Case Study: Marketing Platform, SimplyEngage, Integrates Email with a CMS

If you’ve read our blog post on how Selltis, a CRM software company, you’ll know how they used the M-Connect API to make their CRM a full-featured marketing solution and add tremendous value for their existing customers. Today, we’re going to look at another solution built on top of the M-Connect API to make an existing product even better. This time, it’s the local online marketing platform SimplyEngage.

So what is SimplyEngage? According to Founder Ed Vincent, SimplyEngage is a SaaS (software as a service) platform that allows local businesses, franchises, and other multi-unit businesses to have a single sign-on solution to manage marketing initiatives across all of their individual locations and units. So if you want to write a new blog for your Bayside location while simultaneously updating Facebook and Twitter for your White Plains retail store, the service eliminates  the need for remembering multiple passwords and logging in and out of various services.

As a marketing platform, adding email marketing support was not only an obvious choice, but also absolutely essential to providing the best possible experience and functionality for its users. It also fit into their company vision based on the concept that with on single sign on, you can manage all your content in the cloud and send it out to different channels. After building the components to manage blogging, social media, and rich media like audio, video, and images, integrating an email marketing service was the next step.

Vincent says that he went with MarketTraq’s M-Connect™ API for a number of reasons. “We have always experienced very high deliverability with MarketTraq, we found the M-Connect API straightforward and easy to use, MarketTraq has been flexible and ensuring our requirements are met and making adjustments when needed, and the unique ability to create multiple brands within one master account is very helpful.”

One Dashboard To Rule Them All

An absolutely critical consideration for SimplyEngage when choosing an email software partner was whether the ESP would be able to be fully and seamlessly integrate into their existing dashboard. As a single sign-on solution, SE was focused on keeping the user experience when deploying email for different business units as smooth as possible and conforming to their unified SE Dashboard.

In fact, one of the main reasons SimplyEngage chose the MarketTraq Platform is the ease of building in email capability without requiring multiple logins or external webpages and services to use across a client’s multiple locations. With the M-Connect™  API, SimplyEngage users can choose to send out the same email to everyone across their various properties and locations, or send out hyper-segmented emails running off a single e-mail list and broken down by location, as well as countless other enterprise-class features.

Drawing on Experience

Since one of the core features of the SimplyEngage platform is the ability to host and manage large media libraries with their custom CMS, it made sense to build in the ability to pull this content into email creatives. Using the M-Connect™ API allowed Simply Engage to build a system in which blogs, images, videos, and other components can be automatically turned into email creative, either immediately on publishing or at a later time. Using a system of fixed, highly-customizable templates, and M-Connect™, users can set up a blank-slate creative template that is dynamically populated with content as it is added to their SimplyEngage properties.

This is a great feature for users, and operates seamlessly thanks to strong API tie-ins and XML feed integration in MarketTraq which made it effortless to access live content just in time for deployment within emails.

Effectively, the end user doesn’t notice the transition from SimplyEngage to MarketTraq email, and just gets the best functionality of both. For example, a car dealership can write a blog post incorporating photos and videos through the SimplyEngage CMS, and then dynamically feed it into a pre-built email creative with only a couple of clicks, deploying it to their email list at the same time as the content is published online. Total automation through M-Connect makes this process effortless for SimplyEngage, and requires no manual work at all.

All the Bells and Whistles

Besides standard email marketing features, using the M-Connect™ API has given SimplyEngage users access to all the powerful enterprise-level capabilities that MarketTraq comes with. This includes things like M-Triggers, which were introduced to SimplyEngage customers a few months ago and allow dynamic e-mail segmentation and deployments (including transactional emails). It also includes MarketTraq’s best-in-class email analytics package, which provides a simple yet powerful way for businesses to track the effectiveness of their email drops from their SimplyEngage dashboard and integrates with the Google Data API for seamless deep reporting of post-click behaviors — all without leaving MarketTraq.

Even with new features being added regularly, Vincent is already seeing great results.  With the single sign-on solution making email marketing significantly easier than typical SMB email service provides, Vincent says of his customers, “They send more emails and communicate more since they’re always connected.”