This morning, I received an email from a friend trying to coordinate a good time to get a group of parents together to work on a class auction project for my daughter’s 5th grade class at her Waldorf school here in Bellingham, Washington.

As a member of several committees and local community groups, I am regularly tasked with coordinating the schedules of groups. It can be really frustrating sometimes.

Here is evidence of a recent [failed] attempt to coordinate a time for a meeting using email (what the heck was I thinking?)

At some point during the above exchange, I even created a short poll using our very own GroupSurveys online surveys builder to make things easier for everyone.

Technically, that worked, but it didn’t offer the interactive, real-time coordination that I was looking for.

Today, my friend used a really simple scheduling service by doodle.com to coordinate our auction project. It made everything so easy. You just pick the days/times that worked for you and voila. You can also leave comments in the same way that you can at evite.com when responding to an invitation.

Doodle is free for individuals and doesn’t even require registration – although there are premium business and enterprise plans available.

So, if you want to save yourself the frustration so often associated with trying to coordinate busy schedules and find the best time for everyone to meet, there you go.

I hope you find it useful as I do.

So, without further ado….

Here is a quick tour of our new GroupMail Email Newsletter Software website

1. The new, Front Page of our GroupMail Website!

2. Review GroupMail Features and Technical Specifications on the Features page.

3. Check pricing on our different GroupMail Editions and place an order on our Pricing page.

4. Find support articles on our Support page. Search article by category or by keywords.

5. We love to hear from you. Contact us on our Contact Page.

If you have any links to GroupMail articles, pages, or products; you might double check them. We tried hard to minimize disruption with the redesign, but sometimes, link structures and paths can change as a result of these things.

Thanks to everyone who helped to move this project forward — and for everyone who stops by to check out the result of our hard work!

Return on Investment – ROI for Internet Marketing

Every time someone tells me [again] how email is about to be killed off by some trendy new communication tool; I just point them to the most recent analysis of return on investment – ROI for Internet marketing.

According to the latest Power of Direct Economic Impact Study by the Direct Marketing Association; Internet marketing as a whole is forecast to overshadow Direct Mail for the first time next year with a projected $651.8 billion in sales compared to a projected $642.4 billion for Direct Mail. An expected milestone perhaps, but a milestone nonetheless.

What about Return on Investment – ROI for Email Marketing?

The return on investment (ROI) for email marketing continues to fade, but still dominates other Internet marketing investments. In 2006, email marketing enjoyed an average return on investment (ROI) of $52.23 for every dollar spent. This year, the average return on investment for email marketing fell (somewhat sharply) by $12 to $40.56 for every dollar spent. Still, great bang for your buck, isn’t it? I don’t know too many banks (or bookies) offering anything close to that.

Still, compared to to the return on investment (ROI) for search marketing of $22.24 per dollar spent; email marketing is still the MVP of the Internet Marketing League and returning Captain of the International Marketing All-Star Team.

I was actually surprised to see that the return on investment – ROI for mobile marketing was as low as $10.51 for each dollar spent. Considering the high delivery rates of mobile messaging, I thought it would be higher for some reason.

The return on investment (ROI) for social networking is s l o w l y raising year after year. In 2011, the return on investment (ROI) for social networking is $12.71 and in 2012 it is expected to increase only by $0.19 to $12.90 and only up another $0.50 to $13.43 by 2016.

I wonder how that humble long-range forecast for ROI will affect spending in social networking by Internet marketing departments? I guess they call it social for a reason. In fairness, it is hard to measure the influence of friends on purchasing decisions, so I don’t think it is as clear cut as these figures reveal for social networking.

So there you have it.

Email marketing still offers the best return on investment (ROI) value of Internet marketing. It is the craps or blackjack table of the Internet casino.

…and speaking of Casinos, Forbes provides a nice overview of the best bets for your money in a casino.

Interested? Start measuring your own ROI with our email marketing software, GroupMail and tracking the open and click-through rates of your campaigns with our popular email tracking service, GroupMetrics.

Today, more and more of your recipients may be are reading your email on their mobile devices.

Unfortunately, your HTML email designs, painstakingly crafted to format beautifully across all most many Desktop and web email clients may not look so wonderful on the increasing variety of smaller, mobile screens used by the people on your email list.

But do not fear, my email marketing friends. I have scoured the Internetz for you.

Here are the Best Mobile Email Design and Compatibility Tips and Advice in 2011.

1. Justine Jordan at Litmus provides a valuable overview of the current state of mobile email compatibility.
2. Mark Brownlow at email-marketing-reports.com offers a thorough look into mobile email marketing in 2011
3. Ross Hodgekiss at Smashing Magazine shares very practical advice on specific coding considerations for optimizing email newsletters with CSS
4. Lisa Harmon and Alex Madison talked to Rocky Thomas, an “awesome designer” and expert on email-mobile cross-channel integration and share his sage advice on designing mobile email.
5. Small Business CEO links us to 5 tools for testing HTML for mobile compatibility

As with most advice given in relation to email marketing, make sure you do your own testing. Find your own mobile email format and style that fits with your unique set of tools and circumstances. If you don’t have much time to invest, perhaps using a simplified HTML or plain text format is the best approach to get started.

As always, if you need any help along the way, don’t hesitate to contact our technical support team.

But what do others think? That’s what matters, isn’t it? I’m pleased to hear that Howard Berenbon thinks we’re doing a good job.

“…If you’re looking for a quality and versatile e-mail manager for personal or business use, then you’ve come to the right place. GroupMail from Infacta is an excellent program for anyone who manages a list of name for business or personal use.

If you have a small list, say, 100 people or less, then their free version will work for you. If your list exceeds 100, then you’ll want their personal or business edition (starting at $139.95) which allows any size group or list.

Their business edition costs a little more, but makes up the difference with increased delivery speeds (up to 256 connections) and business based features you won’t want to live without…”

- Small Business Software Review

It’s always helpful to hear reviews of your products and services, even when they aren’t necessarily kind. Knowing what others think about our group email software is the only way that you can move forward and improve GroupMail.

Kim Komando, the digital goddess herself, recommended our GroupMail mailing list software again on her show today. We love Kim, so it is always a treat when she pays us any attention.

Do you need to send email to a group of people, say the team, the family or a small group of customers? These programs are called list serves. And here is one program that let’s you do it for free.

The program is a lifesaver for small business owners. Really, it’s handy for anyone who works with email lists or even club newsletters… continue reading

If you’re listening Kim, we are smiling like schoolboys who discover that the girl they like thinks they are cute!

As always, if you have any questions or need some help along the way, don’t hesitate to contact our technical support team.

Interested? Get more information about our award-winning email marketing software, GroupMail and our extremely popular email tracking service, GroupMetrics.

* Click on the image to go to the full review

As usual with these reviews, we aren’t contacted to confirm features or capabilities; so there are often some items left unchecked in the feature set. This review omitted several GroupMail features.

1. GroupMail does provide an unsubscribe report for your campaigns. This is done through our Subscriber Add-on, which comes installed with both our Personal and Business editions of the software. If you’re interested, you can find out more information about managing email lists with GroupMail.
2. While we don’t have a page on our website with an FAQ title, we do provide a library of common (and even some advanced) tutorials for our customers. You can visit our GroupMail email marketing tutorial library, our blog and even download a .pdf version of our GroupMail User Manual from our website (Personal and Business Edition users only).
3. GroupMail does support all Windows Operating Systems from Windows 2000 to the current Windows 7. For some reason, this review suggests that GroupMail isn’t compatible with Windows 95. C’est la vie.

As always, we are pleased to be in the fine company at the top of the review and will continue to work hard to improve. One of these years, we will find ourselves at the top of this review!

Today, I found another review of GroupMail that also gives our email marketing software a nearly perfect 5/5 review.

Your email marketing task is essentially sending personalized messages to a large group of recipients as fast as possible? Group Mail Business Edition is the right tool for you with its flexible mail merging features, and a number of delivery methods.

While the scripting language used by Group Mail could be more powerful and flexible, Group Mail does feature easy and comprehensive mail merging and can be extended with a number of plug-ins that bring such nice features as automatic handling of bounces, powerful address validation and more.

Integration with Group-Surveys.com [online surveys] makes surveying lists easy, and Group Mail works with Nooked.com as well, which lets you offer campaigns via both email and RSS. While Group Mail can import groups from a number of sources, it lacks the ability to write back to a list database, unfortunately *.

All in all Group Mail is a great email marketing application, though, and integration with the sophisticated and rich GroupMetrics [email tracking] service for tracking open and click-through rates only improves on that.

Read the entire GroupMail 5 Business Edition 5.2 – Email Marketing Software Review

* I will use this opportunity to correct one discrepancy with this review. GroupMail Business Edition DOES provide users with the ability to write back to your external list database.

But don’t fret, even when a review comes in that suggests that GroupMail is practically perfect in every way, we won’t stop working hard to make it even better!

“GroupMail has been hands down one of the best products I have ever used. It
is crucial that we keep all the families at our private school, Trinity
Classical Academy, informed of all the events that are going on at our
school, of which there are many. Using Outlook for mass mailings just does
not work – too many errors and returns.

GroupMail helps me communicate with all of our families and prospective
families by allowing me to create professional looking e-mails with
limitless possibilities and best of all, they all get delivered in seconds!

But the best thing about GroupMail is that you install it and you are up and
running quickly and THERE ARE NO FEES after that. No per-e-mail fees or
monthly subscriptions fess. No trying to create e-mails on some internet
site which has limitations. I have saved hundreds, if not thousands, of
dollars by not having to pay fees by using GroupMail which is a stand-alone
workhorse.

Mass E-mails, when done correctly, are the most cost-efficient, effective
way to communicate your message and GroupMail is the best, most economical
program that I have found to help us get the word out.”

- Wally Caddow, Humble Pie Creative

Thanks Wally!

Since 1996, we have worked hard to provide all of the features that our users would need to get their email marketing game on while keeping the cost of our software low. Most importantly, GroupMail has evolved over the years, not based on what we think needs to be improved, but by what our customers need. We use customer feedback as the driving force in our continual development efforts. To do that, we listen carefully, talk with our customers on a regular basis and keep an eye on industry trends. I think that is what really sets us apart from all other email marketing software and service providers — and that is something that just can’t be objectively captured in a comparative review (neither can my bias!)

As with all reviews, there are some things that are left out. In this particular review, there are a few features left unchecked for GroupMail that actually should be checked.

1. Unsubscribe Report: Both the Personal and Business Editions of GroupMail come installed with GroupMail’s Subscriber Add-on, which automates your opt-in, opt-out and bounce management efforts. Subscriber allows users to automatically add recipients to groups who subscribe on a website subscription form and delete or exclude recipients from a group who unsubscribe from a list. Subscriber will also delete or exclude invalid email addresses that bounce after a predetermined number of times. Subscriber keeps history logs for all unsubscribes and bounces for your campaigns.
2. FAQ: Not only does GroupMail have a Help file in the application itself; we have a .pdf version of our User Manual available to Personal and Business Edition customers, an online tutorial library covering the most commonly asked questions and a blog that is regularly updated with support issues, tips and tricks for the software.
3. Live Chat: While technically they might be right in that we don’t have a “live chat” feature on our website; we do have a Twitter profile and are engaged in real time conversations with customers. Most importantly though, our customers can actually pick up the phone and call us — the original version of live chat. We are also constantly monitoring our email of course!

For more information, read the full 2010 email marketing software review.