FEATURE SOFTWARE REVIEW IMASRO MARKETING SUITE
ááá paying the vendor to do it for you) is commendable. Each report is built up in much the same way as the Discover functions above, and reports can be pretty much instantly generated for selections previously saved out to the “Selects” folder. There are pre-built campaign reports and you can of course generate your own using the report designer. Handily, it’s possible to drill down from reports into the individual records beneath or drag and drop items from the report to build a new selection (see profiling above). It’s simple to export graphics via Excel, including a useful description of what the picture means, and you can also share reports over the Internet. There’s also the Prepare group of functions that exploits SQL Server’s internal commands. Intended more for analysts, this offers comprehensive data engineering tools for formatting, merging, joining tables, creating derived variables (the Expression function is particularly comprehensive) and much more besides.
26 April 2010
It’s possible to build hierarchical dedupes too, but as it used exact matching only, this will only be of use with records already coded up with URNs. Finally, the comprehensive online, context-sensitive help plus lots of mouse- over tags all help to cement the impression that this software is properly put together by people that know what’s needed when it comes to marketing databases.
FUTURE PROSPECTS
Imasro’s first release is a tightly-focused package. It supports data exploration, better targeting through clear and detailed selection, data engineering, reporting and, via campaign codes, offers a way to keep track of your direct marketing activity. There’s a lot of ongoing development
but Imasro is still at a relatively early stage, so there’s little to help with operational aspects once you’ve exported your selection. This contrasts sharply with the range of options offered by most of the
established marketing suites. To cater for this, three further modules
are planned. One will offer campaign management, workflow, links to email packages and so forth, there is a new reports designer with dashboarding, and there will be a modelling tool that will offer Chaid-style, tree and basket analysis amongst other alternatives. However, the key selling point here is price. Competing systems charge much more for the core functionality that the Imasro Marketing Suite currently offers. For under £10,000, it’s possible to build
a rock-solid marketing system from scratch that can handle millions of records using a standard relational database. There’s simply nothing else on the market like it. For companies on a tight budget that are motivated to handle their own customer data or MSPs that want to manage high volume databases at lower cost, Imasro is one option that they simply must explore. n
www.dmarket.co.uk
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