Review: Omnistar Mailer
Posted by Jon Lee in Efficiency, Reviews, Sponsored, tags: email, marketing, omnistar mailer, review
When I was asked by Omnistar to write a review about their software, Omnistar Mailer, I felt it would be a good opportunity to stress the importance of email marketing. Email marketing has been an vital part of many successful business over the last decade. I find that people new to the industry tend to shy away from this aspect of marketing and instead decide to focus on forms of Web 2.0 and viral marketing. Good old fashioned e-mail and newsletters has been proven to work over the years and should not be neglected! You can try maintaining a list of e-mails of your customers but you will soon realize that you need a more elegant and powerful solution. That’s where e-mail marketing software like Omnistar Mailer comes in.
Overview
Omnistar Mailer is a web based email marketing software that lets you easily manage and deploy newsletters and e-mail campaigns. Omnistar Mailer is built using PHP/MySQL and can be controlled entirely from the web. You can maintain lists of customers and create multiple e-mail campaigns to reach these customers. You can even create surveys that your customers can use to give feedback!
Ease of Use
The first thing I tried was to use their “Getting Started Wizard“. It was fairly easy to set up a mailing list and I like how all the customization you’ll ever need to do can be done straight from the application without any hand coding. For example, a subscription form generally has two fields: name and e-mail. If you want to add more fields for the user to enter, their interface easily allows you to do just that.
Creating your actual e-mail that gets sent out to your customers is fairly straightforward as well since there is an integrated modular WYSIWYG editor. Omnistar Mailer comes with 9 HTML templates you can use to build your e-mail around. However, you may feel that finding someone to design the actual e-mail layout may be a better idea since the templates are rather simple and not that attractive (in my opinion).
If you’re ever confused about how to use a certain feature, they even have video/audio tutorials! That’s an A+ for effort right there.
Analytic Reports
Perhaps one of the most powerful differences between using an email management tool and maintaining a list of subscribers yourself are the reports that email management software generates. You can track which users are most engaged with your newsletter or what the click through rate is. This allows you to tweak and test different campaign settings to maximize click through rates.
Pricing
With all these features, it shouldn’t come as a shock that the software isn’t free — it costs $257 for a full single license. It does come with lifetime (and phone) support though! It may seem like a lot but at least they’re not charging a monthly subscription fee which seems to be the growing trend nowadays in web-based software.
Suggestions
My one main complaint are the limited number of HTML templates available. There are 9 of them but they simply appear to be slight modifications of 2 or 3 core ones. I would suggest designing the e-mail yourself instead of using one of the built in templates if you want something that looks. A secondary complaint is that some of the more advanced features like auto-responders require you to manually set a cron job. Not everyone may be comfortable doing this but I guess there is no easy way around it!
Conclusion
Omnistar Mailer is a very powerful and well built piece of software. If you need something to manage your mailing list or e-mail newsletters, then this is something you should definitely consider getting. At $257 it is an investment but with their 30-day no questions asked full-refund policy, you don’t have much to lose. Still in doubt? Try their online demo to judge the software for yourself.
P.S. Readers of this blog can receive 20% off the price of Omnistar Mailer by using coupon code: jonleeÂ
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I am under the impression that email marketing has outlived its utility. People simply send such emails off into their spam blocks. I wonder if there is any study done to verify this and perhaps a chance for an interesting post from you?
I also agree to the comment above. Email marketing is vanishing now.
I have to join the chorus that email marketing is not an effective tool any more. But the newsletter and survey functions of this software will surely have its pluses i think.
Wow. I don’t know where you guys are getting your information from, but from my perspective, email marketing is far from dying. My perspective being that of a consumer and that of someone with insight into one of the UK’s biggest retail groups.
I agree that it is not effective. I carried out an experiment. I sent out 44000 emails. Only got 1573 hits from them and 3 sells. I got no profit. So, you can see what is its effect in present times. Don’t waste time on it. You will just be aded to the spam. Consider building organic traffic instead or try ppc. Thanks
Email marketing can still be effective if done correctly, but nowadays many people just view it as spam.
You probably know better than me Will, i was just commenting from a personal point of view, because i do not respond at all to marketing email, simply trash them; rarely even open them if i dont know why they are from.
E-mail marketing might not be dead but most campaigns are spam attacks…
It looks good.Thanks for the cool information.
I have not used this one.But it is looking interesting.Thanks for this.
Well, I don’t know from where you all are getting this information from, but from my point of view, email marketing is far from dying. My view point being that of a consumer and that of someone with insight into one of the UK’s biggest retail groups.
@Sandra – if you choose to use email marketing you have to be aware that the response rate is very low, the only answer would be targeted marketing which should do the job very well. Basically I agree with the statement, that email marketing is still alive and kicking. You just have to know what you are doing
As far as the templates are concerned, if there is an easy way to add more of them there should not be much of a problem.
Email marketing can work, but I agree with most comments above, that it has become much harder. Stick with SEO or PPC!