Will Microsoft’s new email marketing tool kill MailChimp?

Microsoft recently released an email marketing extension of Office 365 Microsoft Connections. Connections allow users to create professional-looking email marketing campaigns on the web, iOS, and Android. It monitors campaign performance, including clicks and open rates, and manages subscribers. In many ways, Microsoft Connection’s value proposition is similar to MailChimp’s! If this was not enough - Microsoft is offering the email tool for free just like MailChimp! Ever heard of anything ‘free’ from Microsoft before?

MailChimp announced in early May that it would give its 15 million customers free access to its email marketing tools, a service previously which came at extra cost. While MailChimp is cheaper than an Office 365 subscription, experts say that's only true to a point. The MailChimp business model has a "free to play" lower tier which spikes upwards as a list of subscribers grow. For example, with MailChimp, you can email to a list of up to 2,000 subscribers a month for free, but if you have 24,000 subscribers, it will cost you $150 a month. However, MailChimp’s model is not sustainable - especially if it were to compete with tech giants! Microsoft on the other hand, has $126 billion in cash on hand, so offering products for free is no big deal for them.  But with Microsoft's offering there is a catch - Connections is not really 'free', you will need to purchase Office Suite to install the email tool!

While leveraging Microsoft's platform may seem tempting to small businesses, they must wait to see if Connections will be like Microsoft Media Player or Microsoft Money! Will it be a huge success or will it just fail like several other Microsoft products?

It is perhaps too soon to say anything, but it will be interesting to see if Microsoft is able to revolutionize email marketing with Connections and if MailChimp will be able to sail through the fierce competition from a tech-giant!

Link: https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/10/microsoft-launches-new-email-marketing-and-invoicing-tools-for-small-businesses/?ncid=mobilenavtrend

Mailjet Raises Another $11 Million To Scale Its Unified Marketing And Transactional Email Service

Posted Jul 15, 2015 by Romain Dillet (@romaindillet)

French startup Mailjet just raised $11 million (€10 million) from existing investor Alven Capital as well as Iris Capital and Seventure Partners. As a reminder, Mailjet is an email delivery service that works for both marketing campaigns and transactional emails.

“Mailjet’s distinctive feature is that we tackle both markets — marketing and transactional,” CEO Alexis Renard told me. “It’s different for MailChimp as they have two different products under two different names [MailChimp and Mandrill], Campaign Monitor only does marketing. But our market is evolving toward emails that are not entirely transactional nor marketing emails.”

Renard could be well-positioned to handle this new sort of emails by developing a single product under one brand. But first, a quick recap. What is a marketing campaign and transactional emails? What these companies call a marketing campaign is a newsletter or any kind of mass email list that you subscribed too. It’s not particularly tailored to you. A transactional email is an automatic email sent to you and only you. For example, it can be an email to confirm your email address after signing up to a web service or a purchase receipt.

These are two very different beasts. Transactional email services need to have a reliable API, send email as quickly as possible and never fail — Mailjet started with transactional emails. Marketing email services need to be able to send hundreds of thousands of emails even if it takes a few minutes, have a good reputation with Google, Microsoft or Yahoo so that your newsletter doesn’t end up in the spam folder, and provide tools to customize the design of your emails.

“Around 30 percent of ours clients only send marketing campaigns, 30 percent only send transactional emails and 40 percent send both,” Renard said. Mailjet now sends 600 million emails per month for 32,000 clients and monthly recurring revenue has jumped 70 percent year over year. Recently, the company has launched a new visual template designer to easily create responsive campaigns.

To read more

http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/15/mailjet-raises-another-11-million-to-scale-its-unified-marketing-and-transactional-email-service/

When to send marketing emails to Norwegian bartenders in their 70s

Mailchimp came up with a couple of interesting findings from analyzing the data of over 10 billion email they send out every month. In particular, the looked at the timing when people open their emails. The graphs below show their analyses for age groups, geographies and professions:

College aged recipients have an optimal time of 1 p.m. versus 10 a.m. for the older two categories. College students during the summer likely drag themselves out of bed later and check their email later than older folks.

During the summer months, Norway has a very long day, so the distribution of the optimal send times for Norwegian addresses plateaus out from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. while a country like Egypt experiences a more pronounced fall after typical business hours.

Lawyers have a well-defined workday in which they optimally engage with email marketing at 9 am. Bartenders roll out of bed later and aren’t fully engaging until noon. Neonatal nurses on the other hand have little of a pronounced optimum. Rather, they work night and day and their distribution of optimal send times blurs into a plateau all the way past 10 p.m.

Source: http://mashable.com/2014/07/17/when-to-send-marketing-email-data/?utm_campaign=Mash-Prod-RSS-Feedburner-All-Partial&utm_cid=Mash-Prod-RSS-Feedburner-All-Partial&utm_medium=feed&utm_source=rss