Manoj Ranaweera

I have an erratic relationship with email marketing tools. During the past, I have tried many products without total satisfaction. For my own sanity, I am writing this article so that I would have a source to check when my sanity is questioned once again by me.

• SimpleNews Drupal Module - started with this, gave up, went with mailchimp, ditched them, went back to this module, and I am thinking of ditching it once again.
• Mailchimp - Got frustrated due to two reasons, one for penalising me when I used the service for legitimate accounts, and the second, account automatically jumping up to next tariff as we got hit with spam accounts before our rebranding
• Google mail
• CritSend - smtp relay that will remain active to support private messaging and account management. But it also routed all simplenews newsletters, about 7500 emails a month
• iContact - have not used them for a while. Lack of innovation was the main reason, as I got bored of their service over time.

• "noooooooo - talk to me - @sendgrid much better (well actually its a slightly different horse but might suit u better" from @timlangley 
• "@TimLangley @manojranaweera I agree, @sendgrid is a fantastic service - I use it for @myonepage. I'm looking at MadMimi for newsletters" from @joelg87

• Pricing: Mailchimp $30/$50 for 2500/5000 addresses with unlimited emails + MadMimi $36 for 10,000 emails. Its $200 for 10,000 emails at Mailchimp => MadMimi wins
• Templates: Mailchimp has two column template I used in the past, which I still like + Madmimi does not have templates and I could not work out how to build a template with two columns - Let's not go through HTML here
• Integrations: Mailchimp integrates with Drupal and CapsuleCRM - Nirvana! + MadMimi none

• Switching to Mailchimp, not because I am thrilled about their service, but it makes functional sense due to integrations.
• May switch to MadMimi for edocr as I like some of their case studies. Madmimi is more about promotions than newsletters, so appeals to edocr than Techcelerate. Well, having said that, Madmimi could equally work for events.
• Mailchimp will be too expensive for edocr due to large number of accounts. 
• Hope MadMimi can tell me how to build 2 column template

(download)

Click here to download:

mailchimp-vs-mad-mimi-qlayEqAqkzuymGpsEqnx.zip (22 KB)

http://www.edocr.com/doc/7358/collabor8-a4

Taken from (copyright with) Crains Manchester Business 

Text payment service could be Yes man's biggest venture yet

Content Secure will allow customers to pay for services via their mobile phones

By Michael Fahy

Keith Curran, the Manchester-based entrepreneur who built virtual network operator Yes Telecom before selling it to Vodafone, will next month launch a venture which he believes could be his biggest yet.

Contact Secure, a text-based payments service aimed at high street retailers, gambling firms and government agencies, is due to go live on May 28.

Curran, who has been busy selling its virtues to major corporates, said two big retailers have agreed to sign up to a pilot scheme, but he declined to name them. The business is one of seven new ventures where he has taken stakes since Yes was sold in a £30m deal in 2006.

Contact Secure will have four strands to it. The main one is a “Text and Buy” Service that allows anyone who sets up an account to instantly buy goods via text message.

The second enables Contact Secure account holders to make instant purchases via the web without having to put credit card details on individual retailers' sites. “Abandoned baskets on websites have gone up considerably because retailers have had to build in more safety measures to prevent fraud,” said Curran.

The third is a “Buy Text Collect” Service which supersedes the “Text and Reserve” service, used by Argos and others, as it takes away the need to queue in the store and retailers know customers will collect because they have already paid.

Curran also said that the service could be used to transfer cash between Contact Secure account holders. This will include the ability to pay restaurants, takeaway firms, builders or any other service providers who have an account. He argues that this could replace portable chip and pin machines and thereby cut down on fraud.

Contact Secure is targeting two types of customer — proactive and reactive. The former will engage in impulse sales by texting product codes that appear on billboards, shop windows, TV ads or anywhere else displaying the Contact Secure logo.

“It taps into the "I want one' mode,” said Curran. “There's a lot of things you'd like to buy when the shops are shut.” Reactive customers will use it to pay utility bills. “We want to make the boring tasks like paying your electricity or car tax become a non-entity so you can do them in seconds.”

Contact Secure will make its money by charging retailers, utilities and other clients a small transaction fee for processing payments. Curran is chief executive of the company but said he had assembled a “very credible” management team — all of whom are shareholders in the venture. These include ex-Macromedia software executive Steve Dobson as chief technology officer, ex-Arla foods operations chief Richard Mostyn-Jones as operations director, ex-Enterprise Plc director Peter Ahye as chief financial officer and Steve Dixon as head of marketing.

Pioneering

Curran declined to say how much they had spent on developing Contact Secure, other than to admit investment was now “well into seven figures”. He also admitted that predicting likely revenues for its first few years would be difficult.

“It will change the face of retail,” Curran insisted. “When you go to retailers and utilities companies they all want to see 2-3 year results. We can't show them because this is pioneering.”

Earlier this month, London-based mobile media consultant BuzzCity issued its fifth annual global survey on customer mobile behaviour. Of the 1,798 mobile users it interviewed, 90 per cent said they had used their mobile to purchase goods or services. Some 68 per cent of these were related to mobile usage (such as top-up airtime), but 23 per cent of customers said they had either bought from retailers, paid a bill or booked tickets though their phones.

“The potential opportunities are huge but the diverse challenges faced by the global mobile audience must not be overlooked,” said BuzzCity's chief executive KF Lai. “Mobile consumers have money to spend, but they must be provided with the opportunity to do so.”

What Everyone Should Know About Website Statistics It's important to track a few key statistics on a regular basis and not get lost in the sea of numbers.  What are the most important?  Read on... 1) Visitors (new and repeat).  This is the number of people who have come to your website for the first time or who are coming back for a second time. This is important, because this is the size of the pool of people from which you are trying to get leads. The bigger the number of visitors, the more potential for you to get leads. 2) Leads.  This is the number of people who self-select on your website and do something to give you their contact information. It could be signing up for a demonstration, requesting a whitepaper, or viewing a video, but there must be a form where they give you at least their email address and sometimes more information as well. This number is critical since your website leads are where your sales come from. 3) Conversion Rate.  This is the percentage of your total website visitors who become a lead. So, if you had 200 visitors to your website today, and you generated 3 leads, that would be a 1.5% conversion rate. Most people will tell you that a 1-2% conversion rate is the average for a b2b website. The conversion rate is important because it is telling you how efficient your website is at turning visitors into leads. Remember, you can double your company's number of leads by either doubling your website traffic or doubling your conversion rate. 4) Website Grade.  The free tool at www.WebsiteGrader.com gives you an excellent overview of the marketing effectiveness of your website, including things like your Google PageRank, number of inbound links and other key statistics. What is nice about the Website Grade is that it summarizes this all into one number from 1 to 100. You should know what your website grade is and track it over time to make sure you improve (or if you already get a good score, to make sure you don't slip. 5) Keyword Search Rank.  For most business websites, the most efficient traffic and leads will come from organic search. This is the traffic that comes from people searching on Google, MSN and Yahoo and other engines and finding your website in the results. This traffic is not completely "free", since you need to work on your website to really maximize it, but it is usually much more cost effective than other sources. You need to know how you rank in the search engines for at least a few key terms related to your business, and you also want to know how that rank is changing over time - are you moving up or down - since that will determine the future success of your website visitors and leads. Source:

Taken from Insider News

Corporate Finance Advisory Team of the Year
PM&M
Moore & Smalley
Tenon
Cowgill Holloway
Dow Schofield Watts
CLB Coopers

Corporate Law Firm of the Year
Napthens
Forbes
Brabners Chaffe Street
Harrison Drury

Corporate Banking Team of the Year
Royal Bank of Scotland/NatWest
Handelsbanken
Yorkshire Bank

Fund of the Year
Rosebud Fund
Rising Stars Fund
Rapid Realisations Fund
North West Business Investment Scheme

Small Deal (under £2m) of the Year
Acquisition of Safe Business Services by Danbro
Fund raising of Plant Impact
Development Capital for Medalytix
Acquisition of TwoWay Gaming by NetPlay TV

Turnaround Team of the Year
Pierce
Harrison Drury
Moore and Smalley
Tenon
Begbies Traynor

Technology Deal of the Year
Development Capital for Medalytix
Acquisition of TwoWay Gaming by NetPlay TV

Deal of the Year
Sale of Liquid Plastics to Sika
Sale of Legion Group to Sectorguard
Acquisition and float of Daisy Communications
Acquisition of Bethell Power Services by Enterprise
Acquisition of Wright Build by John Turner
Acquisition of Teal Furniture by Senator International

Lancashire's Entrepreneur of the Year
Nigel Haworth. Northcote
Mohsin Issa, Euro Garages
Ilyas Khan, Accrington Stanley
Stephen Richards, Fast n Fresh
Matthew Riley, Daisy
Steve Jackson, Recycling Lives

Young Dealmaker of the Year
Charlotte Wood, Forbes
Pauline Rigby, Forbes
Shahin Akhtar, Haworth & Nuttall
Tim Mills, Pierce

Lancashire Dealmaker of the Year
Paul Spencer, Haworths
Carl Collett, Royal Bank of Scotland
Ruth Coffey, Forbes
Paul Stringer, Cowgill Holloway
Craig Richardson, Dow Schofield Watts
Rob Kenmare, Moore & Smalley
Kevin Hughes, Yorkshire Bank