August 10, 2006

Email Labs 4.8 Released, Works With CRM

By David Sims, TMCnet Contributing Editor

EmailLabs, a vendor of e-mail marketing solutions and a subsidiary of J.L. Halsey Corporation, has introduced EmailLabs 4.8.

The new features help marketers "minimize undeliverable or improperly formatted e-mails, create more effective messages based on contextually relevant best practices, offer RSS delivery to their subscribers, and uncover statistically significant variations in campaign performance based on subscriber demographics and attributes," according to company officials.

Jim Herbold, general manager at EmailLabs said his company offers "best practices that… minimize the risk of having e-mail messages render poorly or get improperly filtered. We enable marketers to offer RSS to their most discerning subscribers, and we help demonstrate ROI to C-level executives by indicating how messages resonated with specific segments."

Oh hey, and it helps you "comply" with CAN-SPAM and enhance deliverability, wink wink.

Actually spam avoidance is a concern. Charles Bermant asked in a recent column "If you respond to spam, doesn't this let the sender know you are a live one and therefore increase the spam?" A valid question, this reporter simply deletes for this very reason.

Bermant asked Stefan Pollard, director of consulting services at Email Labs, who told Bermant this used to be true, but a "legitimate" marketer "(one that would be unfairly tarred by the spam brush) would offer several ways to unsubscribe," Bermant said: "He also cautioned against typing in my address to an unbranded page, because this could be part of an e-mail harvesting process."

Officials say the product is provided as an ASP service, and is integrated with a company's Web site, sales force automation and CRM technologies through EmailLabs' application programming interface.

What company officials call "significant" features include EmailAdvisor, an e-mail auditing tool from sister company Lyris Technologies, whose five interrelated auditing components let marketers preview how messages will appear in the 35 most popular e-mail clients,

Betcha didn't know there were 35 e-mail clients, did you? This reporter sure didn't, at $100 a name I could rattle off enough to maybe pay for a good dinner in Manhattan. If we split dessert and lay off the brandy.

The product also checks messages against common spam filters and blacklists, determines the best time to send based on which ISP providers are experiencing delays, and get real-time, post-launch analysis of how 40 major ISPs are delivering, blocking or filtering messages.

David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. For more articles please visit David Sims’ columnist page.

(source: http://news.tmcnet.com/news/-email-crm-/2006/08/10/1784736.htm)