|
- Business Focus: Online marketing
- In Brief: Offering online tools for e-mail communication, surveys, collaboration, and event planning, privately held Elliance has increased its sales by 50% over the past three years.
- Location: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
- Employees: 21
- CEO: Abu Noaman
- Cisco Products: Cisco Catalyst switches, Cisco routers
|
In today's business, intuition is no longer enough. Marketing departments are faced with two contrary pressures: "Sales, marketing, and customer service are understaffed and underbudgeted, but expectations are extremely high," says Abu Noaman, Elliance CEO, who specialized in marketing when he earned his MBA from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). "To serve customers best, you have to let the numbers do the talking, as opposed to someone's intuition."
Numbers are frequently the only way to give a quantitatively driven CEO a higher comfort level. And that's what Elliance strives to do. "Marketing doesn't have to be fuzzy, even though that's the way people [are used to thinking] about it," Noaman says. "It should be fact based, and you can find data points that indicate the direction in which a business is moving." Those data points come together to create metrics, which can then be analyzed.
The online-marketing firm offers four hosted applications (soon to be more) and provides analysis to help marketing executives be more effective with their marketing dollars by focusing their resources on the most promising efforts.
Though other vendors may offer applications that duplicate what Elliance does, it's rare to find all the capabilities linked in a single application, much less priced and targeted for the midmarket. And not only do Elliance tools help its customers serve their own customers, but Elliance also uses its own tools to be more responsive to clients.
While Elliance has enterprise customers such as Cisco Systems and Waterpik, many of its customers are small entities. These customers are using Elliance online tools to enhance their marketing effectiveness.
ennectMail: E-mail Notification
The marketing department of Noaman's alma mater, CMU, employs fewer than a dozen people, but maintains relationships with some 90,000 students, parents, alumni, and supporters. To promote an online version of CMU’s magazine, Elliance helped the university build an e-mail notification system based on Elliance ennectMail, which hyperlinks to all the articles online. As a result, CMU can quantitatively track how many people open the e-mail (at a cost of only 5 cents per e-mail), how many of those people click through to an article, and which recipients do so month after month. "They suddenly knew who was deeply engaged and who was mildly engaged," Noaman says. "You want to increase the participation of the deeply engaged and figure out how to move up the mildly engaged."
ennectShare: Web-based Collaboration
The Branding Group, a small Pittsburgh-based consulting firm, serves its clients with a team of marketing and design professionals spread across the city. ennectShare gives The Branding Group's team a Web-based collaboration tool in the form of a secure Web workspace where they can interact and share documents, as well as keep track of decisions and milestones. "It allows marketing groups to share digital assets and spark collaboration within the group itself, and with its stakeholders," Noaman says.
ennectSurvey: Survey Tool
CollegeProwler.com, a start-up that publishes university guides written from the students' point of view, had a basic marketing problem: finding new customers. Because customers tended to be college applicants, there was little potential for repeat business. The company used ennectSurvey to learn whether customers would recommend the information CollegeProwler.com provided. "Within 48 hours, they determined that 80% of their customers would recommend their service," says Noaman, "but they were also able to identify the percentage that wouldn't, and then survey them further to learn why." The cost was about 10 cents per response, according to Noaman, instead of $25,000 for a market-research study.
ennectEvent: Event Planning and Management
Another Pittsburgh-based firm, Tele-Tracking Technologies, which makes workflow software for hospitals, wanted to organize a user conference for its 700 customers. Three of its employees used ennectEvent to manage communications and information about the conference, sending invitations by e-mail, and tracking responses. According to Noaman, it took only a few hundred dollars and a few hours to set up a Website for the event-something that used to take weeks. When Tele-Tracking's Director of Marketing Christopher Anderson was asked why he liked the software, he replied, "It makes us look sharper and smarter."
With its applications priced for midmarket budgets, Elliance has found that asking for less in dollars and providing more in quantitative analysis is a sure path to success.
Back to Top
