I am a big proponent of using email to communicate with customers.

It is fast, virtually free, highly customizable and very much in synch with the way today’s consumers communicate.

I have long recommended a vendor called Constant Contact to my clients because it offers a powerful and easy to use set of tools for managing email subscriber lists and for creating great looking emails.

However, I have often wished that it would do certain things that it didn’t.

Recently I have been involved in setting up an email program for a non-profit whose board I sit on and learned about another company called Market Volt.  Yesterday I had the chance to sit with them for about two hours and was blown away by some of the benefits they offer over Constant Contact.

Both cover all of the basics.  You can upload subscribers, manage your emailing list, create emails easily from a variety of templates and track delivery.

Where Market Volt pulls ahead is with a variety of tools and an execution of certain details that makes a huge difference in the final outcome.

Here are just 5 of the big advances I saw…

1)      Auto-Trigger Delivery.  Say your email is for an art gallery and features 5 artists.  With Market Volt, when the customer clicks on a link to learn more about a particular artist, you can choose to have them added to a category of customers interested in that artist. You can also automatically have a follow-up email sent to them at a specified time on that particular subject.

2)      User Permissions.  With Constant Contact, if you want your graphic artist to help you create an email, they will also have access to your entore account including your subscriber list.  With Market Volt, you can assign permissions to different people so they can only see what they need to see.

3)      Surveys.  Market Volt includes a built in survey engine that allows you to create a customer survey that can be deployed through email.  Constant Contact makes you have a separate agreement with a different vendor.

4)      Coupon Generator.  You can upload your standard print coupons and distribute them by email.  Each can have a unique redemption code so you can track who has/has not redeemed their coupons.  You can then automatically follow up with those who do or don’t participate.

5)      “What You See Is What You Get” editing.  Market Volt’s tools for creating your email (or filling their template) seem more straight forward.  It takes less clicks and less moving around to create the look you want.

I was really happy for the Market Volt guys that they had figured out a way to make a product that beats the big guy.  I think their price might be just a little higher but it looks like the value and features are there to justify it.

Oh – here’s a #6 advantage.  You can’t sign up without calling them – no impersonal web sign-ups allowed.  While that seems to be an inconvenience at first, it helps them to assure that your email gets delivered.

Here’s why – spam filters on recipient’s computers filter out messages from senders known to send spam.  Big email vendors that allow instant sign-up don’t know their customers and thus have no way of assuring that they won’t be sending spam and thereby causing all of their other customers to get blocked.

Market Volt wants to talk to you.  By knowing their customers, they make sure that their email is clean and well intentioned.  The bonus for you is that a higher % gets through.

I would recommend anyone shopping for a vendor to provide email creation/management solutions look hard at Market Volt.

Call Tom Ruwitch at Market Volt 314-993-3732 & tell him I sent you (and no… I don’t get a dime).

Marc Bluestone