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Twelve Horses

Twelve Horses delivers intelligence, automation, and integration in electronic communications. Twelve Horses North America is a national leader of email and Web-based marketing and business automation solutions.

CRM for Communications

Businesses that have relied on stock CRM are modifying their investments with “aftermarket” products and solutions with greater frequency. Why? They desire to enhance and extend their CRM investment beyond its current capabilities. Web services and extensible APIs have allowed businesses to take their CRM platform and integrate alternative solution engines to win the race for intelligence and automation.

Businesses are keenly aware of the utopian version of CRM: perfect management of information and relationships. With a smorgasbord of CRM options, business eyes have typically been bigger than their appetite, and quickly followed by the indigestion that their stock CRM is not always the right solution to win certain races. Their CRM needs modification.

How businesses communicate greatly influences how effective their CRM is at ensuring that the flow of customer-centric information in and out is accurate, relevant, maintainable, and able to be leveraged. Communicating with customers through various channels (call center, email, Web, print, etc.) is the focal point of CRM’s challenge: how to integrate communications channels and optimize the flow of information to meet CRM requirements.

The vast majority of all CRM has done a good job of being focused on communications requirements pertinent to information accuracy and relevancy. When it comes to maintenance, adaptability, and decisions-oriented leveraging, CRM often lingers perpetually one step behind the dynamics of the business. This is not from lack of intent, but purely at the speed of CRM’s ability to react and modify to business’ CRM communications requirements.

When Electronic Communications Count

Twelve Horses has found an excellent fit with business CRM in the area of electronic communications, particularly centered on email and Web-based campaigns, scenario management, dynamic content, dialogue, and process automation.

Many businesses today face significant electronic communications challenges as they pertain to CRM:

• A business that finds its CRM weak on accurate and relevant information about its customers relies increasingly on email and Web-based communications to validate and expand its intelligence with greater efficiency and frequency.
• A business looking to find automation between fax, voice, and email with triggers from call center activities for presentment finds disparate systems unable to centralize the business logic and rules to manage those communications channels.
• A business that desires its CRM to handle the complexities involved with engaging in scenario-driven and automated dialogues with customers finds its CRM incapable of performing the tasks.
• The deliverability requirements for mass email and Web site dependent communications are not core to the business’ CRM. Email service providers (ESP) can deliver the email and the results while successfully navigating the issues of security, privacy, and capacity, but not always leveraging information between the CRM and the ESP effectively.
• External vendor solutions are not always process-oriented and lack automation and integration that CRM requires in order to maintain information with accuracy. Replicating data is a challenge.
• CRM lacks the data analytics to react quickly and modify to today’s needs. The dynamics of electronic communications have become increasingly complex in even a year’s time, leaving a gap between what is required and what the CRM can support.

Essentially, Twelve Horses’ messaging platform and engine address two common questions most businesses are faced with:

• How do we effectively communicate electronically and ensure our CRM is integrated and leveraged?
• How do we assure the information we gain is factored into our accuracy and maintenance?

Who We Are

Twelve Horses provides the applications, infrastructure, and professional services to automate and integrate email and Web-based marketing and business dialogue across multiple systems and channels. Twelve Horses is a full-service ASP for electronic communication and business automation, centering the benefits of CRM, direct marketing, agency services, and email software technology under one roof.

Our Web-based MessageMaker™ platform and suite of applications for email marketing and electronic business communications lives at the core of Twelve Horses’ products and services. Designed as a stand-alone Web-based application with integration in mind, MessageMaker’s API and extensibility allow for it to be integrated with other enterprise applications, such as CRM, SFA, accounting, and other business systems. Additionally, we support direct plug-ins to common desktop PIMs.

For businesses looking to leverage their CRM, MessageMaker is available in a Web services offering both behind and outside the corporate firewall. The MessageMaker application is also integrated as an OEM solution to other enterprise applications for distribution.

Most MessageMaker customers take advantage of Twelve Horses’ strategic, creative, and technical professional services to meet specific project requirements or full-service outsourcing needs.

Finally, we provide data center infrastructure products, such as hosting and co-location, to manage the entire communications chain from concept to execution within a sandbox of high-end security, availability, redundancy, and failover.

More Than Just Electronic Communication With Personalization

Many businesses believe that the ability to add personalization to a campaign is a demonstration of relationship. They believe that by sending more messages a relationship is strengthened. They look for dynamic content, trigger-based dialogues, and eye-popping creative for the solution.

In other words, they look and explore all kinds of avenues for cementing the relationship when they’ve put little to no effort in understanding what their customers want in a relationship. Our advice? Focus on how best to prospect, maintain, and enhance relationships from the starting point, and then match the technology to support those strategies.

Twelve Horses is often the aftermarket solution for businesses that need to incorporate intelligence, relevance, and dialogue to communicate more effectively while leveraging their current CRM or SFA.

Solutions Overview

Twelve Horses helps business communicate electronically to build their customer relationships by using email and other Internet-based communications. We work to identify the stages in your customer relationships, outline the information needed to understand your customers, and then pinpoint what moves them to action. By initiating a dialogue - a two-way conversation - by automatic and scenario-driven triggered messaging, processes that give business insight into customers’ needs and interests can be introduced with maintenance and leverage in mind.

We use MessageMaker to collect and centralize that data and build customer profiles that are reflected and replicated within the CRM. Over time, these profiles grow, giving businesses an increasingly clearer picture of your customer landscape. Business can see who the best customers are, what makes them valuable, and identify the triggers that got them to each stage of the customer lifecycle. That information helps create effective, targeted email, voice, and fax communication programs that are relevant.

What is learned not only deepens existing relationships with “best customers” but also points business to the right leads and reveals how to communicate to them, and can move leads into prospects, prospects into customers, and customers into loyal advocates.

Acquisition

Business needs new customers. Getting them doesn’t have to be difficult but often is when various communications tactics are not cohesive. Acquisition doesn’t have to be expensive, yet acquisition costs are sometimes difficult to ascertain during the efforts. Pursuit of new customers with consistent results that are tied to metrics of success and cost are imperative no matter the complexity.

Twelve Horses’ approach to customer acquisition is focused and methodical. By leveraging CRM knowledge, we find the best prospects, sort communications priorities and, for those that electronic communication makes the best sense, begin fostering electronic relationships. Our communications help our clients learn about their “best customers,” and their profiles help us to find others just like them.

Retention

Nurturing relationships doesn’t mean bombarding customers with irrelevant communication. One size never fits all. To keep good customers you need to build trust - create a dialogue where you send them information they want and, in exchange, they tell you more about who they are, how and why they buy, and often when they wish to be communicated with.

Ultimately, you want to make a personal con­nection with your customers, so that they’re buying with their hearts, not just their wallets. However, adequate communication of selling advantages often gets lost in the dialogue without attention to profiling and leveraging a CRM knowledge base of behavior characteristics. Our customer retention programs build long-term, rewarding relationships. They in-spire loyalty and spur repeat sales.

Enhanced Customer Intelligence

The real value in accumulating customer information is having the ability to extract relevant ­knowledge and act on it. You don’t need the most data. You need the right data. And you need ready access to it to leverage the relevancy into action.

MessageMaker tracks campaign performance, collects customer data, and builds individual profiles. We understand who the customers are, what they’re interested in, how they interact with campaigns, and what needs or characteristics they have.

Our analysts look for trends, identify customer groups, and understand buying behaviors - all the while keeping their eye on the overall goal of getting more value from the customer. Each time we send a campaign, we learn more, and that makes us wiser. Testing with A/B scenarios, dynamic content modification, and strategic feedback loops are the kind of unique customer insights that deliver results.

Return on Investment

Measurement and evaluation have become a ­critical component of any initiative. Email communication can, if done with the aid of appropriate transaction system integration, support that ­component and lend itself particularly well to detailed ROI analysis. Deploying ActiveTrak enables us to provide insight into the effectiveness of email campaigns and enables a marketer to make better ongoing decisions regarding what offers to make to which customers/ prospects in order to optimize results.

Deployment, Tracking, and Reporting

MessageMaker is our precision marketing software platform. It’s a critical part of any work we do, and we use it for everything from collecting information and building individual profiles to asset management and campaign deployment. With MessageMaker, you can:

• Capture customer data from online and offline sources. Centralize the customer information you receive from MessageMaker in one secure location. This information becomes immediately available for marketing action.
• Build customer profiles. Gather technical information, personal information, referral behavior, email addresses, and marketing permissions. Find out what your customers are interested in and whom they’ve referred to your company.
• Get meaning from your data. We use MessageMaker to identify your most valuable customers. We build segmented lists and query collected data based on customer profile information, preferences, purchasing patterns, and demographics. With ActiveTrak we can look at customer behavior once they land on your Web site and initiate communication based on their activities.
• Regularly update your data. MessageMaker allows you to import new customer groups and profiles, add information to existing profiles, or export customer segments. So your customer information is kept current and we can share, update, and transfer data between your database and our systems.