Marketing isn't always measured in absolutes, but marketers and their clients strive to hit key targets with their campaigns. They all know that email -- while not the most media rich or active engagement option with consumers -- is one of the most effective ways to reach the people that matter most to their brands.
The cloud has quickly become one platform that email marketers can harness to boost the opportunity that email messaging presents.
Say "software as a service" in a room full of marketers and you're bound to see many eyes veer to their phones or whatever else might be nearby. Shift the conversation to "email marketing from the cloud," and you might get a little more attention, but not much.
iMedia found that while there are many proponents of cloud-based email marketing, there are just as many that find the concept overhyped and too confusing to sell or show value.
What is the cloud?
So what exactly is all this hype about the cloud? After all, if you want marketers to jump on board and pitch the idea of cloud computing to others, they better understand what they're talking about and where the value is.
According to Jeff Mills, VP of products at eROI, the cloud is a "cluster of servers that exist for the purpose of exponential computing power and storage." The greatest benefit provided by the cloud for email marketing centers around its ability to work faster and more reliably than traditional email service providers, he says.
There are two major solutions that email marketers can use. One is the cloud such as Amazon's S3, and the other is a content delivery network like BitGravity and Akamai.
The cloud is much more capable of performing processes that sag on servers. If your email campaigns involve processing rather than just sending email, the cloud might be right for you. Processing power can be used to either compile data or serve up assets, and if your content delivery network is coming up short on either of those fronts, the cloud can help.
"When it comes to application hosting, Amazon's EC2 is the equivalent of a server at a hosting facility," Mills tells iMedia. "However, with spikes of traffic, you can add new servers with the click of a button, massively increasing your traffic threshold nearly instantly. When you don't need the servers, they can be taken offline, and you only pay for the computing hours used. In addition, Amazon's Elastic MapReduce allows large mailers with massive amounts of data to offload the resource-intensive log processing, such as statistics crunching."
Mills continued by saying that overall, there are benefits to using the cloud for elements of email marketing, but not offloading 100 percent of your email marketing computing needs. It is best to evaluate where your application bottlenecks are and adjust accordingly by looking at all of the offerings out there.
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