Last week Zeta Interactive, a leading full-service digital marketing agency, unveiled Zeta Mail 5.0, a revolutionary email marketing platform that will dramatically improve the way marketers are able to communicate via email with their target audiences. Zeta Mail 5.0 combines a powerful infrastructure with an intuitive, easy-to-use interface providing marketers the ability to interact with high volumes of customers and prospects in a completely personalized and targeted fashion.
PromotionWorld: During our previous interview in February last year, we discussed the expansion of Zeta Interactive and the appointment of eleven senior management team members. What has been happening at Zeta Interactive since then, and how is your continued commitment to providing the best services to your clients progressing?
Al DiGuido: Contrary to current economic trends, Zeta Interactive has enjoyed a tremendous amount of success since February 2008, including the recent launch of our brand new email marketing platform, Zeta Mail 5.0. Over the past year, the company’s email business alone has grown 24%. We’ve added world-class clients like Century 21, Intellicorp and Jigsaw Media to our client roster, and continue to provide tools that marketers need to not only survive the market, but flourish. Our company is comprised of the best marketers, strategists and technologists in the business, and people at Zeta Interactive truly understand that to be an effective marketer you need innovative, best-of-breed technology. That is why we have created our full-service suite of technologies that give businesses the ability to reach more customers than ever before and interact with them in way that leverages metrics and insight garnered from one channel and apply across a number of online channels—whether email, search, social media, etc.—for truly optimized, integrated communications. Our slogan is “What’s Next,” and I can say that since February of 2008, we’ve been saying that a lot.
PromotionWorld: Please tell our readers about the new dynamic email platform, Zeta 5.0, and how the new service can help marketers and businesses better communicate via email with their customers and prospects.
Al DiGuido:There are still businesses out there who view email as a commodity—different vendors providing a myriad of solutions, each with features and benefits indistinguishable from the next. Zeta Mail 5.0 changes that. It really combines the best of both worlds—a remarkably powerful infrastructure along with a graphical, intuitive interface that makes one-to-one communications with high volumes of customers and prospects possible. It provides a host of unique features needed to plan, execute, and optimize highly-targeted, complex, and relevant email campaigns –including an innovative conversation mapping features that enables marketers to easily plot and diagram an entire customer contact strategy, create triggered lifecycle campaigns, and view reports on each campaign as well as overall engagement. The reporting is unparalleled—comprehensive as well as customizable, so users can separate the meaningful from the mounds of the mundane. Combined with other features such as drag-and-drop functionality throughout, advanced list management and segmentation capabilities, extensive translation features and highly flexible integration capabilities, Zeta Mail 5.0 represents a break-through in email communications. And it’s reliable—in fact, we guarantee 99.5% platform uptime, or the customer doesn’t pay for delivery in the effected month.
PromotionWorld: What distinguishes Zeta 5.0 from other email platforms on the market?
Al DiGuido:The world of the marketer has changed—dollars and resources are tighter than ever, and pressure to prove measurable value and results in shorter time periods is now a way of life. Unfortunately, while the world of the marketer has changed, the technology solutions available have remained status quo. For email marketers in particular, platform downtime has been an expensive but expected occurrence. Mail queue delays are common. And the technology involved is often so complex, it requires assistance from IT. Not so with Zeta Mail 5.0. Zeta Interactive is the first vendor in the industry to provide each client with a dedicated hosted setup of the platform. That means no more unscheduled downtime, no more costly mail queue delays. No more enduring slow list upload and segmentation speeds. It also means clients can choose their own maintenance and upgrade schedules, rather than have them dictated by their service provider. And finally, it means the entire system is scalable with just the simple addition of hardware. Again, it is because of this unique set-up, we can guarantee that 99.5% platform uptime. All of this, and it is easy to use.
PromotionWorld: Would you agree with the statement that email is the most cost-effective marketing tool for promoting products or services, and why?
Al DiGuido: Absolutely. That’s why we’ve seen email volumes increase so dramatically over the past year. In an economy such as this, marketers realize that email provides an effective, measureable and cost-efficient solution. In fact, according to Forrester Research, 2 out of 3 marketers today agree that email is the most cost-effective marketing platform right now. These marketers have seen return on investment (ROI) that is two to three times as high with email than with other forms of direct marketing. Marketers need to justify spending for every dollar in this market, and email presents an opportunity to really track how effective your campaign has been, and then use those metrics and insight to optimize future campaigns for even greater ROI. That is why a significant focus for Zeta Mail 5.0 was in creating break-through reporting and analysis.
PromotionWorld: What are some of the most impressive changes and improvements that have taken place at Zeta Interactive over the last year?
Al DiGuido: We have been fortunate enough to enjoy some very steady growth over the past year, even in this tough economic climate. As I said before, in the past year, our email business alone has grown 24%. Zeta Interactive has expanded our client roster to more than 200 Fortune 1000 customers, including leading companies like Time Inc., Sony and LiveNation. We’ve also increased our staff to more than 300 employees, and named more than a dozen industry veterans to lead our executive management team. Zeta Mail 5.0 is the first part of a series of releases scheduled over the next several months, aimed at shaping the new face of full-service digital marketing.
PromotionWorld: Zeta Mail 5.0 is the first step in what will be a string of new product releases scheduled over the next several months. What can PromotionWorld’s readers expect from Zeta Interactive in the coming months?
Al DiGuido: The reason Zeta Mail 5.0 was such a huge success was that we took the time to consult with some key industry analysts as well as members of our client roster of Fortune 1000 clients to hear the real-world needs of modern marketers. We’re going to continue to do this in order to keep on the pulse of the world’s most sophisticated email marketers and provide them with the tools they need to meet their changing needs. That being said, we will be adding a number of innovative features to Zeta Mail 5.0 over the next few months, such as share-to-social link that enable recipients to send the email to their social network contacts or post it to their profile. And you’ll be seeing a big announcement in the next few weeks about another technology we are launching aimed at providing companies with an easier, more efficient way to create digital catalogs and publications and run their marketing activities around them. You’ll have to stay tuned for the specifics on that one, but rest assured it will be something that will definitely turn heads.