What is MantisMail?
In short, it's electronic marketing campaign and contact management made easy.
MantisMail allows you to easily manage all your contacts, email and SMS marketing campaigns in one place. It provides you with a system that you can access from anywhere with an Internet connection and do the following:
- Create unlimited 'groups' for your contacts
- Add, edit and remove contacts in one or multiple groups
- Store notes, phone numbers, addresses, etc. for contacts
- Create, edit and send email campaigns to one or multiple groups
- Build and save email templates to be used at a later date
- Send pre-built web pages as actual email campaigns
- Manage and send SMS campaigns to groups (Australia only)
- Access comprehensive statistics on email and SMS campaigns
- Easily integrate your website to automatically build your contacts database from
new and existing customers
- And much more!
The Advantage of Email
Many businesses that have a web presence underestimate the power of email to attract existing and potential clients to their websites (and therefore their products and services).
'Build it and they will come' may work if you have a baseball field but will not work for websites.. You can have the most powerful, interesting and entertaining website with an easy ecommerce facility and great information but what is the point if you can't attract visitors? Even if you do attract them, how are you going to make sure they keep coming back to you?
Time is short and people like to browse the internet until they come across something interesting..
What if a potential client is looking at your website and they have to leave suddenly or don't have the time to browse through everything?
What if a potential client is viewing your website just days before a new product launch that they would be interested in?
What if your website covers an industry or product that is community based?
What if customers that purchased from you once could be easily attracted to
purchase from you again and again?
How do you keep people coming back?
The answer is Mail Lists!
That's right. This often overlooked, underestimated and misunderstood marketing tool is actually one of the oldest and most widely used applications of the Internet (even more that 'surfing' the internet with a web browser).
A recent study in Australia showed that 95 % of Internet users utilize email on a regular basis as opposed to around 65% that have websites
(and it has been that way for years). This is a trend that is echoed around the world in business sectors of all sizes.
No Spam!
Spam (unsolicited email sent to a non-targeted mass audience) is the scourge of internet marketing. More often than not, Spam is ignored by the receiver and the only effect is has is causing major frustration on the receivers part.
Spam was a technique developed in the mid 1990's by early Internet marketers to build huge databases of email addresses worldwide and then sell these databases to companies to post their marketing message to.
The problem with Spam is that the number of people that are annoyed by receiving unsolicited (or Junk) email far outweighs the slim possibility of anyone coming to your site and products. In fact, so many people have complained that in some parts of the world, spam is illegal. Many service providers will not let you send spam from their systems and it can also be a very costly and highly in-efficient marketing method
Opt-in mail lists
'Opt-in' or 'subscription based' email lists are a much more efficient and friendly way to build up your on-line customer base. Basically, you have an option on your website for visitors to join your mail list by entering their email address. You also need to have the ability for people to easily unsubscribe from your list if they no longer wish to receive emails from you.
This creates a win-win situation as you slowly but surely build a reliable and efficient database of potential and existing clients without annoying anyone and creating a bad image for your product/service.
What to do with your database of email addresses
There are a few methods for building and administering a database of email addresses...
You could have your website send you an email with someone's address every time someone opts in to your mail list but this creates an administration headache trying to send messages to all the addresses and keeping track of invalid email accounts, how many members you have, etc.
When sending a message to your listees, you must be careful as to how you post your message. The common way of putting email addresses in the 'to' field of an email may annoy your customers and provide security risks as everyone who receives your email will also get a copy of your email list!
You could use one of the free online mail list programs but the emails your members receive will be cluttered up with banners and advertisements that do not relate to you or your message (and can often compete against your business).