Relenta CRM
October 16, 2006 in 3 out of 5 stars, CRM, Email newsletter management, Hosted softwareRelenta CRM: A new CRM tool (customer relationship management). Includes email, contact manager, shared calendar, email newsletter marketing/autoresponders. Relenta They claim, and employ a (now familiar) "Less is more" approach. They call it the "90/10 rule" "Designed for usability and efficiency, Relenta CRM achieves 90 percent of the functionality commonly required by small business users with only ten percent of the application weight." They integrate email, contact management, calendar, and email newsletter marketing software into one application. The free plan offers quite a bit for the starting-out entrepreneur trying to determine if this software is right for them. They've obviously put a great deal of effort into this offering. The interface is attractive and fairly well conceived and it includes many of the features you'd expect from a CRM. It will be interesting to see how it evolves (it needs some maturing still) and how it stands up to the imminent Sunrise (CRM product) from 37signals. A detailed user guide/help/knowledge base is really needed (they are working on it). The support is decent in the meantime (although the support form is cumbersome to fill out). They do have a PDF "user's manual" you'll find in your Relenta inbox after you create an account, which is helpful. They need spell check. HTML email templates would be nice (right now offers only plain-text email) They require 3 credentials for login, not just the normal 2 (i.e. username/password). The initial starting experience still needs some polish. I had that bewildering "what do I do now" moment when I started. The free account allows only one user, but you are offered the form to create another user. Only after you attempt it does the application tell you can't add one ("user limit exceeded"). Then the statistics on my dashboard reported 2 out of 1 user, but I still only had the one. The application response feels a bit sluggish (and no AJAX in sight, which could alleviate some of that feeling). It feels like they may have rushed to launch it. It's certainly usable as it is and (I have reports from a very happy user), and it's an impressive application, but we've come to expect more from web applications in the last couple years, and this one isn't quite there yet. From FREE to $50 per user per month Reviewed by Carson McComasWhat is it?
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Amigo
September 11, 2006 in 4 out of 5 stars, A service, Email newsletter managementAmigo: Amigo is a service that matches advertisers with online newsletters, and vice versa. Carson Systems For every person fully converted to RSS land, there are a bazillion folks still reaching their audience with good old fashion email newsletters. Carson Systems cleverly found this blind spot in the market and have applied many of the modern design, functionality and simplicity principles that have gained traction on the web in the last 18 months. In so doing, they've created an elegant service that can benefit owners of those email lists (large or small), and those of us who may wish to communicate with those audiences. Part of the challenge in the "techcrunch" industry is reaching markets beyond our own echo-chamber. If Amigo can effectively gain newsletter owners beyond our borders - this can be a very effective tool for both sides (newsletter owners and advertisers). It's still very early yet so there's a slight chicken-and-egg problem with reaching a critical mass. But the application is strong enough - with time I do believe it'll happen. I'd be slightly nervous about click fraud and I'm curious to see how they plan to handle it. Amigo takes 30% of click revenue. Reviewed by Carson McComasWhat is it?
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MailUp
August 31, 2006 in 3 out of 5 stars, Email newsletter management, Hosted softwareMailUp: MailUp is a web based tool for managing email newsletters. It can be integrated with web sites or CRM applications. It manages subscribes (single or double opt-in), unsubscribes, bounces and provides statistics. NWeb Pricing: MailUp does not have a "pay per message" or "pay per contact" pricing model, you pay only a flat monthly fee and you can send whatever you like plus and you can have any number of subscribers in your DB. However, there are different pricing plans. Lower plans offer less features (lowest plan doesn't have bounce management for example) plus the lower the plan, the slower the send rate, ranging from 720/hr to 103,500/hr. Nice features: attachments, embedded images, international charsets support. Their sales site is terrible (they tell me they're in the process up an update), getting started requires a human-mediated sales cycle (yuck). Polls/survey module not yet completed, SMS Module available only for Europe recipients, admin tools are slightly cumbersome to use. Admin tool doesn't work in FireFox. The parent company is Italian and you'll occasionally run into poor translations to English, or fully Italian language portions of the service. I had to email them to get this, but they claim it will be on the site once they redesign. They are responsive on email. $59/mo - $120/mo - $450/mo - $3,300/mo Reviewed by Carson McComasWhat is it?
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MailBuild
August 18, 2006 in 5 out of 5 stars, Email newsletter management, Hosted softwareMailBuild: MailBuild is an email newsletter tool built just for web designers. You design a template for each client and they log in to their own account to manage their subscribers, create and send their own emails and view reports on the results. Freshview (formerly Switch I.T.) I've been using Freshview's other product, Campaign Monitor, for over a year to manage my email campaigns. It's still the best software out there to send email campaigns for yourself and your clients. But I've had several clients for whom Campaign Monitor wasn't a fit because they wanted to create and send their own (good looking) email newsletters. To meet that need, Dave Greiner and company now bring us MailBuild. It's a great tool for your clients that want to take control of their own email marketing. The idea is a simple one. You design an email template for each of your clients using the simple MailBuild template
system. Your clients can then log into their own account, add their own content to each newsletter using a very cool and easy to use AJAX-based editor, and send it to their own subscribers. As with Campaign Monitor, they can also see great looking reports on the results of their campaign and easily add and remove subscribers to their account. The entire interface is so polished and can be re-branded to look like your own product. Your clients can even log into their account from your own web site. Freshview have a knack for polishing their interfaces so that they
hold your hand, and read your mind, and this is no exception. These guys really are an inspiration for how to properly do a web app. In an effort to keep things simple, they don't yet allow custom fields. This might be a nice addition, and Dave has indicated that if the demand is there, he'll add it. Like Campaign Monitor, you pay $5 + 1 cent per email. You pay on behalf of your clients so there's plenty of room to charge each client a marked-up fee for your management of it. Reviewed by Carson McComasWhat is it?
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Campaign Monitor
June 27, 2005 in 5 out of 5 stars, Email newsletter management, Hosted softwareCampaign Monitor: Web based email newsletter and list management software for web designers. Switch I.T. (now Freshview) It's going to be hard to explain the ecstacy I experience each time I use this service. For years I've been trying to find the perfect tool to manage email newsletters for myself and my clients. Just when I thought no one could get it right, Campaign Monitor came along and blew my socks off.
They handle everything, from capturing your subscribers, sending your campaigns and delivering very sexy reports straight to your clients. Plus, the software is continually updated and they provide you with loads of tips and articles on getting the most out of email marketing.
The best part - you get all this for only a penny an email. And you only pay when you use it (no silly monthly charges or anything). Honestly, this thing just rocks. Hmmm.... this is a tough one the thing is near perfect. For the anal-retentive in me, there are some totally unimportant quirks where you can't delete some of your past campaigns. $5 + 1 cent/email Reviewed by Carson McComas What is it?
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