Infacta Groupmail 5 personal edition review
Small businesses that want to run their own email marketing campaigns can with this easy-to-use program.
Email marketing is cheap and, when done right, can get very high customer response rates. Groupmail provides all the tools a small business needs to create direct mail and manage its mailing lists. You can build multiple, targeted mailing lists and use the program’s templates to create and send mailshots quickly.
The 20 templates included are simple HTML tables formatted in such a way as to accommodate 200 to 300 words (you could make the text longer but it wouldn’t look as good). As you’d expect, you can customise templates to your needs, perhaps choosing a consistent colour palette for all your mails. If you have the text ready, you can create a new mail in as little as five minutes.
Managing your mail lists is generally straightforward. The only irritation was the program’s inability to import contacts from Outlook. For this, you have buy the business edition for £200 (which also includes support for common databases such as SQL Server and Oracle). There is a workaround, though, which is to import your Outlook contact list into Mozilla Thunderbird first.
Otherwise, list management works well. Crucially, you can add unsubscribe links to your messages and use the Subscriber add-on to remove from your mailing list anyone who sends you a mail using that link. The Subscriber add-on will also remove invalid emails from your lists, which we really liked. When you first configure GroupMail, you need to enter the details of your ISP or email provider. Sending your mailshots is then as simple as opening your finished message, selecting the mail list you want to use and clicking send.
A free version of GroupMail is available, but it sets a limit of 100 recipients per list, provides only four templates and doesn’t support add-ons. Businesses will be better off with one of the paid-for versions.