This is not another ExactTarget vs. Silverpop vs. MailChimp vs. ConstantContact post. I promise. If you are actively engaging with customers or prospects via email, chances are you have found your delivery mechanism. And I hope you love it.
Here you will find a quick review of three tools any email marketer can use, regardless of her chosen send software. The tools below can give email marketers a leg up with inspired design, clean lists and improved relevance.
InboxVision
What Is It?
InboxVision provides a healthy database of emails sent by brands across the globe. Users can garner inspiration and design ingenuity from competitors, top email marketing brands or separate industries altogether. The service allows us to create a search query that will pull in relevant email messages and provide alerts when new emails are added. We can collect our favorites in a lightbox to save them for later or share them with colleagues, clients and team members.
How Does It Work?
InboxVision builds and maintains its massive collection of industry-agnostic emails by pulling from a few sources: 1) they rely on a panel of helpers who send along emails as they are received, 2) they themselves sign up to receive emails from major B2B and B2C organizations under different names and addresses, and 3) InboxVision users can seed their own collections with an email address provided by the service. InboxVision maintains multiple profiles to beat out any sending caps, multiple domains to ensure receipt, and they wisely click on images to give the impression of an active user.
Potential Use Cases
- Monitor competitor activity
- Prepare for new business pitches
- Elevate creative and email aesthetics by sampling what others are sending
- Keep a watchful eye on affiliates or franchises who are representing your brand
How Much?
InboxVision offers pay as you go or monthly/annual plans. Get access for one month for $147. The annual rate is $885. Each account includes five search queries to gather relevant emails and five lightbox folders to collect your favorites.
LeadSpend
What Is It?
LeadSpend ultimately helps email marketers protect sender reputation. The tool validates emails to improve delivery rates to near 100%. This validation process can happen at the point of email capture or with a list that has been dormant for some time. Validation is a critical process for email marketers as it allows us to protect our sender reputations among internet service providers and get more of our emails to the inbox. As data reliability and quality present daunting hurdles for email marketers, LeadSpend can ensure the cleanliness of your lists.
How Does It Work?
Customers can upload a list to LeadSpend for validation. The process entails checks against spam traps, disposable emails, misspellings and bogus addresses (e.g. test@test.com). Within seconds, LeadSpend can update the list by providing detail on those emails that were validated or not validated with the reasons why. This same process can be applied to lead generation forms which utilize the LeadSpend technology. While LeadSpend works with customers through partners like BlueHornet, Eloqua, Silverpop and others, they can also handle clients directly.
Potential Use Cases
- Improve a shoddy Sender Score
- Verify email addresses at the time of collection
- Clean a list before reengaging a sluggish group of subscribers
- Ensure “abandoned cart” messages make it to their desired recipient
How Much?
Pricing starts at 1ยข per email. There are no contracts or long term commitments. LeadSpend requires a $100 minimum fee regardless of list size.
RapLeaf
What Is It?
RapLeaf is a service email marketers can utilize to improve list quality. The product will not help you acquire more email contacts, it will improve the knowledge and information you have about current contacts. Users can upload a list, select desired data points including age, gender, marital status, interests, purchase data, etc. From there, RapLeaf scans its data records to find additional information about your contacts and append your list. The service enables marketers to deliver more relevant, personalized messages.
How Does It Work?
Rapleaf is able to gather more information about your email recipients by teaming with well known and reputable data partners. They pull from census data, public records, surveys and other data aggregators. Their service scans for email address matches across a host of records to improve the quality of your list.
Potential Use Cases
- Segment your lists based on distinct data points (e.g. location, income, education, etc.)
- Garner additional information about sales prospects during the conversion cycle
- Acquire necessary intelligence without having to ask or require it from prospects at sign-up
- Determine how many of your subscribers would find a specific product/service promotion of interest
How Much?
Pricing scales based on the quantity of records and the number of fields you would like appended. For instance, a list with 5,000 records can be updated with age, gender, zip and home owner status for $102.00. See and play with the pricing scale here.
Outside of email delivery tools, what are some of the email marketing utilities you rely upon?
Here’s another service my company uses to protect email sender reputation: https://www.GreenAppleMail.com. You should take a look at them as they can ensure the cleanliness of your email lists and actually they have improved our delivery rates to near 100%.
Looks interesting. I’ll check it out. Thanks for the input.