Campaigner Adds Targeted Email

The email marketing service now lets SMBs segment their audience and set up filters to send more personalized messages.Protus Campaigner gives small businesses tools to manage their e-mail marketing: customizable message templates, list management features, and reporting and analytics functions. Now the company has built on that foundation to enable businesses to tailor their messages based on what they know about the recipients. "It's a way for our customers to better target their customers," says Protus vice president Steve Adams.

For example, Campaigner's reporting feature enables a business to see if any of their message recipients aren't bothering to open the message or click on the link, or only open some messages and not others. The new targeting feature lets the business then send a special email blast to just those recipients asking them to confirm that they want to still get messages, without having to extract the names, create a new mailing list, and so on. Conversely, those recipients who do follow links in their emails can get more frequent messages. The targeting can even be more fine-grained than that: Campaigner lets a business see which email subjects drew the most response and follow up accordingly.

According to Adams, the first step for a small business looking to take advantage of segmented marketing is to build a mailing list that has the relevant details. Physical businesses with customers who actually come in can capture some of that information on the spot -- for example, whether the customer is male or female, what they bought or what services they showed an interest in, and so on. For e-businesses, Campaigner provides the ability to set up an online form that customers can fill out; another new feature is the ability to embed a form like that onto a business's Facebook fan page.

One more new feature worth mentioning to Mac-based businesses: Campaigner can now import up to 500 vCard contacts (the kind of file Address Book exports) at a time.

Available with a 30-day free trial, Campaigner's plans range from $10/month for unlimited e-mails to up to 1,000 addresses up to $55/month for up to 10,000 addresses.