Inbox marketer suite is an effective tool to help advisors manage their client communications. It is fast, inexpensive and efficient, and combines the reach of e-mail with the intelligence of a marketing database.

Developed by Guelph, Ont.-based Inbox Marketer Inc. , the proprietary, Windows-based software facilitates the creation and deployment of e-mail campaigns and provides real-time tracking and reporting. Essentially, it integrates database and e-mail deployment into a single Web interface, with Inbox remaining invisible to the client in the whole process.

Your own e-mail marketing database, which holds relevant con-tact and personal information, is used to select the mailing list — the entire list or a customized list based on pre-defined criteria. For instance, you may want to target only clients with RRSPs or RESPs, or send an e-mail to all clients about a specific product or service.

You can then choose a template from the software’s creative library and choose the content. Or you can use your own content. As a separate service, Inbox includes software that can help you write your own content.

Once an e-mail campaign is deployed, you have access to real-time reports. “Advisors can watch as people open their messages and click on the links. The reports identify which individuals have clicked on which links,” says Randall Litchfield, president of Inbox.

This process enables continuous client communication, Litchfield says: “Every time advi-sors send messages, they can re-cord their clients’ click behaviour and feed this information back to the customer profiles in the e-mail marketing database.”

By refreshing customer profiles, advisors can engage in “closed-loop marketing” that enables customized e-mail marketing. Effectively, you can “harden” your offers to specific clients in subsequent e-mail campaigns, based on the interest shown in a particular subject or product, thereby increasing the likelihood of a positive reaction.

“Information can be more targeted, more relevant and more useful to the recipient,” Litchfield says. “Once advisors embark on that process, they’ve engaged the client in consensual marketing.”

The reports also show click-through rate, open rate, response rate, discard rate and time spent reading e-mail, allowing you to improve your e-mail campaigns.

The query feature allows you to segment your e-mail lists easily, so you can design targeted campaigns. E-mails can be personalized for greater effect.

Inbox is premised on permission-based e-mail marketing, meaning that recipients must agree to receive information from the advisor. It has permission pages and opt-in pages that are integrated with its database. The opt-in feature allows for cleaner mailing lists.

Recognizing that spam is a growing concern, the software automatically produces evidence that clients have “opted in” to receive e-mails. “It will record the date they did it, how they did it, whether it came through a Web page or from another e-mail, and so forth,” Litchfield says.

New subscribers are added to the database automatically, while those who unsubscribe are deleted automatically.

Inbox works in three ways: it provides a self-service solution, whereby you can use its Web-based interface to deploy your own e-mail cam-paigns; it offers full e-mail services, including preparation of your e-mail marketing and publishing strategy, designing templates for newsletters and alerts, writing content and assisting with the acquisition and building of mailing lists; and it will work with a combination of self- and full service.

Plus, Litchfield says, it is user-friendly: “Our users have very commonplace computer skills — they are not IT people. We built the Inbox Marketer Suite so anyone can learn to create and deploy e-mail campaigns with an hour or two of training. We didn’t ‘dumb’ the application down, but made it extremely intuitive.”

The firm offers 24/7 customer service and claims that requests never go into a service queue.

The marketing arm of advisor firms and advisors with a large client base can make the most effective use of this smart, flexible software program. IE