own customer lists. It's still far from a complete marketing automation system: there are no multi-step workflows, event triggers, recurring campaigns, behavior tracking, CRM synchronization, touchpoint integration, or transaction database. But Launchpad does provide a way to assemble audiences and execute outbound promotions, placing it somewhere between simple email systems like Constant Contact and full-scale marketing automation products.

The core of Launchpad is its list selection interface. This is used to select names from V12’s master database of 208 million postal addresses, 80 million email addresses, and 150 million Web browser cookies; to segment previously purchased names; to retarget email responders and Web site visitors; and to select from the client’s own uploaded lists. Geographic selections begin with a U.S. state map but can also be based on Zip code, political boundaries, distance from a specified point, or user-drawn polygons. They can be further narrowed by demographics, behaviors, auto ownership, and other attributes. Users can also get lists of prospects similar to their uploaded customers, based on a system-generated predictive model. Audience counts are updated in seconds as users adjust their selections. If the audience is larger than desired, the user can specify a quantity and the system will automatically extract a random sample of that size.  Users can also apply suppression lists, exclude previously selected names, and specify whether the system returns all individuals, one name per household, or one name per postal address.

For email campaigns, the system also lets users create emails based on templates, from uploaded HTML, or from scratch using a graphical page builder. Users can send test emails and include seed names. There is no built-in split test capability, although this is planned for future release. Today, users can copy an existing campaign as the foundation for a test version, but they would need to suppress the original audience as part of the list specification. Users can also deploy a standard, V12-hosted form to capture responses. Once a campaign is built, users can save it to a shopping cart where V12 shows the cost. V12 manually reviews each campaign to ensure it complies with spam regulations and other requirements. V12 sends the emails from its own domain. It will not provide actual email addresses on purchased names but does provide postal addresses on purchased names and on email responders. The company is adding integration with post card mailers.

Launchpad supports mobile marketing through mobile-friendly emails, mobile landing pages to capture user permissions, and text messages send to names where the client has received direct (first party) permission. Display advertising is handled through integration with MediaMath’s TerminalOne advertising system, which includes the V12 cookie pool as an audience option: users can select audience segments based on the V12 cookies, but cannot target specific individuals directly. Users can also set campaign and daily budgets, CPM targets, frequency caps, start and end dates, ad sources, inventory types, and geographic targets. Retargeting can be done through email lists or ad pixels. The CRM option lets clients upload their own customer lists, including custom fields, but doesn’t offer any type of contact management or associated data tables. Social media posting and listening is under development.

Reports include campaign quantities and responses, allow users to drill down to individual responders, and can calculate a simple Return on Investment based on actual costs and user-provided assumptions for response value.

Launchpad is offered directly to marketers but is sold largely through resellers including MasterCard, US Bank, SwissRe, Gannett, and YP Direct. Those firms offer the system to their own clients as a service. Direct pricing starts at $50 per month for a bundle including 1,000 emails to V12-provided prospects. Users can also purchase individual services such as data enhancements, prospect names, or customer record storage on a cost per thousand basis. The client base is ramping up quickly through the reseller channel: it is currently around 260 and expected to reach 1,000 by end of 2014 and projected to 5,000 by end of 2015. Most clients are small to mid-size B2C marketers ($1 million to $100 million revenue) although there are some B2B and larger B2C firms.

Mintigo InterestBase Harvests Web and Social Data for Marketing and Sales

Every marketer recognizes that the Web and social media could be rich sources of information about customers and prospects. But harvesting that data has been frustratingly difficult.  Doing it yourself  takes multiple tools to gather different kinds of information, and then patching the result together into personal profiles. Most tools do little more than keyword searches, which only capture a fraction of the potential information and only cover keywords that marketers know in advance are important.

More advanced technology does exist. Semantic engines can extract information such as executive changes and product announcements from press releases and social media profiles. Sentiment analysis can (with limited reliability) detect the attitudes that individuals express. Identity aggregators can link email, social media, and other addresses for the same individual. Predictive models can show how different attributes correlate with targeted behaviors such as purchasing a product.

Few marketers have the skill or resources to pull all these tools together for themselves. Vendors are another matter: there’s inherent scale economy to scanning the Web and social media once and applying the results to many different clients. I recently wrote about Lattice Engines,  which has assembled these pieces to create prospect lists. Infer starts with your own customer data, enhances it with information mined from the Web, and generates predictive scores.

Mintigo has also been mining Web and social data to build prospect lists, starting in 2011. This week it announced a new platform, InterestBase, that gives clients an interface to define target groups, analyze group members’ interests, push prospect lists to marketing automation and CRM systems, and enhance individual lead records.

The foundation of InterestBase is a central repository of 30 million names and 3 million companies (and growing), built by scanning Web sites and social media for job postings, product and technology names, group memberships, accounts followed, hashtags, Javascript calls, and other information. The system uses this data to assign individuals and companies such attributes as job title, company size, technologies used, hiring plans, and interest scores for products and topics. Marketers can use titles and other attributes to define their own target groups, called personas.

Lists containing members of a persona can be assigned to marketing campaigns and sent to external marketing automation or CRM systems for execution. Connectors are currently available for Marketo and Salesforce.com, with an Eloqua connector due soon. A campaign list can include the entire persona universe or a quantity specified by the user. Once the campaign is run, responders are loaded back into Mintigo and the system will identify attributes that distinguish them from non-responders.

Clients can also upload their own lists of customers or campaign respondents.  Mintigo will determine which attributes correlate with group membership, display the most important ones in reports, and use the findings in predictive models that score the entire database on likelihood of purchase or response. Clients can also upload other lists for Mintigo to enhance with its own information. This enhanced data can be used in lead scoring or to help guide salespeople.  External systems like Web sites can also accessed the data in real time via API calls.

The features are interesting, but what really matters about Mintigo is the data: fresh, powerful, and unique information about a large share of the business universe. Richer information lets Mintigo clients identify new prospects they’d otherwise miss, distinguish strong prospects from weak ones, and target messages to each prospect’s interests. The result is substantially more effective marketing and sales operations, finally letting marketers use data the Web has so tantalizingly exposed.

In case you're wondering, I do consider Mintigo a Customer Data Platform: it assembles a persistent customer database, uses predictive models to classify the members, and makes the data available to external systems for marketing execution.  

Pricing for InterestBase is based on the number of names in the client’s prospect pool, based on automated analysis of their actual customers. An average client starts around $3,000 per month.