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Innovative Digital Marketing in the Cloud

Technology

With innovative offerings ranging from self-service campaign management and email to fully managed customer engagement and loyalty programs, ClickSquared’s pioneering Cross-Channel Marketing Hub enables marketers to orchestrate and deliver analytics-driven, relevant and personalized customer communications across email, direct mail, social, survey, mobile and web channels.

The Client

Boston-based ClickSquared is a global provider of cross-channel cloud marketing software and services.

The Challenge

With innovative offerings ranging from self-service campaign management and email to fully managed customer engagement and loyalty programs, ClickSquared’s pioneering Cross-Channel Marketing Hub enables marketers to orchestrate and deliver analytics-driven, relevant and personalized customer communications across email, direct mail, social, survey, mobile and web channels.

An effective marketing campaign management system needs to have the ability to identify and select target audiences; assign correct offers/treatments; define attributes for personalization; perform elementary analytics; execute, track and report each campaign; manage customer contact history; and finally, develop business rules — all without the need for programming.

Moreover, a successful platform will need to have an extremely easy to use and intuitive interface geared towards non-technical marketing professionals to facilitate adoption and ensure a short learning curve. The new generation of ClickSquared’s pioneering cross-channel cloud solution christened “The Hub” incorporates all these features in a winning combination.

In order to bring The Hub to market in the desired timeframe, ClickSquared realized they needed to quickly expand the R&D team with a provider that had a deep understanding of the subject matter. First Line was selected as
 ClickSquared’s development partner.

First Line's Solution

First Line’s the US-based development team was responsible for the implementation of some of the key components of the core platform. The new solution incorporates the following functionality:

  • Better customer insight through consolidation of all customer data into a single, multi-dimensional marketing data mart
  • Cross-channel orchestration (i.e. direct mail, e-mail, SMS, social media, etc.) enabled via one interface, based on a common set of business rules
  • Analytics-driven campaign creation, leveraging built-in segmentation and modeling tools
  • Ad hoc customer analysis and data visualization tools powered by a business intelligence engine (allowing marketers to “slice and dice” campaign-performance data in order to understand the key factors that drive campaign success — or the lack thereof )
  • Automated, cross-channel, multi-wave campaigns (allowing the results of the first campaign to automatically guide or select the subsequent marketing treatments)
  • Management of campaign execution lifecycle: a web service for robust management (execution, pausing, sopping, resuming, and cancellation) of marketing campaigns
  • Table catalog (client metadata): Data mapping abstraction implemented via the mapping process that produces a logical map of the physical data source with specific access rights and additional business logic considerations
  • Graph manager that creates and manages execution graphs for client access (asynchronous execution of request with optimization for possible parallel execution)

In the process of developing the new platform, First Line’s experts have overcome some non-trivial technical challenges.

Results

Although the development is still ongoing, and the product is being continually enhanced further, the new version of the platform incorporating many new features was successfully deployed for the first select clients.

Team size: 13
Total effort: over 150 person-months

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Client References

I want to express my gratitude for all of your team’s hard work, support and extra help. We are very grateful for all that you have done for us.

Senior Project Manager, the US specialized digital design and web development agency

Your quality of work is exceptional, and your flexible approach has allowed us to build and deploy a large amount of complex functionality in a very short space of time. Kudos to everyone for their professionalism and for delivering results that exceeded our expectations.

CEO, leading social media analytics provider

We have never had a better release that we can think of. And that is all because of your hard and dedicated work. So here is a big THANK YOU to everyone from all of us!

Editor, leading Scandinavian newspaper

For a software vendor like ourselves, picking the right development partner is crucial. First Line’s technical expertise and solid project management, coupled with their proficiency in Agile methodologies, have made them an integral part of our product development group.

VP Product Development, leading enterprise software vendor

Our First Line Team has been doing a great job. All of the guys check in great code, and they have a forward thinking mindset, not a feature-to-feature approach. They are also very open in terms of sharing knowledge, which is critical to running productive distributed teams.

Application Development Director, global marketing company

We've all learned a lot from you, and it is great working with you.

Application Development Director, global marketing company

The First Line team has an excellent process and we can learn from your team and improve.

Product Owner, Strategic Software Consultancy

I would like to thank the First Line development team for their dedication and high level of quality in their work. Despite being thousands of miles apart, we have been able to work quickly, effectively, and intelligently. Your team has been a major part of why we have been successful thus far.

VP Engineering, e-learning startup

First Line is a great technology partner capable of delivering complex, ‘industrial grade’ projects. They have demonstrated strong technical competence and solid understanding of the media and publishing domain. We have also been very impressed by the management team's attention to our needs and commitment to our success.

CEO, leading European digital media company

Your effort is the #1 reason that this project is going so well. I've worked with a lot of teams over the years and there are very few teams that I trust and respect. When you are given a task or feature, I never have to worry whether or not it will be accomplished on time and I never worry about the quality - you always deliver.

Architect, Strategic Software Consultancy

The team we put together in the last half of this year is one of the most productive, skilled and enjoyable I’ve ever worked on. It’s great to see the product brought to life, and I’m proud to work with all you folks.

Senior Architect, Fortune 100 company

The First Line Software team is professional, results driven, and proactive. I know that when we provide requirements for new functionality, they will not only deliver on the scope of what has been asked but will look beyond and give insight into how we can make our product even better. It has been a privilege to work with First Line Software, and I look forward to continuing our partnership in future.

VP, global marketing company
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