Faster, Easier Email – With Stats

For many years now ESP Marketing Assistant has offered salons and spas the ability to bulk email their clients. There is a feature to create an email and the ability to filter the recipients from your ESP client database.

However, when it comes to delivery of the emails it can get a little tricky because you are sending them through your normal email service provider. The upside of this is that you don’t have to pay for the emails in the same way that you would through a third party bulk email provider but the down side is that most email service providers have a limit of how many emails you can send through their servers in a given period of time and if you exceed this they may block you as a spammer.

Further to this because your email and management software is “offline” the images that get included in the email are actually embedded in the message rather than simply being links to an online location, which means that if you create email with three images in and send this email to 5000 people then it will send the same three images 5000 times, which means that the send will take a long time and use a lot more data.

We had previously solved part of this problem by allowing you to compress your messages into batches of about 20 emails at a time and this enabled many users to successfully send bulk emails directly to their clients at no cost.

But there were still not statistics available, ie, how many mails were received, opened, links clicked etc.

In order to solve this some ESP clients chose rather to export their client database from the ESP Marketing Assistant and use a third party emailing solution that you pay for. However, we wanted a solution that was far more integrated, like our SMS system. Last month we had 850 000 messages sent out by ESP clients with very little help from ESP support staff and this is what we have wanted to achieve for our emailing, fast, easy emailing with no blacklisting and great stats to show exactly what has happened with your emails.

Well, we are proud to announce that this is now possible. By partnering with Grapevine ESP has now made it possible to create and send emails in exactly the same manner as you do now but instead of sending them through your normal email service provider you can now send them through Grapevine, just like you do for SMS.

The ESP Marketing Assistant will automatically upload your email images to a server so that they only get sent once, the recipient list will get uploaded once and ESP sends a trigger to Grapevine notifying them to deliver the email. It then goes through their Silverpop messaging system and you can log in to view your delivery stats or get them sent to you automatically via email.

In a nutshell, its faster – only a few seconds to send to thousands of recipients and you get stats as well and you don’t have to export your client database and import it into another system. It also means that you can work offline and not have to log into and online browser based system, but you still get all the benefits of the online system, it’s the best of both worlds.

However, there will be a cost involved. So if you are someone that is already paying a third party for your bulk emailing then will be a no-brainer for you. If you are someone that finds the existing method to slow or finding that your email service provider keeps blacklisting you as a spammer then you should definitely sign up.

But, if you are someone that does not wish to pay for bulk emailing and are happy with how things currently work, then you can just keep using the ESP Marketing Assistant exactly as you currently as you will have the choice of which method you want to use.

PLEASE CONTACT US IF YOU WANT TO TEST OUT OUR NEW FUNCTIONALITY AND WE WILL MAKE THE RESPECTIVE ARRANGEMENTS WITH YOU. Note that this is very new technology so please bear with us and we plan for its release.