Challenge
A leading Swedish Marketing Automation technology company, whose anchor product is an Email Marketing application used by a rapidly growing number of businesses worldwide, was looking for ways to cut down on their hefty in-house development costs. They were aware of the opportunities afforded by offshore development, but did not have any related experience and exercised an extremely cautious approach to any existing offshore development alternatives. Vilmate was recommended to the company by a senior technical stakeholder of another client of ours who was well-acquainted with our technical capabilities, skills and reliability as a provider. The client’s application is a powerful Email Marketing Automation platform which allows creating, AB-testing and conducting rule-based email and SMS marketing campaigns. These campaigns can be based on intricate rules and AB-tested using two or more different custom emails. The user can compose a custom email based on one of the multiple prefabricated templates or create a custom template using the platform’s Template Editor functionality. Additionally, they can illustrate the created emails with images from the image depository of the application. In addition to providing the ability to segment subscribers for targeting purposes manually, the application can automatically attribute them to one of several groups based on the information submitted by these subscribers during the subscription procedure. It is also possible to set the system to send subscribers a group-specific email after they’ve been attributed to a group. This can be done either immediately, or at a predefined later date and time. The application also includes the Dashboard tab that is used to display campaign-related statistics. The software is integrated with the Magento eCommerce platform and several applications of Rule’s clients by means of an API that enables an efficient data exchange between Rule’s platform and the above systems. Presently, Rule’s Email Marketing Automation platform is used by more than 700 corporate clients, including several iconic international brands. At the time Vilmate was approached to assist Rule in implementing the project, the client’s platform was already operational. However, the platform lacked a range of important functionality, necessary for rendering marketing campaigns sufficiently sophisticated and efficient. We were entrusted with developing this functionality.
Solution
As this was our client’s first attempt to optimize their development process and costs by outsourcing part of their development offshore, they, initially, requested us to augment their 3-strong in-house team by just 1 software engineer. Later on, the number of Vilmate’s employees, involved in implementing the project full time, was increased by 2 more people (1 software engineer and 1 QA engineer). From the very beginning of our involvement in the project, our team has been managed directly by the client’s Head of Development. As a result, we have added the following functionality to the client’s system: The Template Editor that allows creating a diverse array of email templates. Integration with the Facebook Lead Advertisement platform (allows attracting subscribers through FB advertisements). Facebook messaging functionality (allows contacting subscribers and can also be set to automatically send email messages to subscribers). A module for the application’s integration with Magento2. The module allows importing user-related information into the application, including the contents of the user’s cart, as well as dynamically creating new and updating existing subscriber profiles in accordance with the information received. Improvements to the Statistics Monitoring and Aggregation functionality which made it possible to further expand this functionality. Vilmate has been actively involved in implementing the project for around 1 year now and the project is currently ongoing. TECHNICAL SOLUTION The technology stack used by Vilmate to implement the project includes: Laravel and Lumen Frameworks (as the core for the application’s Back-end and customer integration project). AngularJS (as the core for the application’s Front-end). MariaDB Redis (as the cache/session Back-end and message queue platform). The Magento eCommerce platform’s integration modules. FB, Google Analytics and other integration libraries.
Results
Vilmate’s taking part in the project has allowed the client to nearly double their development effort while cutting their development costs nearly in half. The client has received mission-critical functionality that was delivered to them by us in fine quality, on time and on budget.
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