ANTenna Blog -- Networking & Communications

Implix today rolls out GetResponse 6.0, its e-mail marketing solution for small businesses, with a slew of new features.

Entrepreneur Simon Grabowski founded Implix ten years ago in Poland at the age of 18. The company now employs 100 people in Wilmington, Delaware; Halifax, Canada; and Gdynia, Poland. Its 93,000 Get Response customers send out some 6 billion emails every year.

Grabowski is clearly passionate about e-mail marketing, claiming it offers companies with under 100 employees the best cost-per-action of any marketing effort (after search engine optimization), returning $45 for every $1 invested. He says e-mail marketing is predicted to grow to a $2 billion market by 2014, with some $144 million wasted on undelivered e-mails.

Competing against more established players like aWeber, iContact, Vertical Response, MailChimp, and Constant Contact, Implix hopes the latest generation of Get Response can participate in that growth with several key enhancements:

1. Multimedia Studio is designed to make it easy to record and insert videos into e-mail messages. It automatically encodes and stores the e-mail on Implix' servers (subscribers get 100MB of storage space) and inserts a thumbnail image and Play button into the email.

2. Social Media. Twitter integration automatically tweets the link whenever a user sends an e-mail or updates a blog. Grabowski says Facebook integration is in the works. Grabowski cites studies claiming social media users to reach 47 million in 2014, and says its important to integrate those users with traditional e-mail marketing.

3. iPhone Integration. Users can now track campaign results and add subscribers directly from their iPhones.

4. New Templates. The number of included templates has increased from 70 to 300.

5. Free Followups. Each campaign now includes free followup messages to subscribers.

6. Free Drag and Drop Surveys.

7. Improved Analytics, covering subscriptions, performance, surveys, and critically, sales conversions. Split testing is also supported.

bMighty.com believes in the power of e-mail marketing, but we also know that it's important not to put all your marketing eggs in one basket. Carelessly overloading your e-mail lists with too many messages can burn out your subscribers. Instead, you want to do everything you can to make your subscribers, typically among your best customers and prospects, happy with your company.

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