14 DAY TRIAL // Marketing has become a powerful tool all over the world. Every product has nowadays a strong marketing strategy behind. Promoting a product can be useless if you do not know what's your market niche and you do not make the necessary research to see if your product is what the customers want.
The next software provides you the means of appealing to your market and it will also allow you to promote, research and even get feedback from customers. It is a simple tool to be used in the latest instrument of mass marketing, the Internet marketing.
E-mail marketing is probably the most efficient method on the Web of presenting your product to the customers. Of course, as long as you are not spamming them. The name of the software is E-mail Marketing and it is produced by INFORCOM and the price for this marketing instrument is $27. The only limitation of the application is its ability of sending only 30 emails.
The interface of the software is simple and user friendly and allows you to contact thousands of people in just a few mouse clicks. The software's use is for sending mass emails to addresses extracted from web pages.
There are no complicated menus and - as I have said before - using this software is very easy. The menu bar contains only the Session File option which, in its turn, hides different other submenus (New, Open, Save, Import emails from files, export emails to text file, add email list without filtering and Settings).
As one would expect, the most important option in here is Settings. It allows the user to create an exclusions list which is a list of domains or email addresses to which a message should not be sent. Once you have entered some items in there, the software will eliminate the words of the emails and domains from the send list.
The next option in the settings menu is for configuring the SMTP Server. The user can choose between the integrated software and other server (user specified). S/He can also set the retry delay and the maximum number of retries.
The Connections tab allows you to set the number of email extraction threads and the number of send email threads. The last tab in the Settings window is Extraction. The settings in here are to be used during the email search. The user can define the number of pages to be searched (the minimum number is 2000 and the maximum is 20000) and the number of link levels. If you select to extract the emails from a web page then you also have to set the number of links to be searched.
The main application window contains a number of fields that are to be filled by the user. The fields on the left are for sending the email, so you will find a field to type in your name, email address and subject, as well as the content of the email which you can choose to be simple text or a web page. In this last case, the web page will be loaded from your computer. At the bottom of all this you have the option of attaching a file and it ends with Send Email button.
On the right side of the application window you get to set the parameters for your search. Thus a country is obligatory to be chosen as well as the type of the job for the software (extract all emails from the web page or email address search). Under this bar, you will have to enter the object of your search.
In the right upper corner you will notice four little buttons. They are to be used for harnessing the bandwidth used by the software. The first one is for customized bandwidth (set by the user in Connections under Settings), the red led is for using a little of it, the red one for choosing to use half the available bandwidth and the green button is for setting no restriction for the used bandwidth and the software will use all of it.
The other options in the Session File menu are for saving the current session, initiating a new one or opening a past session. The software is able to import emails from simple text as well as from Word or Excel documents or any other archive, be it binary or ASCII.
The Good
The software is a powerful tool to use in your promotion of the product or just for mass emailing. Easy to use and pretty efficient.
The Bad
Although the help menu contains all the details about the software and how to use it, only users that know Spanish will be able to use it.
The filtering of the emails retrieved is not too accurate and you may get half of the email address. It could be used for spamming and you can send emails with different addresses in the sender field. Also, the integrated software does not work very well as I could not send a single email.
The Truth
The software is great, despite the little spelling errors in the interface and the fact that the Help menu is in Spanish. But I am waiting to see the improvement the future versions will bring.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
