Email Promotions

Attached I have listed the best email promotional programs out there. Many of my clients ask about email promotions and which ones are the best. So here you go!

The ones I have listed all are maintained off-site, so it does not interfere with your email client software, and you won't get a spam violation. And it helps because you should be sending out to a large email list.

Need to build that list...ask I and can help you with that. But more on the best email programs below.

Constant Contact®, Inc. helps small businesses, associations, and nonprofits connect with their customers, clients, and members. Launched in 1998, Constant Contact champions the needs of small organizations and provides them with an easy and affordable way to build successful, lasting customer relationships.

Constant Contact's leading email marketing and online survey tools—supported by its expert personal coaching and support—help all types of small businesses and organizations create professional-looking email newsletters and insightful online surveys and begin a dialogue with their customers. Today, more than 250,000 customers worldwide trust Constant Contact to help them connect with their audience.

With Constant Contact, small organizations have access to the latest industry information and education to help them learn email marketing and online survey best practices. Plus, they benefit from Constant Contact's high email deliverability rates due to strong partnerships with ISPs, a no-tolerance spam policy, and a leadership role in organizations such as the ESPC (Email Sender and Provider Coalition).

Vertical Response
There are two simple reasons why people have flocked to VerticalResponse to help them grow their businesses for over 5 years:

• A superior product that’s easy to use
• Superior customer support

From the very beginning we decided that if you actually pick up the phone when a customer calls, call them back, or send them a real live email (not one generated by a robot), you’ll have a customer for life. Well, we think we did it.

At VerticalResponse we work hard to offer online tools that enable anyone regardless of technical expertise to get up and running in minutes with their email and direct mail campaigns. Self-service isn’t just for the gas pump anymore, it’s the way businesses need to use the Internet to help them grow.

Upgrading to Content Management

This is meant to be a case study based on a real solution provided to an institution. @ebc Inc. has these resources available to implement for clients.

A Museum sought to redesign their web presence and invite a broader community to engage with the institution, without any restrictions on content.

Through a few web development companies, the museum evaluated several potential content management options, ultimately selecting Macromedia Contribute as their solution for adding and updating web content quickly and easily. With Contribute, the museum introduced a flexible review and approval process and enabled cross-functional departments to easily and safely add and update content on the website. An authoring tool for non-technical content providers, Contribute 3 requires no technical expertise and is powered by the same technology as Macromedia Dreamweaver.



The Benefits:
•Enabled cross-functional departments to easily and safely add and update content -- without knowing HTML.
•With consulting help from a web developer, the Museum created a flexible review and approval process, which accelerated website updates.
•Accessibility standards and usability maintained through transparent and invisible project workflow.
•Admin settings help ensure that website meets guidelines for accessibility support.
Content publishing process never degraded and ensures preservation of work and standards.

The museum boasts more than a million artifacts and approximately 28,000 works of art. The museum is also a broad, active, and community-based institution that includes exhibition spaces, a library, and archives. In fact, the archives contain the largest collection of photographs, drawings, memorabilia, and documents about their territory in the world.

Within the scope of a five-year New Media plan, developed to implement a new technology strategy for the delivery of museum content, the Museum sought to redesign and redevelop its web presence to reflect the welcoming, active, and dynamic nature of the institution.

To achieve this goal, the Museum selected an interactive technology and web design firm. Renowned for their work in the arts and culture space, the firm worked closely with the museum’s staff to create a new website that was intuitive, accessible, and highly usable for a broad range of users.

The Museum had three primary goals for the site: First, the site had to accommodate dynamic, compelling and up-to-date information on the museum’s exhibitions, collections, programs, and events. Second, the site had to be easy to maintain, which was no small feat considering the size of the institution and the number of departments involved in developing content for the website. And third, the site needed to adhere to new government standards for web accessibility.

In fact, Macromedia technology underpinned almost every facet of the new website redesign project. The web firm developed the site using the Macromedia Studio product suite, and deployed the site using Macromedia ColdFusion. The museum uses the Macromedia Web Publishing System, which includes Contribute, to enable content contributors to collaborate, manage, and publish to websites using templates within a centrally controlled, standards-based environment. Developers used Macromedia Flash to create multimedia content and interactive functionality. Finally, the museum’s web producers use Macromedia Studio for ongoing website production.

The ongoing success of the new website redesign is apparent, yet Contribute remains behind the scenes. It is approachable and easy to use for the broad range of departmental users in the museum. Additionally, site administrators like the flexibility of using Dreamweaver and Contribute together to maintain a centrally controlled and permissions-based environment for distributed web publishing. Furthermore, they leverage Contribute’s accessibility features to meet and exceed the W3C levels 1 and 2 accessibility standards (both at site launch and on an ongoing basis). Administrator options allow site developers to enforce accessibility markup (such as alt tags for images) and protect CSS layout standards (which help structure the hierarchy of content so that it is optimized for screen readers).

Finally, the Museum provides their comments on the website project.

“Contribute hits the mark because it takes advantage of and enforces an imbued intelligence that is integrated into the work-flow process, web templates and overall site design.” For the web firm and the museum, implementing Contribute into the Museum's site maintenance process means that the developer and the museum’s web producers can rest easy at night. They know that as content is added and published to the site that design, accessibility and usability standards will be maintained at all times. Best of all, for site producers, the enhanced publishing process means they are free to work on more challenging projects (other than updating text) and that accessibility has become transparent and invisible to the project work-flow.

For more information, feel free to contact us on how to implement the Adobe line of products for your next website project.

Why Custom Website Design and Development

Review this as a case study on how to utilize a custom, web-based solution, as apposed to working off templates and pre-packaged software as a low-cost solution.

A premier symphony orchestra wanted to build an easy-to-use, Internet-based ticketing application which could handle big seating charts, enhance web presence, and orchestrate the back-end business of a complex performing arts organization.

Encumbered by a paper-laden, legacy-based ticketing system, the orchestra looked for a way to make the complicated process of ticketing sing. The plan was to evolve it from a static HTML site to a highly interactive experience. They integrated the new site with their legacy ticketing system through web services, but, at the end of the day, they needed an even more highly integrated solution.

"The web is our only touch point that's growing," said an information technology director at the orchestra company. "Our goal is to process half our transactions online."

They relied on the tight integration between Flash and ColdFusion to build a ticketing system from the ground up – sharing much of the same code with the website.

They named the new ticketing system to help market and promote the new site more effectively.

Over two years, they mapped every facet of the Orchestra's business process – from season subscriptions to group sales. In nine months, they delivered technology that drives the business, and can drive it further. "We rapidly built the application framework using built-in ColdFusion features such as CFX, custom tags, CFQuery, CFHTTP and CFMail,". The intuitiveness of the ColdFusion markup language allowed HTML designers to design the website while integrating the programmers' ColdFusion code. Junior programmers and HTML designers handled much of the workload; only one senior engineer was needed on the website.

Now, audiences can buy, exchange, or renew tickets online, engage in program notes, and hear archived concerts.

Sales workflows are completely paperless on the new application. Users pick a concert, pick a day, and pick a seat. The application processes payment, and prints the tickets. Administrators can "seat" a house, plan events, set pricing, and report results.

Besides handling 90 custom workflows, the application is capable of ticketing any house – perhaps someday the cluster of performing arts organizations, or universities filling multiple venues.

So the benefits are:

• Easy transfer of skills for Java programmers to ActionScript
• Rapid development cycle and time to market
• Paperless seating of multiple houses, excellent customer service
• Eliminated overtime and temp hires, three times faster ticket processing

Onlyebc.com can assist in case studies such as these, and that is why we focus on custom website design and development solutions utilizing the Adobe host of software products.

Please feel free to contact us with your custom solution, and we'll help to break it down, and explain the benefits.

Get a shopping cart

To all of you potential business owners out there, who needs a shopping cart?
Onlyebc.com offers a few that we have reviewed that: work well, offer stability, and can be customized.
Visit our website to find out more information on the shopping carts would work best for your needs.
What else do you need? Merchant Account, SSL, Payment Gateway. Our company can assist with the set up of these components as well. Click on the "Start ecommerce Today link(bottom left hand side of the home page) www.onlyebc.com
You will get a downloadable file from Authorize.net They can assist in the set up the the Payment Gateway and the Merchant account, based on the needs of your website shopping cart.
Any more help? We can do it!