E-mail marketing firm Listrak has added a feature that allows users to insert RSS feeds containing links to social bookmarking sites to their e-mail marketing campaigns.
This feature combines RSS and social bookmarking with the e-mail marketing software.
“Web 2.0 sites are the fastest-growing category of sites on the Internet, but the e-mail industry has yet to seize the opportunity of this rising trend of consumer interest,” said Ross Kramer, CEO of Listrak, Lancaster, PA. “I see an opportunity for a product that brings a sort of digg.com-like feature set to e-mail.”
Recipients of these e-mails have the opportunity to vote for e-mail content that provided the most relevant and interesting experience and let other consumers use the e-mail social bookmarking database to find and sort through the most interesting content as voted by Internet peers. Recipients can also post the e-mail’s online landing page to a social bookmarking site, such as Digg.com or Del.icio.us.com.
These sites enable users to publish and share their favorite Web sites online instead of inside their browser so others may view the information. Due to the nature of these sites, companies cannot buy ad space or high rankings.
Listrak also has added a media library feature to its e-mail marketing platform to make it easier to add image attachments to e-mail campaigns. This library lets marketers store, manage and insert image files to e-mail campaigns in one central location along with support for many file types.
According to Mr. Kramer, e-mail continues to be at the top of revenue producers for the firms that are actively engaged in e-mail marketing. In 2007, e-mail marketers will strive to make e-mail programs more relevant to recipients, he said.
“We will see a broad adoption of lifecycle-based programs already in place at some large firms working down market into smaller mid-market firms,” Mr. Kramer said. “This will lead to a departure of the traditional batch-and-blast techniques so widely used today to a more targeted customer needs-focused approach that will eventually lead to higher response and overall ROI.”
