WrapMail signs 3 new Hotels in Norway

WrapMail today signed Hotell Ivar Assen, Hareid Hotell and Sagafjord Hotell in Norway. These hotels should start wrapping early next week.

WrapMail is a finalist for the South Florida Business Journal’s 2009 Technology Awards

WrapMail, Inc. has been selected as a finalist for the South Florida Business Journal’s 2009 Technology Awards in the Interactive Marketing category.

The Technology Awards was created to honor the area’s best technology-based companies, the CEOs or CIOs leading the way, and the companies making the best use of a technology in South Florida. We looked for growing startup companies, trend-setting innovations, products and services to highlight. Our judging team – led by our editorial department, along with Mark Smith, COO of 3Cinteractive; Mark Wyllie, executive director of InternetCoast; Travis Berger, VP and president-elect of the South Florida Interactive Marketing Association; and Chris Burgio, president of the South Florida Technology Alliance – selected three outstanding finalists in each category from the scores of nominations received.

On Nov. 5, WrapMail, Inc. and all of the finalists will be honored at a special awards luncheon at Jungle Island, at 1111 Parrot Jungle Trail, in Miami.

WrapMail in Inc. Magazine

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

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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.

Copyright © 2009 Mansueto Ventures LLC. All rights reserved.
Inc.com, 7 World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007-2195.

Wrap it up!

Dave Kustin, CMO – WrapMail

Independent Professionals Unite!

WrapMail will be launching a new service, WrapMail Lite, within the next 30 days targeted to independent professionals. Please allow me to define independent professional.  An independent professional may be someone that works in network marketing (Arbonne, Avon, Mary Kay, etc…), as an eBay seller, a real estate agent or any other professional typically associated with a group affiliation.  See below for a preview of the sign up page:

Why do this?  There are tens of millions of people currently working as independent reps for various network marketing groups and the vast majority, if not all of them, use a web based email address to email their prospects and clients.  WrapMail Lite will be the only web based email system specifically designed for independent professionals.  Users will be able to preview and choose a professionally designed Wrap for their affiliation, customize it with their picture, link(s), contact info and send wrapped emails from a unique email address (@wrapmail.com).  Why use Yahoo, AOL, Gmail or the others when you can use this to push your store out with every email?

Wrapped emails will have the designated affiliation’s images along with the users image embedded in the email which will always show up – never a red x – and will be clickable back to the users unique web page(s).  The system tracks all clicks and reports back to the sender WHO is clicking on WHAT and WHEN.  The cost will be $4.95 per month or $49.95 for the year which is an incredible value in these trying economic times.

Dave Kustin – CMO, WrapMail

30 New Accounts in October

Not a record month, but still very good.  That’s 30 new companies representing hundreds of employees sending thousands of wrapped emails every day instead of plain black on white ones.  I am beginning to think of wrapped emails as being ‘PROACTIVE’ versus ‘PASSIVE’ or ‘ELECTRIC’ versus ‘ACOUSTIC.’  Whatever the analogy, wrapped emails do something – they inform, brand, conduct research, up sell, cross sell – they are an extension of your staff. I can’t think of another marketing/communication tool that is as active and subtle at the same time as WrapMail.

Wrap on…

 

Dave Kustin – CMO, WrapMail

Intellectual property protection

Every company should strive for the development of propriety technology, processes or products which are often supported with patents. This is especially true for those that operate in a commodity driven business. Thankfully WrapMail does not operate in a commodity business and is alone in a $60BB market.  That of course does not mean we have not pursued our own set of patents, one of which is for the WrapMaker.  We have filed a patent for the WrapMaker which is the main tool for our customers to implement their own Wraps.  Customers can use the templates to upload their own images, resize and crop them, add hotspots for links.  Beyond that, customers can rotate all of their Wraps, create a sender specific Wrap, create group specific Wraps and even insert an RSS feed into every wrapped email.  Yes, very cool.

What is really cool about this, is the fact that we have something that the ‘big boys’ of technology will not have.  This is even the case for our free email version which will further distinguish us from Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and the like.  And as emails move closer and closer to inclusion of HTML, not only will our image embedding technology make us attractive, which also is patent pending, so will our WrapMaker.

Needless to say, we look forward to negotiating a license of our technology

Dave Kustin – CMO, WrapMail

Former President of Nortel Joins WrapMail Board

Past President of Nortel Networks North America Brings Significant Industry Experience to WrapMail

FORT LAUDERDALE, FL — September 28, 2008 — WrapMail Inc., a global provider of innovative person-to-person email marketing software has announced that Dion Joannou, past President of Nortel Networks North America, has been named to WrapMail’s Board of Directors.

“Dion Joannou brings significant technology experience, knowledge and insight to WrapMail’s board,” said Rolv E. Heggenhougen, Chairman/CEO. “We are extremely excited to have Dion on our Board and look forward to working with him and benefiting from his contributions as we continue to grow our business globally.”

Over the course of 13 years at Nortel Networks, Joannou held a number of leadership positions in the Wireless and ATM/IP businesses culminating in being appointed as President of Nortel North America in August of 2005. While serving in that capacity until the end of August 2007, Joannou was responsible for overseeing 50% of Nortel’s revenues of between $5-$6 billion derived from both the enterprise and carrier markets.

Joannou holds a Bachelor of Arts – Marketing from Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville, Illinois and a Masters in Business Administration from the University of Miami in Miami, Florida.

Dion is also on the board of Dialogic a recent WrapMail client. Welcome to the team Dion!

Dave Kustin – CMO, WrapMail

John Walsh – We Can Help!!

I just completed a review of our blog stats and and came away with some interesting conclusions. Our blog stats are categorized a number of ways, two in particular are ‘top posts’ and ’search terms.’ The latter being what terms are used to find our blog.  

Top Posts: The post that has been read the most is this one about missing kids which been read 117 times.  Second place? This one about the iPhone, which has been read 70 times. Yes, missing children is more relevant than the iPhone.

Search Terms: Again, these are the terms that people have used to find us through search engines.  There are many iterations that our blog has recorded, such as: missing kids, milk carton, missing kids milk carton, and so on. Upon adding up all the ‘missing kid’ related terms it amounted to 58.  The second most searched term was WrapMail at 29.

I think it’s pretty interesting that a company and blog which is dedicated to developing email marketing software would have missing kids as its hot button topic.  Or is it? Or is it so obvious that our software could be a groundbreaking tool in finding kids and criminals that people can’t see the forrest for the trees?  

Hence the title of this post – Mr. Walsh, we have tried to reach you about our software (unsuccesfully) and how we could help in your quest to find missing kids and criminals. Our software is so obvious in its simplicity in using the billions of emails as the ‘new milk carton’ to find missing kids. We are using ‘old’ tools to do this job when there are new one available.  We need to talk….

Dave Kustin – CMO, WrapMail

WrapMail Hits 10,000!!

10,000 views of our pitch on YouTube that is.  Well, 10,052 to be exact….and counting. That’s pretty cool. Ten thousand + people have viewed our pitch and now know what WrapMail is all about and hopefully “get it.”  Some people don’t of course, but that’s OK, some people didn’t “get” the automobile, personal computer, websites or even Twitter when they were launched. Wait, people still don’t get Twitter.  Or the winner of TechCrunch50, Yammer, a subscription based version of Twitter designed for businesses.  Watch our pitch here:

In other statistical but related news, WrapMail’s pitch is still number 1 on TechCrunch Pitches. We have 1,118 positive votes, 104 comments and have been in the pole position for months. We are beginning to question why TechCunch even launched the pitches section as they have not written word one about WrapMail, the number one voted company.  Every day we read about other startups on various tech blogs that have ZERO ways of generating revenue, yet we have multiple. Schonfeld, Arrington, you listening? Your readers have voted, now write!

It’s OK, we trudge on.  WrapMail continues to make tremendous strides in technical development, as well as on the business development front. We expect to announce a number of strategic partnerships in the coming months that will make it impossible for certain tech writers to not notice. Maybe we will talk to them

 

Dave Kustin – CMO, WrapMail

Around the Wrap

Just a quick update on some WrapMail news and happenings.  WrapMail has had the good fortune of showing up on a number of blogs recently, here is a quick list and where appropriate, VOTE!!:

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On the new client front, we had 40 new clients sign up during the month of August. One of those clients was GeneralSports Venue who is the distributor of the athletic playing surface AstroTurf and was recently featured in Inc.. Below is an image of their Wrap, which features their many product lines, as well as a link to Archie Manning who is their spokesperson. 

Wrap it up!

Dave Kustin – CMO, WrapMail