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Forfront Lab

Research & Development

Introduction

We attribute a significant part of our success over the years to our innovative approach and consistent hunger to push the boundaries.

As one of the original developers of an email marketing platform in the UK we have always spent considerable time and effort to applied research in our areas of expertise and software development.

Through applied research and development we have been able to give our clients the edge in their fields and produce innovative solutions.

R&D enables us to create products that are efficient, simple to use and offer great value in the market place. We produced solutions for the Public, financial, property and marketing sectors.

A perfect example is the original use of software, OS and networking technologies to develop the ability to monitor and report recipient interaction with electronic mail. We are proud to be the first UK company to have originally developed this technology back in 1999.

Since then we have continually researched the market and new technologies to help develop real value solutions.

Although not all research produces practical advances in technological offering, we have been very fortunate to apply our R&D to products which have made it to the market.

Latest technologies and concepts explored: Blockchain and AI.

Current research

Blockchain implementation in e-shot™

Purpose: transparency and availability of account information to clients. Keeping records of client contracts and individual package, terms and payments in a distributed ledger.

AI implementation in e-shot™

Purpose: improving deliverability based on learned behaviour. By developing an intelligent scoring system which constantly analyses and monitors all the send data generated by e-shot, we would be able to predict inbox placement for clients based on their subscription lists.

Summary

The two pillars of our philosophy merge together beautifully through our Research and Development:

  • Our curiosity and love of technology
  • The obsession to improve productivity and results
This is what makes us Forfront!

Our research led to these successful solutions:

Property

Firsthips.com – a revolutionary 'light years ahead of its time' home selling and buying portal. The complete digital management of the legal process which includes all the stake holders. A strong use of API integration, intelligent communication centre and the combination of a large number of data sources in a variety of formats to one final digital document.

We are currently working on modernising the concept to include the latest Blockchain technology with Digital ID and signatures.

For FloorplansUsketch we developed a sketching tool both for the website and the mobile app used mainly by estate agents to create floorplans.

For First4sale – a property Sell it Yourself portal we developed an intelligent messaging centre, a complex scheduling engine for appointments and mapping application.

Marketing

Based on our R&D we developed new technologies for our marketing automation (email and SMS) platform – e-shot™:

Campaign Processor™

What are the technological advancements sought?

The Campaign Processor is a multi-threaded suite of application components used to build, personalise and send email campaigns that are highly-scalable and built for performance. The Campaign Processor has been built with deliverability and configuration driven load control across multiple servers in mind. The load control can be per customer, email type and by email header information. The Campaign Processor has been known to send a million emails in 10 minutes. It also has the complexity of an isolated data store, whereby each customer has their own secured ring fenced database which offers a high level of data protection, years before GDPR.

What is the technological challenge?

How to cater for multiple customers sending large email sends at the same time in a timely manner. Most email providers cannot handle large volume sends. The service, apart from its multitude of algorithms to control efficiency of sending also has the ability to cater for network connectivity issues without losing track of progress of a send, as well as pause and continue functionality required during upgrades, etc.

How and when was the technological challenge resolved?

We built various prototypes and ran performance analysis to aid in our understanding and eventual application to the platform. This process is an evolving cycle of monitoring, analysis and adjustments to increase stability, resilience and efficiency.

Marketing Automation

What are the technological advancements sought?

Built a UI workflow builder that enables users to be able to drive data changes and campaign sends within the system via: 1. contact and custom field value driven criteria, 2. recipient interactions, 3. subscriptions to a group. The workflow supports if/else constructs and wait conditions as well as those conditions mentioned above.

What is the technological challenge?

How to enable users to be able to build complex UI workflows in an easy to use manner, as well as complexity involved in driving workflow state change management and how to graphically display the workflow to users and enable them to edit steps in the workflow.

How and when was the technological challenge resolved?

Implemented a visitor pattern that is called for each element in the workflow. Dynamic processing is managed by storing the rules in a structure that is read out and mapped to the appropriate logic pathways. This process continues after the first implementation with constant improvements, enhancements to functionality and stability.

Dynamic HTML campaigns

What are the technological advancements sought?

To enable customers to be able to host a web page that the customer manages and changes over time and have this drive email campaign sends. This has proved particularly useful for news publications that send email campaigns to interested users with top news stories.

What is the technological challenge?

Determining the rules to use to convert Web HTML to a valid Email HTML format. For example, DIV's are not supported in an email, only tables. JavaScript and some CSS are not supported. Special processing had to be carried out. This was painstaking and involved building a bank of HTML web pages and testing the HTML email output against multiple mail clients to ensure the campaign displayed as expected.

How and when was the technological challenge resolved?

Most of the CSS and HTML structures and transformations built in were ascertained by repeatedly testing the email HTML generated output against a multitude of mail clients and tweaking the output to ensure that the original web view looks in line with the email view. HTML and email requirement documents were also consulted to ensure that transformation rules being applied were applicable. Since the implementation of the first version we regularly enhance and adjust the code to cope with ever changing technology.