February 12, 2008 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Avatar technology platform SitePal (sitepal.com) announced on Monday that it has launched a new feature that enables business owners to create and send HTML or text-based email blasts to customers complete with a customized speaking avatar.
To use this feature, SitePal says users have to create a speaking avatar and choose the email function within the publishing wizard. Email addresses are then uploaded, with one click, using a lead list from either Yahoo, Gmail, AOL or MSN. If the user chooses to send an HTML version, SitePal offers a series of templates for authoring the email as well. Once delivered, statistics like open rates and number of times viewed are made available through an online reporting tool.
"Talking avatars are a proven and effective way of driving conversions and higher sales and adding an email feature was a natural and important extension of the SitePal application," says Adi Sideman, CEO of Oddcast. "One of the key elements in getting people to click beyond an email and onto your site is a campaign's ability to engage the consumer and get them to take action. Talking characters drive higher response and conversion rates because they are dynamic and help to differentiate email marketing campaigns beyond simple, static text."
SitePal says in the near future it will give users the ability to upload their own custom-branded templates into the wizard and enable users to insert their speaking avatar image into their email signatures. Access to email lists through Microsoft Outlook and other major CRM platforms will be added as well.
Uplinkearth recently began offering SitePal talking avatars.
Read Back Issues of WHIR Magazine
October 2009 - Web Hosting's All Star Team
This has been, for us, one of the most interesting, exciting and challenging build-ups to an issue of the magazine yet, Web Hosting's All Star Team. The balloting process was our first experiment with a kind of user participation we're planning to do a lot more with in the months to come. We had thousands of ballots submitted, with hundreds of write-in suggestions and a demonstration of user engagement that has us feeling super positive about the project.
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July 2009 - What am I Worth?
One of the interesting luxuries of working on a project like the printed WHIR magazine is that it allows us to play with things like our point of view from one issue to the next. In recent months we've been giving added attention to the kind of practical and applicable advice aimed at smaller hosts and resellers. This issue carries on with that point of view, asking, in our cover story, "what am I worth?" It's a complicated question without a clear-cut answer.
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May 2009 - The Blueprint for a Small Web Host
I was a little surprised by how difficult it became to see this idea through. We set out to assemble a blueprint for a small hosting business, but butted up pretty quickly against the general impossibility of covering all the territory that was out there to be covered. The basic constraints of a printed magazine, and the less-than-infinite amount of time we had available forced us to face the fact that we could never produce an exhaustive guide to starting a hosting company.
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