January 10, 2019

We think it’s important for marketers to understand enough about how things work so you can make informed decisions. Enterprise marketing systems are big ticket items, and the consequence of buying the wrong product is to watch it turn into Big Expensive Shelfware that you’re stuck with for several years. That’s why we decided to put together this refreshingly candid — and hopefully entertaining — list of the features we feel sets MarketWide apart from other marketing systems.

How is MarketWide different from other marketing systems?

While there are plenty of cool things we can brag about, we believe the biggest MarketWide advantages are:

• It installs on YOUR network, not ours. That is, unless you ask us to host it for you, in which case we’ll cheerfully accept your money.
• It connects to your existing database – as long as it uses a SQL-based platform like Oracle and SQL Server. Many competitive products are cloud-based, which means you have to reformat and upload your data somewhere before you can access it. Not the case with MarketWide. Leave your data where it is, and let our tool do the work!
• It crunches through transactional data to do its own calculations, rather than making your database administrator precalculate dozens or hundreds of rolled-up data fields.

What’s included with it?

As a robust, full-fledged campaign management system, MarketWide comes with all kinds of stuff, including:

• World Class campaign management with lights-out marketing automation.
• A slick reporting interface — complete with pivot tables and charts — that lets you design polished business intelligence reports and publish them as interactive web pages.
• Features for building & running Ad-Hoc queries and exporting data.
• Administrative tools for building custom objects such as functions, custom queries, and expressions; setting user permissions,
  and adding metadata like picklists and field descriptions.

Additional Plug-Ins include:

• MarketWide Email – real-time email deployment (both transactional and promotional) that integrates directly with your database, along with associated features for tracking opens, clicks, and bounces, HTML editing, and a comprehensive suite of performance reports.
• WebTrak – a component that tracks visitors to your website and automatically captures activity into your database. When combined with MarketWide Email, WebTrak lets you “close the loop” in tracking email conversions.

Will MarketWide work with my database?

If your database is in Oracle or SQL Server… yes. But the $64K question is, how WELL will MarketWide work with your database? Assuming you haven’t gone hog wild and created a gazillion different tables, it should work just fine. But if you have created a gazillion tables, shame on you; you’ll need to delete a few zillion or MarketWide will not be happy.

That said, MarketWide does have one requirement: each person in your database has to have a customer number or ID assigned, and this ID needs to exist in every table that contains customer data. (OK, so technically that’s two requirements.)

One last thing: scalability. MarketWide can run huge campaigns against tons of data. We’ve seen clients build campaigns with over 3,000 segments, and MarketWide has crunched through hundreds of millions of records.

What channels does it support?

MarketWide supports all the traditional direct marketing channels – including catalog, direct mail, telemarketing, and email. It also supports text messaging and Facebook custom audiences. And before you ask, MarketWide keeps a record of everyone it touches in a robust promotion history database, complete with the solicit timestamp, channel, and offer details. This feature — coupled with MarketWide’s report designer — lets you create professional-looking response reports that can be refreshed in real time, and publish them online.

What are the steps to get it up and running?

The first thing is to sign our license and fork over some money! After that you’ll need a database. MarketWide without a database is like a Television with no input signal: it works fine, but it has nothing to do. Further, your database has to be either Oracle or SQL Server.

But – once you have a database, the rest is a snap! The three main steps are:

• We install and configure the software (1 day)
• We conduct end user training (2 days)
• You start marketing (the rest of eternity)

Have no worries; we’re not going to abandon you after training. Our crackerjack support team will be standing by to field your questions via telephone and email between 9am and 5pm ET. For especially tricky issues, we might even fire up a remote desktop session and take over the mouse or watch while you drive, but either way we’ll keep you up and running.

What does it NOT do that I might need?

As great as we think MarketWide is, there are a few things it won’t do:

• It can’t fix bad data or perform address hygiene – that’s your job, or whoever manages your database.
• It doesn’t tell you WHO to market to; it assumes you know this, and it gives you all the features you need to do it.
• It doesn’t make coffee!

What does MarketWide cost, and what’s my ROI?

That depends; how much money do you have? But seriously, MarketWide fees are based on a few factors:

• Agency vs. End User licensing
• Deployed vs. Cloud installation
• Database size – as measured by the number of contacts (customers and prospects)
• Number of MarketWide end users

As an example, if you’re a direct end user (i.e., not an agency), you want us to install on your network (deployed installation), your database has less than two million contacts, and you have three end users; your license fees are $10,000 for the installation and training, then $3,500 per month. This includes unlimited support and all product upgrades. Our Agency pricing works differently, so if you’re a marketing service provider, give us a call.

Regarding ROI, there’s a few ways to look at it. First, if you’re running – or trying to run – campaigns by hand using manual SQL, and you run 2-3 campaigns per week, you probably have a dedicated SQL programmer doing nothing but this. MarketWide makes all that go away. Plus, it’ll give you capabilities you haven’t had before – such as support for unlimited test/control groups, “Nth” selects, max per site, branches, waits, and excludes; not to mention complete campaign automation.

You’ll also be able to set up automated “trigger” campaigns that run as often as you like. “Thank you and welcome” campaigns for new buyers or donors, “Holy Cow you are awesome” campaigns for big ticket buyers, “Why don’t you love us anymore” campaigns for lapsed customers, and so on. Just set these jobs up once and run them forever. MarketWide lets you do things you can’t do now, and it’s hard to place a dollar sign on that.

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Not convinced yet? Click Here and let us show you!