Tuesday, October 30, 2012

21 Top and Popular Professional Email Marketing Softwares and Tools

21 Top and Popular Professional Email Marketing Softwares and Tools in Market
 
This articles provides a detailed list of top and most popular professional email marketing software services and tools. These email marketing softwares provide enhanced software programs for email marketing for small business, medium business and large size businesses. There are various email marketing softwares available in the market. We have picked the best email marketing softwares. Some of these email marketing softwares are free and open source and for some you have to pay.

1. Bulk Email Marketing Software and Solution

Professional Bulk Email Marketing Services Software Solution is best for small business, medium business and large size business. It is one of the best email marketing software and ranked top in the email marketing software market. It provides best software programs for email marketing. Review of Bulk Email Marketing Software is very nice in the market.

Bulk email software is included in almost all modern bulk mail marketing strategies. Powerful, reliable and fast email marketing solution is always required by direct list managers and mail marketers. Live Software offers you free bulk mailing software. This email marketing software allows performing permission based email marketing campaigns.

2. Comm100 Email Marketing Software and Tool

Comm100 provides you with the best email marketing software that offers all the tools needed to implement successful opt-in email marketing programs. Comm100's email marketing software is the best email marketing solution for you to develop and maintain good customer relationships and increase your sales revenue at a very low cost.

3. AWeber Email Marketing Software Solution

AWeber Email Marketing Software claims:

1. Create and send professional email marketing newsletters.
2. Build your list quickly with great looking signup forms.
3. Collect, manage, and send to specific segments of subscribers.
4. Send a sequence of automatically delivered emails.
5. Over 150 templates make it easy to create great-looking emails.
6. Automatically create emails from your newest blog posts.
7. Track the performance of each email you send or an email campaign as a whole.
8. Integrate third party applications with AWeber.
9. Target subscribers based on their actions with a single click.
10. Get more messages delivered to your subscribers with AWeber.

4.  eC-messenger Email Marketing Software

eC-messenger Email Marketing Software claims:

1. Strengthen your customer loyalty by sending regular, targeted, relevant newsletters and email marketing campaigns
2. Increase your sales conversions through follow up mailings
3. Exploit various cross and up sell opportunities via email campaigns and newsletters
4. You will have the option to include coupon offers within an email to drive users to the your website or in store to encourage purchasing behaviour
5. Enhance your brand image and customer loyalty via video mails
6. Via automated and transactional mailings, you are able to maintain and reinforce your customer relationships at critical lifecycle touch points
7. You will be working with one of the biggest email broadcasting senders in Europe, with an expert knowledge of email marketing
8. As independent, international studies prove you will benefit from one of the most powerful email broadcasting solutions in the world
9. eC-messenger send over ten million emails per hour, which means our email marketing software is suitable for all types of companies, large or small.
10. eC-messenger is market leaders in email deliverability due to our strategic partnership with deliverability experts Return Path and our CSA certification
11. Legally you are also on the safe side by using our ASP solution with integrated anti-spam features
12. Any of your existing CRM or eCommerce systems can be easily integrated with email marketing software, eC-messenger
13. The implementation of your tailor-made email broadcasting solution can take just a few days
14. You will be provided with a dedicated personal contact for any questions or advice
15. If you require, eC-messenger can help with the complete campaign management including the send out and reporting
16. According to your needs, eC-messenger consulting experts will support you in optimising your email broadcasting activities further

5. Vertical Response Email Marketing Software

VerticalResponse helps you build relationships with your customers and grow your business. There's no need for technical expertise, and you can send professional emails quickly and easily that get real results.

6. Active Compaign Email Marketing Software

Easily add any number of time-sensitive auto responders to any of your lists. For instance you may have an instant auto responder that welcomes the new subscriber, have a message automatically sent 24 hours after their subscription and have another mailing sent a week later. Add html or text auto responders to any of your lists with ease.

7. Elite Email Marketing Software

Elite Email Marketing Software's interactive maps show you where people are engaging with your emails. Drill-down to your country. With tons of templates to choose from, you are sure to find the professional design that meets your needs. Newsletters, promotions, coupons, postcards, and more. With Elite Email you can create an unlimited number of list segments, which allows for more targeted sending.

8. MailChimp Email Marketing Software

MailChimp helps you customize your signup form to match your brand, so you can share it on your website and integrate it into your Facebook page. You can even collect signups from an iPad or laptop. And importing an existing list into MailChimp is a snap, no matter how it's formatted.

9. iContact Email Marketing Software

Use 100s of beautiful templates to create effective emails in minutes. No experience required. Designed for small businesses. Access bult-in social media features to easily share your messages and maximize results. Get easy-to-understand tracking and reporting. Enjoy unlimited award-winning support and resources.

10. Benchmark Email Marketing Software

Have something to sell, a cause to promote, a service to provide? You need email marketing to do things right. Create quality, eye-popping emails that work. Save time. Save money. Get your message out to the masses.

11. Awebdesk Email Marketing Software

Email Marketing Software to send and track beautiful newsletters professionally for yourself or your clients. Features-rich, Socialised, Easy to use & affordable.

12. Atompark Email Marketing Software

AtomPark Software is a leading developer of mass emailing software since 2001, developing high-quality email campaign software: bulk mailers, email address extractors, email verifiers, mailing list managers and other bulk mailing software.

13. Arclab Email Marketing Software

The fast and reliable SMTP bulk email software engine works with any SMTP mailserver and supports all common authentication methods, including SMTP/ESMTP authentication, SSL, StartTLS, Pop before SMTP and IIS Pickup directory mode. The built-in WYSIWYG email message editor can be used to compose personalized rich-text (HTML) email newsletter messages in MIME format with an alternate plain-text part. It can import html files  and inline images, add file attachments and allows the use of an external html editor or an external mailclient. It supports the  use of designed templates in HTML format and includes some templates and layouts, which can be used and modified royalty-free with MailList Controller.

14. eCircle Email Marketing Software

Experience: Over 12 years in the world of professional e-mails
Performance: One of the most powerful shipping solutions with a volume of more than 8 billion emails per quarter
Safety: Maximum deliverability with Delivery Rates 98%
Full service: More than 350 employees are playing eCircle request the complete newsletter management for you
Features: Industry-leading features like social media integration (Facebook, Twitter), multi-channel delivery (e-mail, SMS, fax), automated testing, customer lifecycle program, integrated CMS

15. LISTSERV Email Marketing Software

LISTSERV launched the mailing list industry 25 years ago and remains the gold standard. Continuously developed to meet the latest demands, LISTSERV provides the power and reliability you need to manage all of your opt-in email lists, including email newsletters, announcement lists, discussion groups and email communities.

16. Oempro Email Marketing Software

The most popular email marketing software, since 2000! On average 30% of email marketing campaigns are deleted without getting opened. Oempro makes easier to manage your lists, create and send stunning email campaigns and track results. Get the most from your email campaigns.

17. Interspire Email Marketing Software

Interspire email marketing software includes everything you need to create, send, track and profit from email marketing. It also includes powerful tools to completely automate your follow up marketing and customer feedback loops too.

18. e-Campaign Email Marketing Software

Fast, Flexible, & Easy-to-use Email Marketing Software. Mass mailing, HTML email newsletter delivery, and bulk email marketing campaigns - You can accomplish these tasks with ease. e-Campaign email marketing software is an efficient group email and email marketing tool for companies, e-zine publishers and professionals, as well as individuals, to communicate with their customers, subscribers, and other email contacts effectively. With e-Campaign mass mailing software you can design rich HTML emails, newsletters, and e-zines easily, and deliver personalized email messages to your customer base and mailing lists.

19. YMLP Email Marketing Software
  • No CC, no BCC, no "undisclosed recipients"
  • Email Newsletter Builder
  • Built-in Editor
  • Upload your own HTML files
  • Send Plain Text Newsletters
  • Template gallery with 30 sample lay-outs
  • Sender addresses library
  • Personalize newsletters with "mail merge"
  • Schedule e-mails for a later date and time
  • Include Attachments
  • Send targeted e-mails using filters
20. SendBlaster Email Marketing Software

SendBlaster is the best bulk email software for managing your mailing list. Discover the free solution or the cost effective one, a one-time payment package which allows you to easily manage your email marketing using a desktop bulk email software.

21. Emarketeer Email Marketing Software

Emarketeer email builder makes editing content super easy and our template control ensures maximum email deliverability in all major email programs. Create newsletters that sell and powerful email campaigns with stunning templates, personalization, video in email and complete customization.

 

Monday, October 29, 2012

Online Help Desk Softwares: Need and Importance


Online Help Desk Softwares: Need and Importance

The help desk software industry is one of the fastest growing sectors in the computer software industry. As companies of all sizes across the globe continue to realize the importance of cultivating long-lasting relationships with their clients through increasingly technical media, this industry is poised to grow well beyond the hundreds of help desk software solutions that are already in existence.

For small and large companies alike, choosing the right software solution is the key to providing outstanding customer service and support. In many cases, help desk software also provides internal team members with an effective way to communicate with one another about internal and external issues, while also allowing them to measure their effectiveness when responding to various types of client issues.

For many companies, the process of selecting help desk software is a major cause of stress and the final decision often comes after many months of deliberation. Usually, this is due to the wide variations in available features across products and the lack of a clear understanding of which features will best suit the company’s needs. However, this process can be made much easier by gaining an understanding of the help desk industry and how each solution approaches the task of creating a transparent flow of information between both staff members and clients.

15 Benefits / Advantages of an Online Help Desk Software to an Organization / Company

15 Benefits / Advantages of an Online Help Desk Software to an Organization / Company

Help desk software, when implemented correctly, can streamline the support process, leading to lower resolution times and increased customer satisfaction, which in turn boosts customer retention. There are several benefits to deploying a centralized help desk:

1. Support agents have access to a central knowledge base containing all of the company’s product and customer information.
2. Agents can search the entire knowledge base, including articles and previous support tickets, for an answer by typing in relevant keywords or phrases.
3. Clients can seek answers to their questions without contacting an agent by searching the knowledge base.
4. Tickets can easily be created by both customers and support representatives through the help desk’s ticketing system.
5. When creating a support ticket, a customer can automatically be prompted to fill in required information regarding their request to expedite the support process.
6. Emails will be routed through the help desk first, so agents will not have to worry about support requests mistakenly being marked as spam.
7. Automated responses can be emailed to clients as soon as a request is received.
8. Support tickets can automatically be created from emails.
9. Support tickets can easily be created during a customer call by utilizing the software’s search and auto-population features.
10. Support issues can automatically or manually be assigned to an agent, decreasing or eliminating agent collision.
11. Agents can easily view all of their open, closed, and pending support requests.
12. Clients are able to provide instant feedback regarding their satisfaction with the support process.
13. Agents can monitor their performance ratings and can also track their average response and resolution times.
14. Agents can easily track what the hottest support issues are, allowing them to create new knowledge base articles that target clients’ needs.
15. Clients can rate knowledge base articles, allowing agents to improve confusing or unhelpful support articles.

Organizations typically rely on help desk software to improve the efficiency of their agents, whether it’s during a support call or through an email, by giving them access to a centralized database of highly organized company and client information. The help desk also records and tracks all support issues, allowing agents to quickly track every support issue that needs to be resolved and pull from a growing database of pre-recorded responses, leading to lower resolution times and increasing customer satisfaction. Many companies find that increased efficiency actually leads to regular cost savings, since the number of additional employees needed for support can be minimized.

When to invest in online help desk software solution

When to invest in online help desk software solution

There is no general rule that can be applied to a company in order to figure out when the right time to invest in help desk software is, though all mid-sized to large companies are usually advised to do so in order to provide high quality and speedy support to their growing customer base. Typically, if any of the following statements can be used to describe a company, it should seriously consider investing in a help desk software solution:

1. The number of our clients and available products is quite large or is continuously growing.
2. We do not have a central database containing product information that both customers and support agents can easily access from any location at any time.
3. Support agents do not have a simple means of locating the contact details for our customers.
4. Our support representatives are finding it hard to locate the necessary answers to our clients’ questions in a timely manner.
5. Support representative must consult with a number of different resources that are located in separate locations (Excel spreadsheets and written manuals, for example) in order to offer a resolution.
6. Our clients do not have any method that allows them to solve their own problems outside of contacting us or reading our product manuals.
7. Support agents do not have a database of responses to pull from when answering client questions.
8. Agents do not have a simple way to communicate new knowledge with one another.
9. Support representatives often work on the same issue simultaneously because they are unaware that another agent is already handling the issue.
10. Resolution times typically exceed 24 hours, even for minor issues that have been dealt with in the past.
11. Tracking customer satisfaction and agent performance is difficult or impossible.
12. We have no means of tracking how many support requests we receive on a regular basis.
13. Our current methods do not allow us to track which types of support requests we receive most frequently.
14. Our customer satisfaction rates are declining or are poor.
15. Clients are leaving us because we are unable to provide the level of support that they require in order to use our products or services properly.
16. We frequently have to refer our clients to multiple departments in order for them to receive an answer.
17. Clients are increasingly expressing frustration when requesting support.
18. Support representatives sometimes or frequently miss important calls or emails because they are unable to monitor each point of contact effectively.
19. Clients do not know that their issues or requests have been received by a support agent within a day of contacting us.
20. Customers are frequently contacting us multiple times in order to receive a resolution to their issues.
21. Support agents have trouble tracking the issues that they are working on.

Types of Help Desk Softwares: Cloud Based and Self Hosted

Types of Help Desk Softwares: Cloud Based and Self Hosted

Today’s help desk software solutions are available in two forms: cloud-based and self-hosted.

Cloud Based Help Desk Softwares

Cloud-based systems are hosted on servers outside of an organization and are located entirely online. These applications are typically ready to use as soon as the service has been purchased and a company account has been created. They do, however, require customization, such as branding and optional user interface design, for example.

Self Hosted Help Desk Softwares

Self-hosted systems, on the other hand, are hosted on a company’s servers and must be installed on each computer in the organization.

Comparison between Cloud Based and Self Hosted Help Desk Softwares

Self-hosted systems are decreasing in popularity due to the cloud. In comparison to cloud-based solutions, self-hosted systems generally cost more to set up, require more deployment time, are more difficult to manage, and offer less scalability, meaning that they may not be able to meet the needs of an organization as it grows. For small organizations or companies with lower annual revenues, most self-hosted systems are financially unfeasible.

Cloud-based software is typically more flexible than self-hosted software, so it can support a growing company’s needs. These solutions also tend to offer frequent product updates, ongoing access to professional support, and users are able to log into the system from anywhere at any time with full access to all of the software’s features, which makes this solution particularly attractive to companies with employees who travel or are located in multiple locations. Cloud-based systems are typically far less expensive than competing self-hosted systems and generally require less deployment time.

Cost Evaluation of Online Web Based Help Desk Software Solutions

Cost Evaluation of Online Web Based Help Desk Software Solutions

The cost of help desk software varies greatly and ranges anywhere from $0 to $1,000+ per agent per month, with self-hosted solutions occupying the higher-priced end. When figuring out the cost of any solution, however, it is important to also figure in deployment costs, such as the costs associated with adding and maintaining new hardware infrastructure, and other short term costs that may be required, such as hiring an outside agent to set up the help desk.

Additionally, the final total must be adjusted by subtracting the ongoing costs associated with hiring additional employees, including their wages, benefits, and any new equipment that is required, to resolve support requests in the event that a software solution was not purchased.

Since most help desk software companies base their prices on the number of users who will be using the software, larger companies will typically have to pay more than their smaller counterparts. Fortunately, many companies offer multi-user discounts as well as promotional pricing on extended contracts.

In addition to cost per user pricing, cost structures are typically based upon the number of features the client requires. The most affordable packages, for instance, may only include the most basic of features, such as email functionality and a help topic database. More expensive solutions tend to be more robust, allowing an organization to fully customize its help desk with add-ons and custom code, gather analytical data, and receive 24-hour support from the help desk manufacturer. For larger companies, the advantages of a more robust solution usually outweigh the higher costs.

Excluding freeware solutions, a bare-bones (basic email and help topic database) cloud-based solution typically costs around $250 to $300 per month for ten agents, with more complete packages costing around $500 to $700 per month. For organizations with very small support teams that require minimal functionality, it is possible to find software priced at as little as $30 per month for up to three agents.

A self-hosted solution containing only the most basic of features typically starts at a one time only cost of $300 for an unlimited number of users on the low end and $1,000 for up to five users on the higher end. For more robust solutions, an organization can expect to spend anywhere from $800 for an unlimited number of users to well over $5,000 for up to five users on more expensive systems. However, these prices exclude any costs associated with new equipment purchases and maintenance, software upgrades, and ongoing technical support.

When it comes to help desk software, cost does not necessarily equate to quality. Any and all solutions should be thoroughly researched before one is chosen and the decision should never be based upon cost alone. Choosing the wrong system, regardless of how inexpensive it is, can end up costing a company more than a higher priced solution due to difficulties in deployment, maintenance, and use of the system, as well as the potential loss of clients due to poor service.

How to choose the right help desk software solution

How to choose the right help desk software solution

We are providing 11 points to keep in mind while purchasing or choosing any online web based help desk software solution. Selecting the right software solution will take time and the decision should not be taken lightly. However, there are several points that any company, regardless of its size or budget, should consider prior to settling on a solution:

1. Decide whether a cloud-based or self-hosted solution is right for you

For smaller organizations and those on tight budgets which need a solution that works right out of the box, a cloud-based system is usually the best choice. Companies with dedicated IT support staff who can handle the implementation and management of new software and hardware will be able to freely choose between the cloud and self-hosted systems.

2. Set a budget

The cost of a help desk varies widely and can range anywhere from $0 to well over $1,000 per agent. Set a budget and allow it to guide the purchasing decision. Be sure to pay close attention to how each solution prices its services; some services charge monthly fees, while others charge one-time-only fees.

3. Make a list of required features

Each help desk solution offers a wide variety of features and it is vital to a company’s success to choose a solution that offers every function that is essential to running a successful support desk. Gather the support team and have a discussion about the current challenges they are facing. Be sure to ask them what they need to overcome those challenges and streamline the support process.

4. Figure out how much storage space you need

When creating a database of articles and other support materials, it is important to choose a solution that offers more space than you think you actually need. This will ensure that the help desk is able to grow with your company. Fortunately, there are solutions that offer unlimited storage space to all of their customers.

5. Check for compatibility

Ensure that any solution you choose displays correctly on the Internet browsers that are used at your company and by the majority of your clients. Also check that the email submission system works with your current email server.

6. Choose the right ticket management features

All ticket management systems are not created equally. While some offer automatic ticket assignments based on rules, the ability to close and reopen tickets at will, and unlimited access to a full history of every ticket that has ever been created, others do not. Never settle for a solution that fails to provide the level of control your company needs.

7. Always be branded

Branding your help desk is crucial to clients recognizing and trusting that their requests are reaching your company. Find a solution that allows you to easily add your logo, color schemes, and fonts to the help desk’s layout as well as to email templates.

8. Opt for security

Dealing with support issues often requires clients and companies to exchange private and sensitive data with one another. Find a system that uses a secure connection, such as SSL and other encryption forms, for all communications and data transfers.

9. Think about using a Web interface

Some ticketing systems allow clients to create tickets via email and a Web-based system, while others do not. Take some time to consider which submission systems will benefit your clients and company before settling on a help desk.

10. Consider deployment

While some help desks require dedicated staff with advanced levels of technical knowledge to create and maintain them, others can easily be maintained by nearly anyone who knows how to use a computer and the Web. Think about who will be deploying the help desk for your company, what equipment may be needed, and how long the deployment will take. For quick and easy deployments, choose a system that does not require any HTML, CSS, or JavaScript coding knowledge.

11. Take a test drive

Most, if not all, help desk software companies will allow you to take a video tour of their software or use the software in demo mode for a limited period of time. Never spend a penny on any software solution until you’ve tried it or seen it in action.