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Case Study: The Pixel Zoo

Designers partner with GraphicMail to cater to clients' needs

Introduction

Established in 2002, The Pixel Zoo is a specialist design agency with office in both Johannesburg and Cape Town offering a broad range of design services in both traditional and new media. Owned and managed by Hannah Williams and Laura Glover, The Pixel Zoo brings a unique blend of skills to the table, combining creative graphic design skills with a high degree of technical expertise in the online environment.

“As graphic designers who also develop websites we have a thorough understanding of the technical framework that we are designing around and this enables us to create solutions that are effective, practical and visually striking. We believe that this kind of holistic approach to online marketing yields stronger overall communication as each part contributes to the whole and we believe this is one of the reasons our clients come back to us time and again. We strive to build lasting relationships with our clients based on a foundation of integrity and trust. As we approach design as a problem solving activity we take the time to really get to know our clients’ needs and this allows us to come up with visual solutions that are effective when it comes to cost, impact and sustainability.”

The Challenge

“With the growth of the internet as a communications medium over the last few years we experienced a growing demand for reliable and cost effective bulk email solutions. Initially many of our clients were using their personal email software such as Microsoft Outlook to send their marketing communications.

There are many problems that can occur when doing this such as formatting and compatibility issues, spam issues, as well as the fact that you can end up using a great deal of bandwidth. To address this need we initially used a very basic ‘mailing list server’ solution. This worked perfectly to send emails out to a mailing list and subscribe or unsubscribe, but that is about as far as it went. There was no way to see if emails had been opened or if our client’s email campaigns were having any effect at all. It is imperative that any marketing exercise have some form of measurement and feedback. The more detailed the feedback you get the better as this helps you continually improve your communications.

Another problem with this approach was that it was comparatively labour-intensive as each emailer had to be created by a developer in HTML and clients could not make any small changes or updates to their emailers themselves. Our efforts to address these issues and offer our clients a more cost-effective, easy-to-use solution lead us on the search for a local bulk email service provider.”

The Solution

After conducting research on several available bulk email solutions we settled on GraphicMail. Our decision was influenced by the fact that they were extremely helpful and friendly, had a competent technical team on hand at all times, were cost-effective and offered a wide variety of useful functionality that was easy to use and that could be extended by using the API. We also found that the structuring of the reseller package really suited our needs. It allowed us to offer a branded solution and interface to our clients at no cost difference to them (compared to going directly through GraphicMail) that allows us to easily manage and help them with their bulk email communications at any time.

Our clients can now compile and send out their own bulk communications, keep them in an online archive which can be linked to from their websites, view easily understandable and comprehensive statistics as well as manage their email databases. The statistics are great – you can see how many mails have been opened, what links have been clicked on and who has clicked on them, which mails have been blocked as spam (so you can personally contact these recipients if necessary), and more... We have also found the options to personalise bulk email and embed images to be very popular and the amount of emails rejected as Spam can be reduced by checking the ‘spam score’ and making any necessary changes. The flexibility of the database management on GraphicMail means our clients can collect all sorts of information from their recipients. From dietary requirements for an event RSVP, to subscribers’ favourite colours – the system is flexible and data can be exported to useful formats for viewing.

Overall using GraphicMail has saved our clients money, saved us time and greatly improved the value our clients get from their bulk communications marketing exercises.”

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