emma - email marketing in style

Here at Business Ready we are preparing for our official launch late this fall. Just like you we are collecting contact names and information like crazy as people express interest in the products and services now. As such, we have been struggling with two key questions: where to store our contact information and what service will we use to provide targeted information to key individuals?

Allow me to introduce you to Emma:

Emma offers everything you need to manage and grow your audience, create and send stylish email newsletters and campaigns, and track your response in real time - all in an easy-to-use, Web-based account with new features being added every month.

Everything about Emma appeals to us: good price point, easy and simple to use, MacOS and PC versions, geared for the little guy (aka small business) and served up in clean lines with a sense of humor.

The platform is centered around three key areas:

1. Audience which allows you to easily organize and store your contact information including: customizable databases, import existing lists (which they will also “de-dup”), create custom sign up screens for new contacts to be added and organize your contacts into one or more customizable groups. Yeah!
2. The campaign features allow you to custom design email templates which they will do for you or you can do yourself if you are an HTML wiz. You can include links within the template to forward the email, manage your preferences, sign up or request contact or removal while being CAN-SPAM and PIPEDA compliant. Also, you can save documents to the Emma Library so that you don’t have to have attachments within your email campaign (you include a link) which will increase your chances of getting your email to the right person. The best part is that if you have an individual that is in more than one group they will only receive one email for each campaign. Nice.
3. Then there are the response features which notify you real time of the various activities of your email campaign (has the email been opened, did they click through to the link, did they forward it, etc). This does sound a bit big-brotherish but it means you can really fine tune your next campaign to make sure your campaigns are strategic.

So, what are we doing? Well, decided against salesforce.com, Outlook or some other contact management system and instead are currently capturing contact information in an excel spreadsheet until we are ready to upload to Emma and begin our marketing campaigns in earnest.

Get to know Emma if for nothing else than to read the employee bio’s - they are hilarious! We like Emma. Perhaps we will take her out for a drink?