If you’re a marketing type who wants to exploit every possible channel, maintain contact with existing clients and inform prospective buyers, you can’t discount e-mail. While e-mail is often associated with spam, it’s a viable means of informing clients and potential customers of your latest offerings. And with Broadwick’s IntelliContact, a Web-based e-mail system, you can manage contacts, segment markets and send e-mail to them, as well as track responses and actions. This competent program, now in version 4, offers all of the tools you need.
Lightyears beyond the capabilities of average e-mail client programs, IntelliContact not only merges client information into the e-mails that it sends, it handles unsubscribes and bounced e-mails and tracks e-mails that have been opened and resulted in click-throughs. The system can add Web site visitors to its database and optimizes the transmission of e-mail so it’s less likely to be classified as spam and held up. For all practical purposes, it’s a sophisticated contact management system that emphasizes e-mail.
Sending E-mail
Detailed “mail-merge” features allow you to address subscribers by name in e-mails and customize the information that appears. You can segment clients by fields, for example, based on the products that they have purchased or asked about, when they were added, where they reside and more. You can also personalize e-mails to each recipient by merging data from fields and send automated messages to subscribers based on a date or how long they’ve been subscribers.
The program lets you create and manage an unlimited number of lists and offers 500kb of image-hosting space to store often used images. Solid search tools help you to locate and group contacts. Once you search for specific clients and e-mail them, you can save these searches as lists that will form the basis of future broadcasts. The program automatically updates lists to include new contacts that meet the criteria. Another advantage, you can send messages from any computer that’s connected to the Internet.
Working With Templates
IntelliContact offers hundreds of professionally designed and attractive templates that range from those that emphasize product features, to newsletters, various promotions, holiday postcards and more. Newsletter or marketing messages can be imported directly from blogs or Web sites and you can save messages as templates that can be used again in the future. If you have respondents who can’t open an HTML-based e-mail, you can use IntelliContact to generate text e-mails.
If you prefer to design your own templates, you can use any HTML editor such as Macromedia Dreamweaver or Microsoft Front Page to create templates and then copy and paste the code into the IntelliContact editor, an integrated and convenient HTML editor.
Staying on Schedule
The system offers powerful scheduling features that let you send e-mails at pre-determined intervals. In fact, with IntelliContact, you can create and schedule to send a newsletter up to a year in advance, which is great for seasonal promotions. You can preview messages before sending them, as well as send to more than one list at a time. After creating a message, IntelliContact offers "SpamCheck," a feature that evaluates your message as a spam filter would. To increase the likelihood of delivery, IntelliContact has negotiated white-list agreements, essentially placing itself on approved lists, with major ISPs. Also, according to IntelliContact, the system is on an average of zero black-lists, which means that its e-mails should not be blocked by spam filters.
IntelliContact allows you to import subscriber information as CSV (comma-delimited files) from virtually any spreadsheet or other contact management application, so you don’t have to enter existing contact and e-mail information. Importing contact information is straight-forward and simple.
Reporting Back
After sending e-mail, IntelliContact offers features that continue to manage the process. The system sends e-mail to let you know that your e-mail was distributed and automatically removes a contact from its database after five bounces, which you can reverse. It oversees the subscription process and allows subscribers to opt-out of receiving future e-mails and can add a sign-up form to a Web site that converts Web traffic into subscribers.
Reports offer feedback so you may evaluate the effectiveness of your promotions. They send statistics and dates and addresses of user removals. The reports also offer information on opens, clicks, bounces, number of e-mails successfully delivered and messages that subscribers forwarded to friends.
Drill-down features allow you to further evaluate underlying data. If you like, reports can be exported to Microsoft Excel or other desktop applications for further analysis.
IntelliContact also lets you send user surveys and tracks the results. Surveys can ask multiple choice, checkbox and open-response questions; feature an unlimited number of questions and be customized with logos and color schemes. The program automatically compiles results in reports that summarize poll choices and individual responses, including fill-in-the-blank questions. As with standard reports, results may be exported to Excel.
Working Interface
IntelliContact offers an intuitive interface that is easy to understand, learn and use. It offers convenient tabs that breakdown the system’s basic functions: “My Contacts,” to add contacts and manage lists; “Create,” to build messages from templates; “Send,” to distribute a message to a list and “Track,” to monitor statistics. It offers a logical and straight-forward procedure to build an e-mail from a template, add text, apply the e-mail to a list or sub-group and quickly send it.
If you have used an earlier version of IntelliContact, the revised interface is the biggest change in version 4. The company has condensed the program’s eight tabs into four.
Bottom Line and Pricing
If you’re ready to use e-mail to inform clients and contact prospective customers, IntelliContact offers an excellent means to create and deliver e-mail and manage the process. It’s a full-function tool that can become a valued part of your marketing arsenal.
Pricing is based on the number of contacts in your subscription list. At the low end, if you are managing up to 500 contacts, the cost is $9.95 per month. At the high end, if your lists contain up to 100,000 subscribers, the cost is $579.00 per month. The firm offers discounted rates to non-profit organizations and asks clients to request a quote should their subscription lists exceed 100,000 subscribers.
Wayne N. Kawamoto is a regular contributor to ECommerce-Guide.com.
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