Applying Email Marketing Features to Personal Email

User Rating:  / 0

Details

Created on Tuesday, 27 September 2011 12:00

Written by Peter Brockmann

A standardized element of modern email marketing services provides statistical results of the campaign - what % of messages were opened, what % were forwarded. These large campaign services struggled with being able to scale their service to the point where they could enable or justify this functionality for the casual or individual emailer who might value knowing that the one addressee of the message had in fact just opened the email in question. No doubt, competition for the high volume emailer, which roughly costs the same to service as the individual emailer, prevented a lot of email processors from looking at the individual segment.

Now for the first time, XLTechnologies and the Zendio service bring big emailer analytics and notification capabilities to individual users. Individuals don't have to use the service provider's web-based templates and don't have to co-brand every email with the email service provider's logo.

Zendio incorporates a new monthly hosted service that binds a Microsoft Outlook plugin script to the hosted software. Users merely use the plugin controls to attach attributes to outbound email and process tracking elements that provide timing, location of opening and state of reading for each message sent with the aid of the plugin.

Links in the email are assigned unique codes which also report statistics about whether or not they have been clicked, when they've been clicked and so on - all on an individual email basis. In fact statistics about commonly emailed contacts such as when they typically read email, where the email was opened, and what the disposition of the email has been can be amassed and presented to the sender. Senders get service generated email receipts too.

The service is turned on or off from within Microsoft Outlook as the message is composed and before it is sent.

One of the most popular features among the early adopters of the service is the mobile texting notification of the message being read. This way, the sales executive can call the customer while the customer is looking at the proposal which had been emailed an hour before - even if they're in the car on the way to the office.

Target user. Zendio will be popular among sales executives because it enables more timely salesperson-initiated-dialog with prospective customers without having to depend on the customer to act. It will surprise some customers, but I expect this will delight most to have a sales person so attentive to their needs and with such great sense of timing.

I expect future revs of the service to more tightly integrate the plugin with CRM services and extend to mobile email services so that the benefits of the service can be extended to more email scenarios.

Pricing begins at $9.95/month with merely a credit card to initiate the service after a free 30-day trial. Enterprise licensing available. Requirements are Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7 and Outlook 2003,2007 and 32-bit 2010.

GiveBackMail - a New Class of Email Service

User Rating:  / 0

Details

Created on Monday, 02 May 2011 15:00

Written by Peter Brockmann

Email is probably the oldest Internet communications service, and today is considered among the most mature of the wide range of services used in business and in personal life to share ideas and digital artifacts such as photos, PDFs, documents and presentations with coworkers, customers, partners, friends and family.

The 'free' web-based email service, supported by display advertisements is a staple of many users' online communications experience and starting today, a new entrant promises to change this service.

GiveBackMail.com, allows email users to concentrate all their email into one simple and high performance viewing experience. Users simply 'transfer' all their email from Hotmail, Yahoo!, Gmail and even standards-based services that use POP3 or IMAP (they all do). Emails are presented in a browser with one skyscraper ad on the right while folders, accounts and addresses are unified and conveniently maintained without having to change addresses or tell anyone about the changes in your email service. Your participation in viewing your email at GiveBackMail.com means that instead of seeing ads in your email dashboard who's revenue benefits Google, AOL, Yahoo or Microsoft, a portion of the ad revenue (25%) is paid to a selection of charities.

Other useful features of the email service include support for 100 MB file attachments, unsend to prevent distribution of slightly flawed email, attachment preview-before-downloading, briefcases to provide separate mail download folders for each account and password authentication over https. The founders of the company, two brothers from southern California, have plans for instant messaging service and potentially distribution of video mail, but thought NOW is a great time to get the service out there and running.

Optimized for the altruistic emailer, the cleverly designed business model of GiveBackMail.com has the potential to make email an anonymous-affinity service without the branding problems of wearing your affinity on your sleeve or email address all the while generating a few $ for worthwhile causes while users do whatever they would normally do - view email.

DexRex Brings IM & SMS to Highly Regulated Industries

User Rating:  / 0

Details

Created on Tuesday, 28 September 2010 20:25

Written by Peter Brockmann

I had a briefing with the founder and CEO of Massachusetts startup DexRex, Derek Lyman earlier this month and discussed the company's upcoming announcement of ChatSync Mobile Enterprise for BlackBerry. Founded in 2006 by Derek and Richard Tortora, two University of Massachusetts Computer Science students, the company has steadily grown to engage with 70+ enterprise customers.

The ChatSync product and service involves a software agent that plugs into your PC or mobile device and securely forwards copies of specific classes of traffic - Instant Messaging and SMS - to and from the device to a managed store available as an enterprise service or as a hosted managed service. The unique design of the DexRex approach is to implement the function as a component of leading managed email service solutions such as USA.net, eSecurity, SEECAS and Sonian Networks.

For most users of mobile IM and SMS services, the client or device software generally provides some degree of persistence. In SMS services for example, even my old Nokia feature phone stored onboard my last messages. My iPhone now stores my conversations. and allows me to scroll through them.

However, for users in highly regulated industries such as financial services, mobile device persistence is not compliant nor conveniently searchable. The conversation needs to be stored in a central server (on enterprise premises or in the cloud) so that it can be processed as part of a legal discovery process. Because of that inability to make the communication method compliant, most financial services IT departments under the advice of their compliance departments have denied access to these simple and powerful services because they could not be well-tracked or integrated into the company's communications compliance infrastructure.

Now, the ChatSync Mobile Enterprise for BlackBerry enables compliance and integration with the enterprise messaging storage and archiving policies for SMS, MMS and the popular BlackBerry Messenger service. Focusing on the BlackBerry infrastructure makes a lot of sense for DexRex because that's where the compliance-sensitive customers are.

The DexRex solution enable higher productivity that comes from being able to use mobile IM and SMS for BlackBerry users in these highly regulated and compliance-sensitive industries.