WrapMail's Weblog

Soccer wrap – first club in Norway to use WrapMail

wrapmail — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 11:10:48 +0000

Hødd soccer club in Ulsteinvik, Norway is the first Norwegian soccer club to start using WrapMail. They already secured advertisers for their wraps and in taking advantage of this possibility are turning WrapMail into a new revenue source. The benefits are many: branding the club, promoting upcoming matches and special events such as the youth league.

WrapMail in Inc. Magazine

wrapmail — Tue, 05 May 2009 11:54:17 +0000

It’s a big day for us Wrappers as WrapMail has broken into a mainstream business publication – Inc. Magazine. The concept of using everyday emails as a new advertising medium is clearly beginning to take hold. Here is the article and link: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090501/sales-and-marketing-e-mails-that-sell.html

Sales & Marketing: E-Mails That Sell

Turning employee missives into ad campaigns

From: Inc. Magazine, May 2009 | By: Kasey Wehrum

The average employee sends about 38 e-mails a day. Could those be wasted marketing opportunities? That’s the thought that occurred to Sean Guerin, co-founder of U.S. Imaging Solutions, a Davie, Florida–based company that sells and services copiers and printers. Guerin decided to try WrapMail, a service that slips advertisements for his company’s products into the e-mails his 60 employees send to customers, vendors, and friends. Now, all of Guerin’s employees have become de facto members of the sales team just by keeping up with regular correspondence.

Several recently introduced products and services, including WrapMail, mailPrimer, BrandMail, and Exclaimer Signature Manager, offer these so-called e-mail enhancements. Prices and features vary, but they all take a company’s outgoing e-mail messages and turn them into marketing mailers, complete with stationery-style borders, banner ads to promote sales and new products, and embedded links. Or as WrapMail describes its service, “It’s like an e-mail signature on steroids.”

As the name suggests, WrapMail takes an outgoing e-mail message and wraps the borders in clickable images. Companies create banner ads, add them to a template, and specify which webpage should appear when someone clicks on an ad. Employees don’t need to install anything — the ads are automatically added after they hit Send. For companies with fewer than 200 employees, the service, which costs $5 per user per month, routes outgoing e-mail through WrapMail’s servers. For larger companies, it’s an additional $3,000 to install a WrapMail server on-site.

Guerin saw results right away. In the first week, someone who clicked on an e-mail banner ad bought an $8,000 printer. The e-mail in question? A reply Guerin had sent to a friend, saying he would attend a dinner party. Guerin’s friend forwarded the RSVP to the host, who happened to work at a photography studio that needed a new printer. Guerin was so impressed that he later joined WrapMail’s board.

There is some evidence to suggest that everyday e-mails make for a persuasive marketing platform. According to a survey by Forrester Research, 77 percent of people say they trust the information in e-mails sent from people they know. That ranks well above the 46 percent who trust what they read in newspapers. And whether or not recipients fully trust the ads in e-mails from acquaintances, they at least look at them. WrapMail claims that nearly all of the e-mails sent with its service get opened. A typical e-mail marketing newsletter, in contrast, is lucky to get a 50 percent open rate.

The e-mail ads may be especially effective in niche markets. Tim Davey, president of Global Marine Travel, an agency based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, that arranges flights for people who work on oil rigs, cargo ships, and private yachts, says WrapMail helps the company target its marketing efforts. Because airlines offer these workers special discounts through Global Marine, the company doesn’t widely publicize its promotions. “We spend about 50 percent of our time turning down people who aren’t qualified to use these fares,” says Davey. About 24 of Global Marine’s 78 employees get ads placed on outgoing messages — about 500 e-mails a month — to cruise-line executives, yacht owners, and other travel agencies. About half of all recipients click on the ads, says Davey.

Of course, there are some drawbacks to plastering e-mails with ads. The messages sometimes get tangled in spam filters. There are also concerns that the in-your-face ads will turn off customers. When WrapMail was mentioned on a tech blog recently, it drew some criticisms. “If I was regularly receiving e-mails with wraps…I would stop dealing with that company,” wrote one commenter. Another added, “Just what we need, more advertising to invade our personal space. Stay out of my inbox!”

WrapMail allows each recipient to opt out of the ads and receive just normal, plain-text e-mails. And a company can omit the ads for contacts who receive frequent e-mails. But Guerin isn’t worried about his ads getting on people’s nerves. “You can’t hit people over the head hard enough when it comes to making them aware of the products you offer,” he says.

Wrap it up!

Dave Kustin, CMO – WrapMail

Shop to Earn signs on with WrapMail

wrapmail — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 13:51:09 +0000

Shop to Earn/Shop to Earth has signed an agreement with WrapMail for a custom solution of WrapMail Lite for Shop to Earn distributors. Shop to Earn has about 150,000 distributors and growing rapidly, all existing and new distributors will be offered the WrapMail solution at a monthly charge (or discounted annual charge). This custom solution will have the following features:

* Complete web-based email system

* Custom Shop to Earn templates

* Individual customization where users can upload their own image, text and unique links to be implemented in the wrap

* Immediate Click tracking (Alert folder) and custom reporting

* POP3 and SMTP option so users can send/receive from email clients such as Outlook, Mac Mail, Cell phones etc

Every Shop to Earn distributor has a unique website and, like all professionals, send emails every day to clients, prospects, friends and family. Using WrapMail’s solution will glue together their unique website with these daily emails. The effect is that every email they send anyway now becomes part of their marketing, driving traffic to their website and giving valuable research as recipients click on various parts of the wrap.

WrapMail approved by Google Solutions Marketplace

wrapmail — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 19:48:08 +0000

WrapMail’s solution for educational institutions has been approved for listing on Google’s Solutions Marketplace.

Toshiba Business Solutions signs on with WrapMail

wrapmail — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 19:26:57 +0000

Toshiba Business Solutions (TBS) has today signed up with WrapMail to use WrapMail’s Enterprise Solution. WrapMail will install its propritary software in TBS’s datacenter and initially TBS will use WrapMail for 750 employees accross North America. The Enterprise solution includes the WrapMaker (Patent Pending) where TBS can make an unlimited amount of wraps (a “wrap” is a dynamic and interactive letterhead for regular emails) and further set rules as far as who will be using what wrap when, either individually, by department or rotation. Furthermore the solution includes full tracking of the interactive elements of the wraps by sender, recipient, subject and timestamps. WrapMail Enterpise also includes a campaign module where TBS can upload email lists and send campaign style emails to a large audience. As with all WrapMail’s solutions nothing will be installed on any desktop/laptop computer or cell phone and no routines change as far as the senders are concerned. WrapMail’s solution is one where all emlements are embedded in the email itself (images and links) and thus these show up on the recipients end without images being blocked and having to be downloaded. WrapMail is compatible with Google Analytics.

Example of what a TBS wrap could look like:

Toshiba Business Solutions Florida wrap example

Toshiba Business Solutions will now be able to take advantage of the facts that they have web pages and employees that send external emails every day anyway. WrapMail enables every email and every sender to become part of TBS’s marketing effort and the esitmated number of branding impressions for 750 senders is about 75,000 per month according to WrapMail’s statistics. Statistics further show that 5-10% of these emails will result in a click and thus a visit to a TBS web page. We all send emails every day, with WrapMail senders now inform the reciving audience via images, text and links of all the products and services the senders company has to offer.

No More Old School Emails

wrapmail — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 15:29:13 +0000

Hi All – check out the article that ran in the Broward College newspaper. Yes, we are still at it – building the first ever ad network using college emails. Yes, we are working closely with Google to make this happen as Broward College has made WrapMail a top requirement for their new student email system. Yes, the students love the idea…read on:

Dave Kustin – CMO, WrapMail

German, French and Japanese for NuSkin

wrapmail — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 21:11:16 +0000

Check it out…sign up…

Signup at www.wrapmail.com/nuskin

WrapMail & NuSkin in Eight Languages. Wow.

wrapmail — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 19:48:13 +0000

WrapMail now has Wraps in 8 languages for NuSkin distributors including: Spanish, Finnish, Danish, Russian, Swedish, Norwegian, Chinese and English. WrapMail Lite has been live for a few weeks and the response has been great. We will be launching a new and improved interface for that system in the next week as well. Here are images of the new NuSkin Wraps:

Signup at www.wrapmail.com/nuskin

Wrap it up!

Dave Kustin – CMO, WrapMail

Email Blows Away All Other Social Networks

wrapmail — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 15:29:45 +0000

Email Blows Away All Other Social Networks

by Max Kalehoff, Friday, January 4, 2008, 12:31 PM

With the explosive excitement and high valuations of Facebook and the like, it’s time to take a step back and acknowledge the mother of all social networks: email. Yes, plain-vanilla email.

Sure, a few of the big social networks have really taken off recently, but email is still by far the dominant and most practical platform for social connections. A recent Pew Internet & American Life Project survey found that 91% of Internet users between the ages of 18 and 64 send or read e-mail, far more than any social network.

In fact, email is so dominant that it’s the single open-source backbone of nearly every social network. Think about it: Most social networks require your email address to sign up. Then they try to upload your email address book in order to communicate with your contacts. I can’t think of a social network I belong to that doesn’t ask me for my email address every time I log in. In fact, I find myself turning off the default email notifications in most social networks I sign up for!

There’s a lot of hoopla about email losing relevance with younger generations, and therefore heading toward extinction. Baloney. The fact is that kids’ primary communication devices are mobile, not computers optimized for email. Therefore they use those devices’ best application: SMS and voice. But once kids graduate, take on business responsibilities and (many) sit in front of a PC all day long, email becomes a hard fact of life. Scott Karp at Publishing2.com noted that “Most people over 30 don’t have many (or any) business or personal relationships that don’t involve communicating by email.” Scott also underscored Research In Motion, whose revenue rose year-over-year to $1.67 billion from $835.1 million — by selling email devices. There’s something to the social network known as email.

Now consider the natural, authentic and deeper social connections inherent in email. Steve Hodson, who blogs at WinExtra.com, noted that his email connections “have risen up the ranks of the network over time and as such have more of a trust factor associated with them that you will never find elsewhere.” Actual writing, thoughtful interaction and more manual contact management lead to connections far more significant than superficial layers of distributed pokes and passive status feeds.

And as proof that social-networking dominance just might lie with email, the major Internet media companies have acknowledged plans to turn their email services into social networks. Saul Hansell reported on the New York Times Bits blog that “Yahoo and Google realize they have this information (email address books) and can use it to build their own services that connect people to their contacts.” Joe Kraus, who runs Google’s OpenSocial project, conceded “there are opportunities with iGoogle to make it more social. It is much easier to extend an existing habit than to create a brand.” Yahoo has been more forthcoming with its “Inbox 2.0.” I’m not sure of Microsoft, but it could have a hand at the table with its massive customer base across Hotmail, Exchange and Outlook.

Finally, considering my ongoing bout with Socialnetworkitis, I’m more thankful and bullish on email than ever before. I believe online social networks have a big future, and they’re a critical part of my personal and professional life today. But email still is the most reliable and manageable platform for social interaction. It is my default.

In the future, I hope the benefits of the latest wave of social networks will begin to merge seamlessly with the simplicity, compatibility and utility of email. That includes integrated profiling, information feeds, social-network analysis, privacy and controls. Of course, the big hurdle will be the ongoing fight against spam. Spammers may validate significance, but they’re also preventing email from becoming a truly great social network.

Will any social network ever become more important than email?

Social Networks + Email = WrapMail & Free Awesomeness

wrapmail — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 19:41:15 +0000

Following our latest release of www.wrapmaillite.com for MLM, real estate agents and eBay sellers, WrapMail now connects social networks with email - www.wrapmail.com/social. WrapMail gives users the ability to drive traffic directly to their respective social network pages such as Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, personal blogs, etc…by including links and logos embedded in every email they send. Here’s an example:

WrapMail is the first company in the world to successfully marry social networking elements and email. MySpace has recently announced an email product, but it requires that you have a profile with them and will not allow for your other social network profiles to be included.

There are many themes for the top and bottom to choose from and more will be added every week. There’s a logo library available of the world’s 25 largest social networks and common blogs. Users can set a link for each logo and also upload their own images. Four images show in each Wrap and if more than four are selected they will rotate with every email. There is no cost for the service, which means this is free awesomeness.

Our pitch remains the same: you have web pages and you send emails, WrapMail connects them and drives traffic to your pages and also tells you who is looking at what and when. Simple. Smart. Be sure to join the “I’m a Wrapper” group on Facebook.

Dave Kustin – CMO, WrapMail