It’s probably hard to find anyone with media jobs in online advertising agencies enthusing about e‑mail ad campaigns these days; from the art director to the account manager, most consider the time and effort involved in designing, implementing and measuring email campaigns too cumbersome. But New York startup Movable Ink is determined to change all that with a nifty new platform called “agileEMAIL.”
A new solution for a “broken” art
Movable Ink’s co-founder and CEO, Vivek Sharma, concedes that email marketing in its usual form is “broken”, with too much time spent on tedious tasks and too little on being creative. No art director relishes that kind of work and consumers tend to be decidedly underwhelmed by most of the promotional material that ends up in their inboxes.
But since its launch in 2010, Movable Ink has been cleverly breathing new life into email marketing with technology that enables updatable real-time content that continues to “live” after the “Send” button has been actioned. So far, its approach has been to offer a “piecemeal solution”, says Sharma, but the new agileEMAIL platform will provide “a broader view.”
Not only will the new technology allow companies to go on embedding live and personalized content into their email ads as before, they can now analyze the results of the campaigns they’ve created using agileEMAIL. Email ads can be made faster and the content can be honed to be more up-to-date and targeted, too.
Faster, smarter, more targeted
Amongst the several new modules on the platform is a “Workflow” unit that, Movable Ink claims, can import a design and convert it into a HTML template “in minutes.” An Insights module provides data not only on how many people opened the email and clicked but on cross-channel conversion rates, too, while the new Action module tests different emails and then uses parameters like type of device and location to target them more deftly.
Any email deployment service can be integrated with agileEMAIL (launch partners currently using the platform include Time Inc., RadioShack and Finish Line). Sharma says that Moveable Ink is steadily dispensing with lousy cookie-cutter campaigns. As he puts it:
“We think there’s an opportunity to create a magical experience for the inbox. Marketers don’t have an excuse to be lazy anymore.”