AcquireWeb AcquireLocal

Challenge
AcquireWeb is the source for making quality customer connections online. Founded in 2001, AcquireWeb offers email acquisition and customer management services to enable global companies to leverage existing offline customer relationships, lower online acquisition costs, create new cross-sell opportunities and improve their return on marketing investments. The company came to SSD at its maturity stage, aiming to expand its industry presence from Global 2000 companies to small & medium business segment. AcquireWeb needed to develop a new AcquireLocal product that would bring the power of a proven customer acquisition program designed for large global companies to the local level. The new product would leverage AcquireWeb massive prospect database reaching to 75mil+ US households (130mil+ individuals) to give the possibility to local businesses both to leverage their existing customer connections and to engage new prospects, maximizing this way their sales growth at the local level.

Result
Through the cooperation with SSD, AcquireWeb was able to transform its proven customer acquisition program designed for Fortune 500 companies into a highly-scalable small & medium businesses solution at a fraction of price budgeted for the in-house development. AcquireLocal is now a well-known cost-effective CAN-SPAM-compliant e-mail customer acquisition product that offers customers the combination of the highest quality prospect database with a marketing strategy designed to drive sales, lower prospect acquisition costs, create new cross-sell opportunities, and improve ROI. The customers have seen ROI increases of 300 – 1200%! Furthermore, SSD analysts helped AcquireWeb to achieve the level of targeting accuracy where its average opt-out rate became less than 0.5%.That enabled the product to instantaneously gain visibility and recognition.

Action
SSD recognized that the key factor in adapting a successful enterprise solution to small & medium business segment was to accurately evaluate the best practices employed in an existing product, and to transfer them to the new endeavor in a rightly-customized way. To ensure customer's success, ESI

  • Involved highly-professional business analysts and software engineers who meticulously studied the code and features of AcquireWeb existing products, and then came with concrete and actionable recommendations how they could best leverage the company's pre-existing IP.
  • Assigned a dedicated project manager to be an effective bridge between AcquireWeb product team and SSD engineering team.
  • Gathered product requirements and jointly prepared product and technical specifications.
  • Formed the engineering team from its existing pool of IT professionals with 5-10 years of experience in consumer behavioral targeting and online advertising space.
  • Created detailed project roadmap and schedule that took into account the possibility of requirements change.
  • Set up clear communication procedures that included daily voice communication with client-side stakeholders, regular progress tracking, and status reporting.
  • Kept client representatives constantly informed about the emerging project threats and risks.
  • Established a centralized repository for change request management to make sure every client request, as well as every bug found by the Quality Assurance team, were taken care of in order of its priority with regard to the available time and resources.
  • Began systematic Quality Assurance tests early in the product development life-cycle to bring down the cost of issue resolution and to ensure the product is released on schedule.

Product Highlights
AcquireLocal provides packaged e-mail acquisition services that enable companies both to leverage their existing customer relationships and engage new prospects in order to maximize sales growth at the local level.

  • Enables customers to identify the target audience of their best prospects from a pool of 130mil+ categorized contact records, and then lock these records for their exclusive use
  • Generates a CAN-SPAM-compliant permission letter on behalf of a client company and sends it to the predetermined list of customers inquiring if they would like to receive information and/or promotional offers
  • Provides customizable industry-specific creative templates to streamline the launch of clients' marketing programs
  • Offers "12 mailings in 6 months" or "22 mailings in 12 months" plans with 5,000-100,000 prospects per mailing
  • Helps clients to launch and manage their marketing campaigns that involve sending branded messages to their exclusive targeted audiences
  • Enables clients to analyze e-mail open rate, click-through rate, and conversion rate after each launch
  • Allows clients to match prospects' online, phone, and store-walk-in responses through a combination of online and offline behavior tacking analysis
  • Has A/B split testing capability, as well as buyer behavior analysis features
  • Includes post-campaign program success reporting and ROI measurement tools
Technologies and Tools Used
- Microsoft .Net Framework 2.0, C#, ASP.NET 2.0, Javascript
- Microsoft SQL Server 2005
- Internet Information Server (IIS) 6.0; SOAP Web Services; Microsoft Windows Services
- Microsoft Visual Studio 2005
- Borland StarTeam 2005; Microsoft Project 2000
"We’ve been working with SSD’s MS platform team for over four years now. During this tenure, we have been consistently pleased with their expertise and professionalism. They have quickly adopted our guidelines and development standards, and have exhibited the highest level of commitment to our needs.  The vast majority of the projects to date have been delivered on time and on budget."
Albert Gadbut
Acquireweb, Inc., President  & CEO