"Xerago was asked to consult and provide recommendations toward streamlining of the email marketing process. Xerago analysed the current email marketing infrastructure and identified the following… The client was using Talisma, an in-house tool for email campaigns. The tool was severely limited in its capabilities vis a vis personalization, bulk emails, multi-wave campaigns and reporting.The email marketing practice was distributed across several stakeholders in various teams such as Product, Marketing and IT
Xerago realized in order for the Bank to achieve their goal of a streamlined email marketing practice a complete overhaul of the email campaign infrastructure was required rather than a simple switchover to a next level solution. To enable this, the has Bank procured the following IBM products.
Marketing Automation
Campaign
eMessage
In addition to it, the bank sought Xerago’s expertise in the implementation and integration of the same. The client had a unique, hybrid system architecture utilizing Linux and Windows flavours (Linux v6.3 and Microsoft Windows 2012 server). As per the clients request Xerago implemented IBM Campaign web server and the analytical servers on the Linux server and the application databases IBM Marketing Platform, Campaign and Marketing Operations on an instance of Microsoft SQL 2012 on the Windows systems. However due to completely different systems in play, no native connectivity solution between the Linux and SQL server was available. Instead Xerago formulated a completely customized open source Microsoft ODBC driver with Unix ODBC manager to connect the application and the database. Xerago also resolved connectivity issues that arose between IBM eMessage and Bluecoat’s SOCKS5 proxy by creating an IP driven bridge solution between the IBM hosted service and the Bluecoat server. Xerago also configured the client’s existing Cognos Business Intelligence system’s security and reporting parameters to work in conjunction with the newly implemented Enterprise Marketing Management suite. Xerago also integrated the bank’s suppression lists with IBM Campaign to avoid customer grievance. As part of the go-live process, Xerago helped the bank’s internal teams get to grips with the IBM solution. Xerago conducted training sessions to help the clients understand the wide range of capabilities of the solution and acquire hands on experience with the same. Two different teams were trained in the technical (database query building, adding/creating tables etc.) and marketing (eMail document design & personalization) aspects respectively. "
