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.

Full Patent Application for the WrapMaker filed with USPTO

WrapMaker: Method, system and software for creating interactive, dynamic html letterhead(s) and manage usage-rules for same

Filed in the US and International.

WrapMail announces Business Partner in Kenya

WrapMail, Inc. (WrapMail) and Hilltop Engineering and Technical Services Ltd. (Hilltop) has agreed to partnership where Hilltop will represent WrapMail in Kenya.

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.

Individual Customization

Rotating product promotions

Instant click alert

WrapMail approved by Google Solutions Marketplace

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

Toshiba Business Solutions signs on with WrapMail

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.

Email marketing ‘to see increased investment’

Email marketing and customer relationship management on demand will be among the largest program allocations by technology companies by 2010, it has been claimed.

Research carried out by IT industry analyst IDC indicates there is currently a gap between what is being communicated to an audience and what consumers require.

The group added that with restricted marketing budgets and a continued focus on efficiency, effectiveness and return on investment, technology marketers and sales now need to focus on tactics that yield results.

Laura Nurzynski, group vice president of IDC’s global go-to-market and sales enablement services, commented: “Reaching the right target, at the right time, with the right information is critical to marketing and sales program success.”

Ms Nurzynski went on to say this requires coordination across the entire go-to-market chain, from market research to how the sales team is enabled.

Earlier this week, e-commerce advice group FuelNet claimed global firms are increasingly turning to email marketing in an attempt to attract and retain customers while cutting advertising spend.

Millions of Unused Ad Impressions Part II

And so it begins….WrapMail is moving forward with Broward College to seek approval to have sponsorships appear in all outgoing student emails.  So far, approved brands include: Apple, Dell, Coke & HP. An official start date has yet to be determined. Potentially, what this means is, every time a student sends an email using their Broward College email address, it will be wrapped with a Broward College approved Wrap which will promote the college, and will have a portion of the Wrap dedicated to a sponsorship. This will be a groundbreaking development in the world of online sponsorship and communication.

Think about what the college is doing.  They have recently gone from being a community college to a four year degree granting institution and they will be using the IMMENSE email traffic from their students to 1) increase awareness about their new status, programs & degrees and 2) drive new revenue in a year full of budget cuts.  Cost for both – $0.  It gets even better, WrapMail will be sharing the revenue with the college.

We are still completing a full audit of email traffic but a recent 10 day review revealed roughly 500k emails, which is like having 500k visitors – the visitor being the person receiving the email.  If we were to extrapolate that over a year, just for fun, there would be 18,250,000 “visitors.”  And that’s one college (see this post). I don’t know about you, but that’s pretty exciting and once one college does this others will surely follow. Here is an example of what a Wrap could look like:

Possible Ad - click for full size

Will some students rail against this? Sure. Are fewer students using email? Probably. But the stats don’t lie and everyone is a consumer. Whether these emails are going to professors, friends, family or future employers…all of them are consumers. To ease some of the possible resistance, the college will be engaging the students with tactics such as a Wrap design contest. So, as the title of this post no longer suggests, but now proves, there are millions of unused ad impressions – about 18 million to be exact.

Dave Kustin – CMO, WrapMail