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Sarah Worsham

Sarah Worsham / Feb 12, 2008

B2B Email Marketing – iContact

eNewsletters and eBlasts are a great way to keep in contact with your customers and potential customers. They offer an easy way to send out news and promotions, although they are best-received if they provide valuable information. The best way to send out and manage these emails is through a vendor. I have been using iContact for sales training eblasts for over a year, and they are one of the most cost-effective vendors with great features that I have found.

If you want to get started quickly, they have over 300 templates to choose from, and it is easy to import your contacts as a group. I easily created my own template and had a test eblast out in about 10 minutes. They check your eblast for spam flags and can also send a text version. Their tracking will show you how many sent, opens and clicks you have and, more importantly, who did what. I’ve also had great experience with their tech support through online chats, email and over the phone. I had a problem with some emails not going through (to our own company email!) and it took them a bit to work through it, but they were very professional about keeping me updated throughout.

iContact’s great features (full feature list) come priced for how many recipients you have, starting at just 500 contacts for $9.99/month (with discounts if you pay annually), which makes it actually affordable for even small businesses. Pricing steps up in a fair manner: 1000 contacts for $14/month or $151.20/annually (full pricing). I recommend iContact if you’re a small or medium-sized business looking for a full-featured and affordable email marketing vendor. I would even recommend looking at it you’re a large business without special requirements.

Technorati Tags: email marketing, B2B email marketing, B2B, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting

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iContact
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Sarah Worsham / Feb 7, 2008

B2B Social Networks – A Review

So far we’ve taken a look at several social network software vendors: Leverage Software, Community Server, Prospero, Small World Labs, Pluck and Ning. These vendors run the gambit from very expensive to free, but their core functionality is very similar. Differences come mostly with integration into your own current website, single sign-on, and analytics.

If you’re a small company or not sure how social networks are going to work for you, Ning is an excellent place to start since you can get an ad-driven version for no cost. You can then upgrade to a non-ad version (and run your own ads), but keep in mind that Ning is for smaller networks and does not offer integration with your own website.

For larger companies, my current forerunner is Small World Labs, with their full set of features, modular implementation, and php-based system. Their 3 price-points make them very affordable and their offerings can be tailored to meet the needs of your specific social network. Content from your website can appear within the network and content from the network can appear on your website – effectively pulling your website into the network. Most importantly, I feel this option offers the best opportunity to scale cost-effectively if your network takes off.

I just came across GroupSwim who built community software that can be used internally, externally, with customers, users, developers, or audience. This may be very useful for B2B companies hoping to interact with their customers, so I’m going to try to get a demo set up for next week.

Technorati Tags: social networks, B2B social networks, B2B, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting

Sarah Worsham / Feb 5, 2008

B2B Social Networks – Community Server

Community Server by Telligent powers some large communities for NFL, National Geographic Magazine Online, Intel, Microsoft Game Studios, Mazda MX-5, and MySpace forums, among others. Community Server touts ease-of-use and has a community of its own with a documentation wiki and support forum. The software is powered by .NET, which can be downloaded and installed or hosted by Telligent. Standard community fare comes out-of-the-box: blogs, forums, profiles, private messaging, photos and files. Functionality and capabilities can be extended through add-ins and customizations (capabilities list). There is support for single sign-in with your website and analytics through Web Trends or Google Analytics (possibly other tag-based packages).

Three packages offer different included functionality and pricing (full list of features). Additional licenses can be purchased to extend the number of most of these functions.

Professional:

  • $2000 + $500/year support
  • Supports approximately 1 million page views per month and 25,000 members per server
  • 2 websites
  • 100 blogs
  • 100 forums
  • 200 photo galleries
  • 1,000 shared files
  • Unlimited content mirroring (displaying content on the community through RSS feeds)

Enterprise:

  • Contact for cost, support included
  • Supports approximiately 10 million page views per month and 100,000 members per server
  • 3 websites
  • Unlimited blogs, forums, shared files, photo galleries and content mirroring
  • Enterprise email integration (to allow users to send and reply to messages on forums and blogs)
  • Distributed jobs to support high traffic sites

Hosted:

  • Starts at $199/mo for up to 250,000 page views per month, additional at $0.009 per page view
  • Includes everything but add-ons
  • 25 blogs
  • 25 forums
  • 500 shared files
  • 50 photo galleries
  • 100 content mirrors

I like the community aspect Telligent has created for support of their software, but I personally would not want to support a .NET application, even hosted (personal preference). There also does not seem to be any out-of-the-box functionality to integrate the community content into your website (although you can integrate content from your site into the community through an RSS feed). The Hosted and Professional packages are close in first-year price, with Professional offering more of everything, but also requiring you to install and host the community. The Hosted package is a very good deal for a business looking to start a social network without much cost, as long as you’re not looking to integrate the community content into your own website.

Technorati Tags: social networks, B2B social networks, B2B, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting

CrunchBase Information
Community Server
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About Sazbean


Sarah Worsham (Sazbean) is a Webgrrl = Solution Architect + Product Management (Computer Engineer * Geek * Digital Strategist)^MBA. All views are her own.

Business + Technical Product Management

My sweet spot is at the intersection between technology and business. I love to manage and develop products, market them, and deep dive into technical issues when needed. Leveraging strategic and creative thinking to problem solving is when I thrive. I have developed and marketed products for a variety of industries and companies, including manufacturing, eCommerce, retail, software, publishing, media, law, accounting, medical, construction, & marketing.

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