Categories: TECHNOLOGY

Smart Online Marketing Applications

We look into several IT companies that have been successful in attracting venture capital firms ‘” in this case, they are in Canada and Australia.

Company 1: Member Based Affiliate Marketing Company

This company was founded by my university friend; initially started as an ISP, but changed the business model to permission-based marketing back in the 1990s. The concept was considered as a new concept back then, by linking members with merchants providing vouchers; these are real vouchers, like Vodafone, Coles, Shell, which you can use them pretty much everywhere.

This model had attracted investments from VCs in Australia, Canada and Singapore; he had used the fund to grow its product range and marketing expenses. They had been quite successful; and advertising revenue had increased significantly as he grew its member base to over 400,000 members.

The successful formula behind this email marketing company is ability to provide detailed profile of each member, therefore, able to provide potential advertisers with “Target Campaigns”.

How can they obtain such information? This is where the voucher system works very well, the business is built based on rewards points system, by answering the questions in the survey, you can receive points equivalent of $25 to $30 in value, which you can use straight-away, it is a very powerful and smart marketing tool to entice members to sign up, and this particular system, is why the venture capital investors decided to put money into the company, not based on its financials.

Company 2: Email Marketing Company

You may think there is not much differentiating factor between E-mail marketing companies since there are so many of them around already.

We interviewed this particular Sydney based e-mail marketing company which has client bases such as Optus and Borders to find out how this sector has changed, and why their business was able to attract investments from venture capital funds.

The answer was quite simple, it is easy to use and its pricing model is much more flexible than other businesses.

In addition, the system can provide much more tracking activities – such as individual e-mails and not just on a generic “open-mail rate”, it can drill down to see which particular user had opened the e-mail, and if he/she had opened the e-mail more than once, and the average time spent reading the e-mail.

This particular function proved to be quite effective in measuring campaign results, especially for companies like Optus who wishes to find out consumer behaviour and brand recognition; and for bookstores to measure what books / authors are of interest from consumers.

Again, this is the main point why they could attract 2 venture capital investors to back them up, the company remains as a small operation, with less than 20 people, with around 10 people in the technical side, and 10 in the administration & sales & marketing aspects.

It is pleased to see there are so many IT talents these days. If you are looking for investments from VCs, it is important for you to highlight your unique selling points, even if your financials is still at early-stage, at the end of the day, most VC (and other types of investors) are looking at your differentiating factors instead of financial forecasts.