Email marketing has really taken off in the past few years, with virtually every burgeoning entrepreneur getting in on the action because of the ease and affordability of simply sending out emails to get the word out.
Instead of putting up or handing out fliers, you can send out mass emails to interested parties to get your message to them, rather than relying on patrons to visit your website. There is a fine line between good email marketing and spam, however, and this is a line that email marketers learn to tread very lightly.
As a result of the growth of email marketing, a lot of new software has been developed that can really help you get a leg up. Infacta’s GroupMail 5 is one such program.
GroupMail is a program that has been around for a few years now, obviously, and they’ve really worked hard to listen to their customers’ feedback and iron out the glitches of previous editions. GroupMail 5 comes in four different versions, allowing you to pick the best one for your budget and your email marketing needs.
For this review, we used GroupMail Personal Edition, which runs at around $139. There is also the GroupMail Free Edition, GroupMail Business Edition (which will cost you about $349), and the GroupMail Marketing Pack (which runs around $699). The more expensive versions obviously will have more features for you to play with, but we consider the Personal Edition to be a pretty good baseline.
Digging in, we found that the interactivity on GroupMail was very smooth. It’s every bit the modern piece of software that most users expect these days. There’s not a lot of clunky interface icons and the like that leave you scratching your head.
We also tinkered around with the “Help” feature to get us started and found it surprisingly useful – rather than a mere afterthought.
The main thing you’ll use GroupMail for is making mailing lists, which this program refers to as “Groups.” This software allows you to easily input contact information for each recipient (which may be as simple as an email address) and place them into various groups.
It will also personalize any emails to these recipients using the contact information you provide.
On the left-hand side of the window, you’ll find the Task List, which is how you’ll manage your recipient database. The Task List has all your Group options, such as the names of your groups, how many recipients are in each Group, the format type for the Group, and what email path you are using. You control and view all these options with a simple double-click – easy.
Overall, we found the experience to be very similar to using Outlook as far as the learning curve for using this software goes. In other words, if you can use Outlook, you can use GroupMail.
GroupMail Summary
All in all, I’d have to say that Infacta’s GroupMail is a fine inheritor of its previous editions. Infacta is constantly exchanging information with its customer base and taking any complaints into account, and fixing them.
In fact, I’ve even read customers’ reports of glitches in the program and seen Infacta representative chime in, promising to work one-on-one with that customer to solve the problem. In this age of huge, faceless companies like Microsoft running the show, it’s nice to see this kind of personalized service. But I digress.
GroupMail is a great program to have if you need to send out mass emails to hundreds or thousands of recipients in short amount of time. We found it easy to pick up and run with, and recommend it to any email marketer.