Email marketing is a principal tool for marketers across industries. Retailers ranked among the highest performers in email marketing, according to a recent Silverpop benchmark study. Most marketers (60%) said email is producing an ROI, while 32% said the strategy eventually will produce a return, according to the 2013 Email Marketing Benchmark Report from MarketingSherpa.
As the volume of emails sent both externally and internally continues to grow, retailers are challenged by tracking, analyzing and reporting email metrics.
To meet this challenge, Kellwood, a designer, manufacturer and retailer of women’s fashions, implemented 365 Command, a cloud-based solution for Microsoft Office 365 email task management. The platform, provided by MessageOps, helps Kellwood better control and simplify internal email administration of 1,300 Microsoft account users.
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“By implementing 365 Command, we’re saving valuable administration time ― as much as an hour per day,” said Debbie Henry, Data Security Analyst at Kellwood, in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “The solution’s most valuable features include setting mailbox forwarding, creating calendar permissions, and automatically removing permissions when user mailboxes terminate.”
Launched in February 2013, 365 Command incorporates an HTML5 graphical user interface designed to make navigation easier for email system administrators. The platform features point-and-click simplicity for changing mailbox settings, monitoring usage, reporting metrics, and more. The GUI interface “is more visually appealing than our previous method, which used Powershell commandlets,” said Henry, “and makes the solution much more intuitive.”
Highlights of the 365 Command tool include:
- Graphical overview of user data, device access and total mailbox count;
- Maps indicating the specific data center location of mailboxes in the cloud, the number at each location, last log in, total size and size over time;
- Mailbox editing to easily set forwarding addresses, create shared mailboxes, change access permissions and control passwords; and
- Report generation that illustrates hard-to-access data, such as devices by mailbox.
