Monthly Archive for May, 2007

New DKIM Standard Good for legitimate E-Marketers

The web has been a buzz about the new standard for email designed to thwart spam and phishing attacks. DomainKeys Identified Mail is a new standard recently approved that utilizes highly encrypted secured digital signatures to authenticate a messages sender.  The only delay in widespread use is the mass adoption of the new email standards.  The nice thing for marketers is that the new standard allows for keys to be used by third party mailers such as legitimate outsourced providers of e-marketing.

By reducing the number of unwanted junk email into a user’s inbox, legitimate marketing emails will have more credibility and perhaps get more notice from users.  Illegal spammers have done so much harm to the reputation of legitimate marketers who send only highly focused emails to likely interested users. I for instance, don’t mind receiving unsolicited messages from a company that has a new software or technology useful in my industry.  There is a greater chance that the message has something I may be interested in as I like to stay abreast of what’s available in my space.

Only time will tell, but this is the best idea for fighting unwanted SPAM and phishing scams yet, and may benefit legitimate marketers as well. I would love to hear your thoughts on this subject.

Test of 3 Email Marketing Tools: The Winner IS…

I have been trying out three different affordable online email marketing tools over the past 6 months; Campaigner, Vertical Response, and Sales Genius. This is not a comprehensive analysis by any means. I just wanted to touch on the pros and cons I noticed in my evaluation.

Vertical Response:
Pros:
nice interface, flexible pricing structure, low pay as you go rates, no monthly fees, good list management features 
Cons: limited website tracking requires manual codes for specific pages

Campaigner:
Pros:
fast send rate, flexible scheduling, easy to use
Cons: primitive interface, limited list management, no website tracking

Sales Genius
Pros:
page-by-page website tracking, powerful list management features through Smart Groups, real time notification of open and click stats, track contact activity history across campaigns and lists
Cons: no pricing flexibility for one time overages, limited help file, slow send rate

The Verdict

In the end, I have chosen to stay with Sales Genius despite the pricing flexibility issues I have. The website tracking features are simply too powerful and at this price point it is an incredible value. It requires no website modification on your end making it extremely easy and fast to get real time page-by-page web visit stats. I also like that instead of just uploading individual lists for campaigns, all contacts are loaded in a single database sorted by smart groups which you can assign and reassign based on any number of data points. This allows you to view site visit statistics across all campaigns and groups. 

Overall I had a positive experience with each solution. Your exact need might dictate you needing a feature I might have missed. All three also have Salesforce.com integration but the integration in Sales Genius is a more true integration and offers better tracking. 

If you have used or compared the above mentioned tools, or have used an email marketing tool I missed, please post your experiences.