Enabling the Long Tail in email marketing
By Duncan Moore on October 12th, 2007
Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail and a forthcoming book called Free, spoke in Montreal on Tuesday at a one-day conference organized by Infopresse, which is a French-language media organization that covers marketing, advertising and communications from a Quebec perspective.
In the last couple of months, Anderson’s uncommon insights have helped us to clarify and articulate the CakeMail business model. Here’s how:
Defining the opportunity that CakeMail represents as an email marketing platform.
In April, before we had this blog up, The Code Kitchen had a blurb in a ChangeThis publication that briefly discussed the circumstances in which the company came to be, as well as the “white space” opportunity that CakeMail focused on. Under the heading “White Space, White Label”, we stated our intention to occupy an open space in the market: that of a dedicated, true white label service that would focus uniquely on resellers and provide them with a 100% branded solution that would be completely transparent to their end users (e.g. using their own domain and devoid of references or links to CakeMail) and totally customizable in terms of design.
But that’s only half the story. Early on, we knew that CakeMail could enjoy great success internationally due to its multilingual options, but it wasn’t until we started to think in terms of the Long Tail that the true nature of the opportunity crystallized:
There are a multitude of minority-language niche markets around the world that collectively form an opportunity far bigger than the entire English-language market.
These markets have been largely untapped because most email marketing platforms don’t offer multilingual interfaces, meaning small business users would have to understand English in order to create and manage their mailings. Of course, end-users would also have to be comfortable with English in order to understand the various system messages they might encounter as subscribers.
So why hasn’t anyone been catering to these niche markets? Until now, the barriers to entry were prohibitive. The significant investment of creating a platform for a minority language was not justified by such small niche markets, so most providers went after the mass market and offered their platforms exclusively in English.
CakeMail, on the other hand, has been designed from the ground up with internationalization in mind. All text for the interface is stored separately from the application code, which means that offering the tool in a new language can be as simple as translating the language file, for which mature editing tools already exist.
Prospective resellers in any country or region around the world can translate the CakeMail platform into their own language, thus opening up new markets by tapping into latent demand for which there was previously no corresponding offer. This is how CakeMail enables the Long Tail of distributed demand for email marketing, which in this case is scattered both geographically and linguistically.
One cannot fully appreciate the magnitude of this opportunity without considering a few facts about the international Web and localized interfaces:
- 3/4 of traffic to top US sites comes from outside the US;
- One of the top new feature requests for Flickr was the addition of multilingual interface options, which they recently added;
- Social network Hi5 generates almost as many unique visitors per month as Facebook, yet most of this traffic comes from outside the US (the Hi5 interface is offered in 9 languages and counting).
- The Wordpress interface is available in more than 50 languages, which partly explains why it is the world’s most popular self-hosted blogging platform;
- 48% of Google’s revenues are now derived from international markets. Google has long crowd-sourced translations from volunteers around the globe, thereby offering the Google interface in a staggering variety of languages and localized domains. Many of these represent tiny slivers of the global marketplace when considered individually, yet collectively add up to serious revenue for the search giant.
The lesson here is that people may consume a lot of content in American English on the Internet, but everyone prefers to use interfaces in their own language or dialect when that option is available. Or, as Chris Anderson would say, “One size does not fit all.”
So, the question remains: how many potential email marketers and subscribers have shied away from this rapidly growing medium of advertising and communication, simply because the tools were not available in their language? We’re about to find out…
Filed under: CakeMail –
2 Responses to “Enabling the Long Tail in email marketing”
Feed for this Entry Trackback Address- 1 Pingback on Oct 12th, 2007 at 6:31 pm
- 2 Pingback on Oct 13th, 2007 at 4:59 pm
