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.

Soccer wrap – first club in Norway to use WrapMail

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

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

Shop to Earn signs on with WrapMail

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.

Rotating product promotions

Individual Customization

Instant click alert

WrapMail on YouTube and TechCrunch

Watch WrapMail’s Youtube video

WrapMail on TechCrunch

The regular email could drive additional business and potentially be a new revenue stream

Banner ads are common on a majority of websites and advertisers pay typically a set amount based upon every thousand impressions/views (CPM = Cost per thousand).

How about advertising in the regular outbound email? Sure Google, Yahoo, hotmail et al advertise for themselves in all the emails users send but there’s another opportunity that seems to have been missed by most: Advertise for your own company in the employee’s outbound emails AND potentially advertise for a 3^rd party and charge the 3^rd party a CPM rate (or click-rate).

Example 1: A major airline could use a service called WrapMail and then have every email sent by employees go out with an interactive letterhead that brands the airline and links back to various portions of the website. Then the airline could go to major hotels, rental car companies and travel insurance businesses and solicit advertising for these businesses to be featured in these person-to-person emails. What would it be worth to a major rental car company to be featured in every email that leaves an airline employees desk? It’s probably worth more than a banner ad on a random website – these are all person-to-person emails, could be from the CEO or secretary BUT always to someone they know! CPM rate could easily be over $5.00. Do the math: 10,000 employees will send about 50K external emails per day for 20 days each month, that’s 1M emails. CPM of $5 would mean revenue from ONE advertiser of $50,000.

Example 2: A major College signs up for WrapMail and wraps all emails from faculty, staff AND students. The college goes to a 3^rd party such as Apple and negotiates a deal where Apple pays $5 CPM. Let’s assume the college is of average size and has 2,000 faculty and staff and 23,000 student email users. The total is 25,000 email users that will send about 2.5M emails in a month – this could give the college additional revenue from ONE advertiser (such as Apple) of $150K every month!

In both examples above the potential revenue could be significantly higher should the company grant an exclusive to a 3^rd party advertiser.

WrapMail makes this possible and has actually coined the term CPW (Cost per Wrap) – why not use the employee email to advertise YOUR business and if applicable turn around and make it a revenue generator.

Millions of emails From Faculty, Staff and Students to Brand the Educational Institution with Every External email Sent

Today WrapMail installs its software at Broward Community College (BCC), one of the largest Community Colleges in the US. This is a significant milestone for both WrapMail and BCC as it is the first internal installation in an educational facility and BCC is the first college to use WrapMail to brand the college with every external email sent by faculty staff and students.

David Armstrong, President of BCC, states in this Press Release “WrapMail will enable us to communicate our broad message and all the many things Broward Community College has to offer to a large group of people much more effectively and efficiently than any other electronic media solution out there.”

WrapMail will also be used to broadcast messages from the President internally and these will be in a Wrap specifically designed for internal purposes. BCC will be able to tailor Wraps based upon sender, recipient, time, subject and/or dynamic rotation. The WrapMail system will be hosted in BCC’s datacenter and all external emails will pass through the WrapServer for wrapping before final delivery.

What would a college “sell”? Most people do not look at educational institutions as businesses, ironically most of them teach business! Colleges sell a lot of different items, the obvious one being education but other items might be school material such as books and computers, clothing and paraphernalia, credit cards and calling cards just to name a few. In addition, most schools have Foundations where they raise money and obviously Wraps can be used to promote giving to the foundation or inform about upcoming events.

The bottom line for BCC is that approximately 100,000 emails are sent every day anyway, WrapMail turns these into 100,000 impressions of the BCC brand or about 2 million per month. Recipients that get these emails can click on the pictures and with the average click-through being around 10% in the WrapMail system that could bring 200,000 new visitors to the various parts of BCC’s website every month. This is Business 101, more people on the website (read: store), more sales.

WrapMail helps find missing kids – the new milk carton

Unfortunately people, especially children, go missing every day. There are a great number of methods in place to help find the missing BUT one very obvious method is totally ignored, not to say impossible until WrapMail developed its technology: email. Not email-blasts BUT using the emails people send every day anyway (one-on-one emails)!

Corporate and Government employees send emails every day, these emails go to the public, businesses and government agencies but when they arrive they are plain black on white.

Each of these emails could have a Wrap surrounding the email that in addition to information and links to the respective websites also could feature pictures of missing adults and/or children. WrapMail, Inc.’s technology allows for dynamic rotation of content so that every single email that is sent out could feature new missing kids so that every single one is exposed to the receiving audience. There are already RSS feeds with data on missing kids that can be incorporated into a wrapped email. This is the milk carton of the 21st Century! All emails that leave WrapMail, Inc. have an amber alert on the bottom, currently linking to missing children in Florida where WrapMail is headquartered. This RSS feed comes from the Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

These pictures could have embedded hyperlinks that lead to pages with more details (such as more pictures, last seen, clothes worn, last seen with etc).

There are about 50 billion emails sent every day; one-on-one emails that is, every one of them could be looking for missing children.

The bottom line is that these emails are sent every day anyway – why not use them for something good? WrapMail offers their solution for free for approved organizations as they, like everyone else, send external emails every day. WrapMail offers its clients the ability to incorporate this feature for free, either with just an amber alert or a rotation of missing people with every outbound email.

WrapMail also offers a free solution where users can set up a free email account and then build their own wrap with pictures and links.

Please also see this article: http://www.canadafreepress.com/2007/cover082907.htm