For a lot of marketers, parameters like click-thru’ rates (CTR) and view-counts are necessary, but not sufficient. Because they’ve understood that the email needs to be backed with compelling content on their websites, that engages with the customer to achieve outcomes. How long did the person stay on the landing page? Where did she navigate to from there? Did anyone receiving the mailer fill out the enquiry?

To help you to dive into all this and more, MailDirect now allows you to transparently hook into Google Analytics for sites.

If you are already using Google Analytics to monitor your web presence points, you can now embed your property ID into your MailDirect campaigns; so when you now access your Analytics account, you will be able to see information on how many visitors your campaign generated, how long they stayed on the landing page (longer indicates more interest), where they moved from there, and more. All of which could prove useful in tuning up not only the specific campaign landing pages, but your site overall.

We believe that successful marketing is a conversation with your customer – engaging, and ongoing. And we’re working on many more ideas that help you achieve precisely this; for instance take our powerful and flexible Engagers functionality,  that helps you maintain a flow of time+event based interaction with your prospects and customers.

Drop us a line for a no-obligations trial and see how MailDirect can take you from one-sided announcements to conversations with your customers.

Note: This is not an endorsement of Google Analytics, nor a recommendation to use the system; this new capability of MailDirect will allow you to connect transparently to Google Analytics, should you be already using the system to track your web properties.

The core principle of the revamp was to bring features, and naturally, the benefits they provide, as much into the foreground as possible. While ensuring that we do not intrude into its ‘Install – Configure – Forget’ ideology.

For instance, the Main Admin Console is meant to show you the health and functioning of your PME v.8 at-a-glance. And also some of the more important parameters of your system… oops, I think I just gave away something here? :)

With a contextual, logical operational navigation on the left, and roll-down sections in the main-body, we hope you’ll discover many more benefits from PostMaster Enterprise.

And we hope the improved web-mail interface will convince you to begin the shift from the desktop mail-client model to the more secure and reliable web-mail on server approach even for your LAN.

Email Configuration (Main) – Admin

Web-proxy Configuration (TPM) – Admin

Collab Configuration – Admin

Looking forward to comments and feedback, needless to say!

It took AOL 9-years to get to 1-million users.
It took Facebook 9-months…
It took Draw Something 9-days!!

What happens when you combine mobile, social and photos? You get Instagram, which has just been acquired by Facebook in a $1-billion cash and stock deal! Btw, Instagram launched 1.4 years ago, has 13-employees, and 25+ million users!

What happens when you combine mobile, social and games? You have Draw Something – launched in February, 2012, and now the #1 app in 79+ countries, downloaded 20+ million times, and with 12+ million users per day!

These are among the many fascinating snippets of information in the slide-deck called The Future of Mobile, from Business Insider.

So what do you think? Where do you see yourself figuring in the mobile tidal wave?

And what happens when you combine mobile, social and work? gosocio? ;o)

Here’s an example of how one of these improvements works for you.

Minimizing information leakage through Bcc: Discovery 

PostMaster Enterprise ver.8 allows you set rules that both allows you to determine whether a message was invisibly marked to any unauthorized individual via a Bcc: and also what to do with such a message containing a Bcc address. You could choose to receive an alert when an email containing a Bcc was processed, without delivering the email to the Bcc recipient, or deliver and get alerted. Thus allowing you to implement good communications practices and making your organization’s email usage and processes that much more secure.

Better email usage policies = more effective email!

The improved web-mail interface of PostMaster Enterprise ver.8 will delight your users – eliminating the need for email clients and desktop storage of email, making your email platform even more reliable and secure.

We’ll be keeping you posted with the details, including the possible release dates, and offers which will only be available for you over the coming days.

Today, the Apple juggernaut rolls on relentlessly, while Android unites hardware manufacturers who hope to carve out a share in the exploding smartphone market that already exceeded PC sales in 2011. RIM is now fighting a desperate rearguard fight for its life, while its leadership is trooping out.

It was not a great day for RIM,or its new CEO Thorsten Heins. The quarterly earnings report was worse than expected, and drove another nail in the coffin of the iconic mobile platform company. But, big changes are coming as Heins makes some aggressive moves and tries to stage a comeback.

Revenue was down by $1 billion from the previous quarter, and RIM revealed it had sold only 500,000 of its BlackBerry PlayBook during this quarter. Contrast that with Apple’s most recent quarterly earnings report which claimed over 15 million iPads sold. To put that in perspective, RIM sold as many BlackBerry PlayBooks over an entire three-month period as Apple sold iPads by lunch time on the recent launch day of the third-generation model.

The tablet is just one facet of the problems at RIM, though. In 2011 Apple sold more iPhones in Canada–RIM’s home turf–than RIM sold BlackBerry devices.

Source: RIM Returning to Roots to Attempt Rebound

We’re getting the first glimpse of what returning to the roots involves for RIM, with the announcement of the Blackberry Mobile Fusion, which extends BES to manage iOS and Android devices as well. And while I wish RIM the best, let me take this opportunity to plug our SmartEmail functionality, which already provides you with seamless cross-platform email delivery along with filtering and full synchronization across devices.

Why would you want to stay locked in to a service, just when the smartphone world is opening up, tell me that!

It’s rather strange that we reiterate this day in and day out but don’t apply it rigorously to the way we do business. So you’re focused on the target, but how focused are you on your target audience. And since the majority of your potential customers are busy scouting the net for offerings similar to those of your organization, a major chunk of your target audience is online. How focused are your mailing lists? Are you reaching out to the right people to begin with? Is your high quality marketing collateral reaching the intended recipients’ mailbox or junk folder? Do these recipients think of you as spammers?

These were some of the many issues discussed at the MailDirect: Customer Connect workshop conducted by QLC. MailDirect is a resilient enterprise communication tool that simplifies an organization’s marketing and branding activities, enabling you stay on top of your customer’s mind. It comes to in a SaaS model and enables you to:

• Create attractive personalized email and SMS campaigns.
• Reach a wider audience through multilingual outbound dialers.
• Conduct surveys and gather market information.
• Analyze your campaign effectiveness through in-depth reports.

Read more..

 We all know that today merely initiating an interaction with your customers is not sufficient to sustain your business, what we need is continuous customer engagement by means of timely messaging. MailDirect not only enables you to establish the quintessential initial contact, but also supports continual customer engagement to keep you on top of their mind.

Let’s make our communications personal.. Let’s stay focused!

Oh! By the way, if you are suffering from excessive emails overload in your PC/smartphone, QLC has some exquisite features under the SmartEmail umbrella, but let’s talk about it separately.

This is just one of the many examples of what I started calling Contextual Insights, that IT is able to provide, which is set to change its role from being a cost efficiency enabler to becoming a key growth driver according to the recently released Accenture Technology Vision 2012 document.

The document comprises six well presented trends:

• Context-based services

• Converging data architectures

• Industrialized data services

• Social-driven IT

• PaaS-enabled agility

• Orchestrated analytical security

As a data and pattern-matching junkie, I was thrilled to see the #1 slot given to Context-based Services, which is all about creating highly retrievable stores of information about individual customers, and then using them along with the increasingly available real-world context information available about them – location, QR-Codes, preferences, et al, to provide input to them. Active inputs as opposed to passive recommendations, so to say.

Here’s what the document has to say about the ongoing impact of social platforms:

But social isn’t finished with changing the ways we communicate. One of the most prominent examples: Facebook recently launched the newest version of Open Graph—the framework that enables content developers to build apps that allow users to share whatever they are doing without overwhelming their friends. As founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained at the company’s F8 developers’ conference, Facebook felt constrained by the Like button because it is perceived as an implicit endorsement of content.

IMHO, items 2,3 & 5 are the necessary elements that have to come into play to deal with 1 & 4, and the last is going to be imperative to deal with the necessary by-product of the changes outlined here – the enormous implications on privacy and security.

At 50-pages, the Accenture Technology Vision 2012 is not a casual read, but you cannot afford not to read at least sections 1,4 & 6. Unless you’re Bill, or Larry, or Steve, or Mark, or… in which case you may prefer the Summary Report.

So what has this to do with my email consumption behavior? Simple – I’ve set a bunch of pretty tight rules that control which messages can make it to my handheld. And, rather than have mail pushed into my device, I choose to ‘pull’ at 15-min intervals. AND, I use an app that puts my device into Aircraft-mode from  2230 to 0630 the next morning. The last, of course, is a personal decision, and one that you could make too regardless of the handset you use – in fact, Blackberry lets you do this in the most convenient fashion!

Does this affect my work-interactions with colleagues? As a matter of fact, no, because we’ve been using a variety of online collaboration tools, that make one-to-many interactions far more productive. Which in turn is the seed of the idea that’s presently called - gosocio!

But before this turns out to be yet another plug for our services, please read the article that’s the reason for this posting - A Time to Tune Out, by Roger Cohen, in the New York Times.

A must read article on an intangible asset – delighted customers: The Value in Wowing Your Customers, by Fred Reichheld, Harvard Business Review.

Strongly recommend that you also follow the links from the article too.

Here’s an example of how one of these improvements works for you.

Smart Queue Processing for Outbound messages
PostMaster Enterprise ver.8 smartly separates messages based on their size, and then uses parallel threads for delivery, ensuring that a message with a large attachment doesn’t hold up more important messages from going out.

Better deliveries = more effective email!

The improved web-mail interface of PostMaster Enterprise ver.8 will delight your users – eliminating the need for email clients and desktop storage of email, making your email platform even more reliable and secure.

We’ll be keeping you posted with the details, including the possible release dates, and offers which will only be available for you over the coming days.

And oh, by the way would you be interested in having smart email filters, using which you could have only specific messages getting delivered to your iOS or Android smart-phone? Check out SmartEmail from MailServe, our powerful hosting platform.