'Net Features : ESP

GetResponse Users Get Access to iStockPhoto Images

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 16:48:00 GMT

Email marketing service provider GetResponse is seperating itself from the competition in a rather unique and user-centric manner - images.

The ESP just announced that it is offering 1000 email ready graphics and pictures free - available from within GetResponse accounts - thanks to a partnership with iStockPhoto.

“When it comes to competing for attention in today’s overcrowded inboxes, a picture is worth a thousand words, and iStockphoto is the 'go to' site for high-quality media. Based on our latest GetResponse study, media-rich HTML emails can deliver up to 59% higher CTRs than plain text messages. So we wanted to make it easy for SMB marketers to boost their email marketing response rates all year long – without spending a dime of their 2011 budgets.”

ESP's Flowing into FlowTown

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 17:00:00 GMT

How much do you know about your email subscribers? Could you be more profitable if you had deeper insights into customer demographics and social network reach?

Email service provider Constant Contact has partnered with social media marketing platform Flowtown to provider users of its toolset with insights into their subscirbers social profiles including demographics (age, gender) social networkmembership and social influenec (as measured by the Klout score, which quantifies reach by measuring the level of audience engagement). The integration is available immediately to users who have accounts with both companies.

“Constant Contact makes social media simple; Flowtown makes social media profitable. Together, we’re making it easier than ever for small businesses to identify, directly communicate, and engage with their most influential email subscribers,” said Ethan Bloch, Flowtown co-founder. “Flowtown is easy to use and affordable; it’s the perfect tool for helping small businesses increase the firepower of their email campaigns.”

Recurring Sender Tool from Contactology

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 20:35:00 GMT

Contactology, a provider of email marketing software, announced today the implementation of its Recurring Sender tool, which automatically grabs content from a web URL and sends it to email subscribers on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.

Pretty interesting in light of all the complexity surrounding and expertise required for small and medium businesses to compete on the email marketing front. Rather than creating a separate email campaign, Contactology creates the email from a URL and sends to a marketers list of email subscribers, eliminating the need to manually create separate email campaigns.

For those heavily involved in email marketing, a service/solution like this one could save you an immense amount of time.

News and entertainment website Salon.com is sending its daily news summary using Contactology’s Recurring Sender. "Before Contactology, we were managing our newsletter internally," said Rachel Hagen, project manager at Salon.com. "Using Contactology’s Recurring Sender has automated the entire process. We post the content into our email friendly web URL and Contactology pulls the page into their application each day, scans for any spam issues, and automatically sends without any additional work from our team."

Email’s Growing Influence on Social

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 14:38:00 GMT

Constant Contact announced new features today that enable email marketers to promote social sharing of their content and messaging.

The new features work with the company's existing social share functions (which have been used to share more than 40,000 unique emails this month alone). While Contstant Contact may not be the first ESP (email service provider) to realize the potential of social sharing, they are now making it even more prominent and accessible to their users

New features include Share Buttons, the Facebook "Like" Button, a Tweet Button, and a Share this Email /Survey/Event.

These sharing features make it possible for users to gain a network effect, generate more buzz, and increase exposure to broaden the reach of customer campaigns, increasing their ROI, and proving that email marketing and social media is a highly effective combo.

Switching Email Service Providers

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 20:30:00 GMT

Recent survey data from Strongmail reveals the majority of businesses employing an email service provider (ESP) have switched within the last two years and another third plan to do so in the next 12 months. Why?

According to the release, “the data shows that 77 percent of these companies have switched providers in the past two years for three main reasons: lack of product features, limited services and high costs.” With such variance in pricing across the industry, I expect that it has more to do with cost than pricing.

Other reasons for switching email service providers include deliverability challenges, the inability to leverage data in campaigns, general dissatisfaction, poor support, system down time, data security and a desire to bring email on-premise. It is interesting to note that deliverability services are consumed at nearly three times the rate of any other ESP service offering.

On a related note, Website Magazine recent post on email metrics has generated a lot of attention so we encourage you to check that out. Our guidance is to do all that you can to optimize email effectiveness before switching email service providers.

Geo-Tracking Now Available at JangoMail

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 09:12:00 GMT

Email marketing service provider JangoMail just introduced reporting on geo-tracking. The new feature enables marketers to determine the location (city/state/country/zip code) of recipients through open, click and Web site activity tracking. Email marketers can also determine the IP address, ISP and latitude/longitude data of recipients.

The geo-tracking feature will perhaps most importantly permit marketers to segment the data. Users will be able to filter reporting results to show data from recipients who are based within a particular mile radius from a specific zip code. JangoMail has also integrated with Google Maps to provide users with a visual overlay of Geo-Tracking data.

Users can export any segmented data into a new JangoMail group with a single mouse click -- allowing follow-up email campaigns to be sent to geo-targeted segments. “Segmentation and geo-targeting continue to be hot topics in the email marketing industry and we believe the new Geo-Tracking reporting functionality will bring critical intelligence to email marketers,” explained Ajay Goel, President of JangoMail.

SMTP Relay from JangoMail

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 20:25:00 GMT

Email marketing service provider JangoMail today announced some innovative functionality to its service for transactional emails.

A trackable SMTP Relay feature will allow email marketers to connect to the JangoMail system via SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) instead of the company's API -- making the platform easier to adopt. This means that email marketers can use Microsoft outlook, Thunderbird or any other desktop email client directly for their campaigns.

As an extension to JangoMail’s Transactional Email platform, the new trackable SMTP Relay functionality will provide users with open tracking, click tracking, DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) signing as well as log files for confirmation of email delivery.

"We are excited to launch the first-ever trackable SMTP relay service for email marketers who have JangoMail running as the engine behind their applications that send individually triggered email messages to single recipients," said Ajay Goel, President of JangoMail.

Email Workflow Solutions @ Campaigner

Administrator — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 15:54:00 GMT

Email solutions provider Campaigner announced this week the launch of Workflows, a new feature of its CampaignerPro V2.0. The feature will enable marketers to develop and deliver emails to customers based on a specified time, date, event or action. Coupled with the solutions' existing segmentation and dynamic content features, CampaignerPro is certainly a solution to consider if your focus is on executive sophisticated and successful email campaigns. The list of clients using the offering is impressive to say the least. Companies such as LinkedIn, Nokia, and TransAmerica just to name a few are using Campaigner.

Workflows enables users to program automated emails with drag-and-drop tools that create a virtual flowchart for visualizing and mapping out elements of the campaign, including:

The event, action or specified time that initiates the sending of an email
Filters to include or exclude contacts
Timer delays for scheduling and initiating message delivery
Post-condition setting to assign value fields for tracking contacts

“The launch of Workflows helps marketers realize even higher response rates as it allows our customers to design more targeted, timely and relevant campaigns,” said Frank Tersigni, Campaigner’s CEO. “With the evolution of email marketing, relying solely on opt-in is not enough. Today’s marketers require enhanced direct customer relationships with improved marketing program performance and returns. Campaigner designed Workflows to help our customers reach this level of email marketing sophistication with easy-to-use tools and services.”