E-tailers often use e-mail marketing to get their message out to current and potential customers. But when many people receive dozens, if not hundreds, of e-mails every day, it's a challenge to make your message stand out.
Adding audio, video, photos, and graphics can help. In the past, however, blasting out an e-mail message with multimedia content wasn't practical because of the hefty storage and bandwidth demands sometimes required.
Several online services, such as GoldMail and Eyejot, are trying to help small e-commerce businesses skirt around the challenges of sending multimedia e-mail. Neither service actually delivers multimedia content directly into e-mail inboxes, however. Instead, recipients receive an e-mail containing a hyperlink that, when clicked, takes them to a Web site where a presentation or video is played.
Here's an overview of how the two services work.
GoldMail: A Web-Hosted Slide Show
GoldMail lets you create narrated slide shows, which are hosted on external servers. To create a presentation, subscribers download GoldMail's application to a Windows PC; a Mac version is coming soon, according to the company.
Using the GoldMail application, you import and arrange the order of image files and documents in your presentation. As you click through the presentation you've assembled, you can add your own narration using your computer's microphone. Presentations can be up to 10 minutes long.
After previewing your presentation, you upload it to GoldMail servers. You receive a URL link to the hosted presentation, which you can then send to others via e-mail. Alternatively, you can embed GoldMail presentations on your Web site or blog.
GoldMail services are $10 per month per user, for one to 10 users; $10 monthly per user, for 11-25 users; and $8 per month per user, for over 25 users. The custom branded player ($149 for a one-year contract) lets businesses display their own logo and colors in their presentations. (Non-branded services display GoldMail's logo at the start of a presentation.) The custom branded player is free for one year if you pay for five or more users.
GoldMail offers tracking features, so you can see who viewed your message, when it was viewed, and how many times.
Tempe Reichardt, founder of Bibola.com, a wine and gourmet food e-commerce site launched in November 2008, used GoldMail to create a narrated slide show announcing the availability of Bibola.com's wine club charter memberships.
"My site is different from other wine e-commerce sites, and I wanted my first message to potential customers to convey that difference," Reichardt explains. "A plain old text e-mail just wouldn't have done it. I wanted something that was more cutting edge and fun."
The reaction to Reichardt's GoldMail message was overwhelmingly positive, she said. "Customers told me they were intrigued by it and really enjoyed the personal touch," she adds.
However, creating the presentation wasn't as easy as she'd hoped. "I'm a small business person first," she said. "I'm not technologically savvy when it comes to developing multimedia content, and I needed help to create this presentation."
Eyejot: Video Messages Delivered in E-Mail
Eyejot is another communications tool that small e-commerce businesses can use to get attention.
With Eyejot, you can record a video message using your computer's Webcam. Unlike GoldMail, you don't have to download and install an application to create your video. Everything is done through Eyejot.com's site in your Web browser.
Your video is hosted on Eyejot servers. When you're ready to share it, you send an e-mail from within Eyejot's site. Recipients receive an e-mail that contains a static image of your video, with a large click-to-play button within the image. When the button is pressed, viewers are taken to an Eyejot Web page to view the video. You can also embed your Eyejot videos on a Web site or blog, and videos you create can be viewed on iPods and iPhones and in iTunes.
There are three price/feature levels of Eyejot service: The free version lets you record videos up to 1 minute in length, send unlimited messages, send to any e-mail address, and import your Outlook or other address book.
For $30 a year, the Pro service lets you record videos up to five minutes and adds the ability to upload video files (instead of being limited to creating a video with your Webcam, as with the free service). Video messages created using the Pro service don't contain advertising or promotion for Eyejot.
With a Pro Plus account ($100 a year), you can also add custom logos and color schemes to your videos, see when your messages have been viewed, and attach documents to your video messages.
(Please Continue to Page 2 for Four More Options for Multimedia E-Mail Marketing)
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