Tikit touts cleaner, easier to use version of email marketing software

UK News

11
May
2015

Jonathan Watson

Jonathan Watson attended the exclusive UK event to celebrate the launch of Tikit eMarketing v6, the latest version of the software that helps law firms manage their email communications. The latest version of Tikit eMarketing is so straightforward that people in the marketing department can easily use it themselves, without having to rely on the IT department, according to the three company executives who presented it at Linklaters’ London office last week.

The three musketeers (as opposed to marketeers) on hand to give us the lowdown were director of managed services Simon Elven, development director Mark Garnish and eMarketing product manager Jeff Hemming.

The main aim for Tikit eMarketing v6, said Garnish, was to make it thin, very easy to deploy and very easy to set up. He was keen to stress that this version is a major step forward; v6 is ‘completely and utterly different’ from previous releases, making it almost a ‘complete new product’.

Those who use it will no longer have to worry about specialist terms like eMerge or ReAction Server (I am always wary of products whose names have capital letters in unexpected places). Getting rid of that kind of language ‘is a big change – and one that should make it much easier for us to appeal to new users,’ added Hemming.

No longer will users have different applications sitting on the desktop; from now on, all they will have to do is go to a URL they’ve been given, log in, and everything they need to work with should be there in one central location. ‘All in one place’ is the phrase that encapsulates what Tikit are trying to achieve, said Hemming.

The new interface for creating a new email message, for example, looks nothing like eMerge. People can drag and drop the elements they want into their messages, configuring them without having to worry about HTML. Hemming showed the audience how this was done. Garnish said the key aim was to make email marketing totally accessible, enabling anyone in the marketing team to quickly and easily create and send email messages.

Hemming said configuration used to be considered something of a ‘dark art’, but as the package is now in plain language, it is all much simpler. There is no longer any need to use an EBF configuration tool, for example. And with complete control over colours, styles and logos, emails can be customised easily to fit the user’s visual environment.

So what happens next? Can marketeers blast away emails to their heart’s content? They can if they want to alienate their audience completely – but with the reports and analytics available in eMarketing v6, this is highly unlikely as it should be easy to weed out anyone who is getting too many emails. Hemming related a horror story from a firm that found one unfortunate soul was getting more than 600 messages a year. That is more than 50 a month and more than 10 a week. ‘When you look at that, it’s hardly surprising that person is not engaging with you,’ he said.

Marketeers will be able to take a detailed look at individual users, check what they are doing with each email and the platforms they are using to access it – which device they are using, which browser, which email client and so on. This helps to provide valuable feedback about levels of engagement, making it easier for the marketing department to understand what the recipients are interested in and to tailor their messages accordingly (Tikit cites research from Annuitas Group claiming that leads who receive targeted content produce a 20 per cent increase in sales opportunities). 

One of the other key benefits emphasised by Elven, Garnish and Hemming (a great name for a law firm if they ever decide to start one) was cost predictability. Tikit clients will not be charged on a ‘pay per send basis’ – they will be able to send as many or as few emails as their strategy dictates.

In the Q&A session afterwards, some Tikit users indicated that they had not even made it onto v5 of eMarketing yet, so it could take a while before they are ready to go with v6. Hopefully, Tikit’s enthusiastic presentation of its new service has convinced them that the upgrade will be worth the effort.