Business Catalyst - Online Business Solution

BC includes over 200+ pre-designed templates to use for email marketing campaigns, or if you prefer, we can custom design an email marketing template to match your corporate branding and website design.

The system allows you to setup any number of Email Lists. A list is any set of your customers which have been grouped together by you for the purpose of receiving an email newsletter. For instance you may want to create a list and have your customers' subscribe to it by placing a subscription form on your website. You could then use this list to send your Monthly Newsletter to. You can also very easily import customer records (in CSV or Tab delimited format) into a list, as well as manually add customers to any list.

Autoresponders are the email notifications that are sent out to your customers upon submission of a web form. They serve as a powerful tool in reassuring your customers that their form was successfully submitted, and also as a handy reference for the customer in regards to what they have submitted.

One-off campaigns are the most popular forms of email marketing. An example of a one-off campaign is an email newsletter that is sent to a group of your customers at some date in the future. For example you might write a newsletter called "April Newsletter" and send it to your customer database. This is a one-off newsletter. Of course you may continue on and send another newsletter in May called "May Newsletter" but again, this is a one-off newsletter.

Loyalty-based campaigns automate communication to a group of your customers on a one-by-one basis. One example might be a birthday loyalty campaign. If you are in a position to collect your customer's date of birth or even just their day and month of birth, then you can setup birthday loyalty-based campaigns that automate communication to your customers on a one-by-one basis. You might want to include a sweetener such as a 20% discount if they purchased with you in the month of their birthday. This process continues around the clock and for every single customer in your recipients list. You needn't remember when customer birthdays are but you can rest assured that you are wishing them happy birthday and keeping them up to date with your latest products and offers.

Email Series campaigns allow you to automate the sending of newsletters to recipients as and when they are subscribed to a list. For example, if you setup a campaign of this type with 0 day, 7 day and 14 day delivery days then when person 1 joins, they will receive issue 1 straight away. Issue 2 will be sent 7 days after they subscribe and issue 3 will be sent 14 days after this person first subscribed. But when person 2 comes along a month later and subscribes to a list via your website, they will receive the same issues at the same intervals relative to their subscription date. This process is repeated for every person that subscribes to the list attached to these campaigns.

Once you've sent out an email campaign the system is able to track what happens to each of the emails (provided they were sent in HTML format). Find out how many email addresses it reached, how many it bounced from, how many people have opened the email and so forth.

You can put the ‘Unsubscribe’ link in any part of the email content. If a customer unsubscribes from a campaign then they will not receive any future campaigns from you until they grant you permission again. You can also unsubscribe customers manually from email lists if necessary. Note: The Unsubscribe link on emails is enforced by BC. This means that if you send out an email campaign without an unsubscribe link, the system will automatically append this to the bottom of the email.

Spam is a major issue affecting everyone on the internet. BC take strict preventative measures to curtail the explosion of spam. The following are some of the measures taken:

• The email FROM address has to be verified. You must be the legal owner of the FROM email address that you use to send out your newsletters with.
• All campaigns require BC approval before broadcasting.
• By default, the system is setup with a Double Opt-in mechanism enabled.
• The Unsubscribe option is enforced. If you decided not to include this link on an email newsletter, then the system will automatically append this to the bottom of your email.