Email Experience : email experience week 9 2012

New App Creates Email Campaigns On-the-Go

Michael Garrity — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 21:00:00 GMT

Small business email marketing service Benchmark Email just released a free app for the iPhone and iPad in the iTunes App Store that will let businesses create entire email marketing campaigns from a mobile device.

The app makes it easy for users to build an email list, send multimedia email campaigns and track subscriber responses. With the iPad version, users can also shoot videos or photos and insert the media into one of ten email templates, create text and have the message sent out in seconds.

Benchmark also offers instant YouTube syncing for videos, the ability to post emails and newsletters to Facebook and/or Twitter profiles, and the option to create an email list either by adding contacts individually or pulling them from the iPhone's address book.

Any mass emails created in the app are automatically fully CAN-SPAM compliant. Users will be able to write subject lines, store iPhone images in a gallery and track what happens to their emails, including which ones were opened and which ones bounced back.

"As the world becomes ultra-mobile, more and more bulk email campaigns will be created and sent on the fly from coffee shops, trade shows, airport lounges, and thousands of other places," says Benchmark Email CEO Curt Keller.

After downloading the application from the App Store, users simply have to set up a free trial with Benchmark Email before getting started.

Listrak Offers New Tool For Growing Email Lists

Allison Howen — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 04:02:00 GMT

Email marketing solutions provider Listrak has launched its Modal Acquisition solution, which helps online retailers acquire new email subscribers from website visitors.

Email is an important part of online marketing, especially since email remains the highest performing channel according to The Direct Marketing Association – returning $40.56 for every $1 spent. And to receive the best ROI, email marketers should focus on growing their email lists with accurate information from subscribers who are interested in the brand.

“On average, companies lose 30 percent of their email subscribers per year,” says Ross Kramer, Listrak CEO. “Retailers that target and deploy behaviorally triggered campaigns could have slightly lower churn rates, but as subscribers’ needs change, they stop opening and responding to irrelevant messages so marketers must constantly work to replenish and grow their lists to increase reach and revenue.”

Upon arrival at a participating retailer’s website, Listrak’s Modal Acquisition displays a popup window that invites customers to subscribe to the email list while the background webpage fades. However, the popup is not displayed to subscribers who have previously signed up through the popup, and merchants can control the delay before the popup reappears to customers that did not opt-in.

After a new subscriber opts-in, they are either directed to a more detailed preference page or a simple Thank You popup. Then, a welcome series is automatically sent to new subscribers so that they can engage while they are the most interested. According to Listrak, the Modal Acquisition strategy has helped grow client lists up to 30 times within a few weeks.

BriteVerify Weeds Out Worthless Email Addresses

Michael Garrity — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 17:00:00 GMT

The BriteVerify email verification solution just announced its latest platform aimed at companies that build and maintain email marketing databases.

This new service will provide simple, fast and, most importantly, accurate verification at an affordable price to help businesses protect themselves from sending emails to invalid addresses, which, obviously, can have significantly negative effects on campaign ROI and sender reputations.

BriteVerify's platform release includes new APIs to simplify the verification process and help companies that utilize clean data service providers, email list managers and lead buyers and sellers, as well as email service providers that manage user lists for customers by working to eliminate time and resource costs that go wasted trying to communicate with bad data.

It also comes with a new social connectedness status indicator called BriteVerify Connected, which gives marketers insights into the most active addresses in their databases so they can prioritize their campaigns to improve performance potential. BriteVerify noticed that many addresses can appear active, but in reality they're "half-dead" or inactive and take up valuable space on many email lists.

Using BriteVerify Connected, marketers can begin to weed them out. Connected also helps identify which contacts are most likely to open, click and convert with emails.

BriteVerify doesn't require any contracts, set up fees or monthly minimums. Instead, customers pay only for what they use.

Pinpointe Increases Customer Base by 60 Percent

Allison Howen — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 12:40:00 GMT

Email marketing vendor Pinpointe has recently announced information about the company’s successful 2011, claiming that its customer loyalty base increased by more than 60 percent.

According to the company, 16 percent of new customers are automating their email campaigns for the first time, while the rest of new clients have migrated from other email marketing providers. Pinpoint provides services for companies across multiple industries, including software, technology, non-profit, healthcare, professional services and the medical field.

And aside from an increased customer base, Pinpointe’s other top achievements of 2011 include cloud-based email marketing for mid-tier enterprises, a private labeled, cloud bases email marketing for digital agencies, and an enhanced integration with salesforce.com. Pinpointe's email marketing solution features an integrated SPAM score checker, autoresponders, cloud-based email marketing and more.