EMAIL BLAST / SUBSCRIPTIONS

Send targeted emails directly to your contacts!

Email is the best way to keep your customers and visitors connected to your products and services. Once people come to your site and either fill out a form or create an account, you have the ability to send rich HTML emails to them on a periodic basis. All you need is our email blast services. For a low monthly cost, you can send as many emails to the people in your database as you need.

How does it work?

When people come to your site, they will fill out one of your forms or they will register at the site (typically to shop or to interact with your discussion forum or blog posts). When they do this, they create a contact record which includes an email address. These records can be viewed, edited and exported from the content management interface which is used to manage your site. You can also manually add as many contacts as you want to your database.

The 9dx Email Blast service allows you to create any number of richly formatted emails and send them to your contacts and account holders. We provide a selection of generic templates which can hold one, two or three columns of content. The emails can be any length that you like, from short marketing blurbs to extended e-newsletters. You edit these emails like any other page on your site, and you can include embedded images and links back to your web site. You can view the emails as you go, or send a sample copy to yourself to see how they will appear to your contacts.

When you're ready, you can send this email to the people in your database. We provide special filters to more narrowly select within your contacts, including date fields (e.g., you can email people who have recently registered), geographical filters (e.g., you can email people who are proximate to a zip code, within a specific state or county, or who have a certain area code), who have placed orders on your site within a date range, and who have filled out a specific form (e.g., you can email people who specifically filled out your pricing request form, and exclude people who filled out your job application form).

After the emails are delivered, you can see the total number that were sent successfully, which ones were bounced (due to an invalid email address), which ones opted-out from your emails, which ones were opened, and how many of your contacts clicked a link in the email to visit your site.

Aren't there other services that allow me to email my contacts?

There are many third-party services which allow you to import a list of contacts and send emails. But they are typically more expensive than the 9dx Email Blast service, and they are all handicapped by one critical factor -- they are not directly related to your web site. You have to take your contacts out of your web site and import them into this third-party system. In so doing, you lose the ability to apply some critical filters which are part of your Xpress site (e.g., the ability to email people who have responded to your blogs, or who have purchased certain items in your store, or who have submitted a donation). It is also much harder to track what people do when they click a link in the email to come back to your site. How many pages do they visit? Do they place an order or make a donation? Do they visit a specific page of your choosing? All of these are automatic when you use 9dx Email Blasts, because our service is directly connected to your site and your contact database.

Third-party services typically do not have automated subscription capability.

What are "subscriptions"?

Subscriptions are special groups of emails that your contacts can choose to receive. When someone fills out a form on your site or creates an account (to shop or to participate), you can automatically enroll them in a subscription. When you are sending an email, you can direct it to people who are members of a specific subscription. This is a way to give people information they are specifically interested in receiving. People can choose to manage their subscriptions at any time, and this includes the ability to opt-in to other subscriptions that you may offer.

Subscriptions can also contain a timed collection of emails. When someone joins the subscription, they will automatically receive a series of emails from you according to a schedule that you create. For example, you can create a subscription that automatically sends someone a follow-up email the day after they fill out a form on your site, then sends them a second email two weeks later, then a third a month later. It's all handled automatically -- you only need to create the emails in advance and indicate the time frame for sending each email.

Pricing

Our service charges a monthly fee based on the total number of unique email addresses in your database at the start of the month. (The charges begin the moment you order your site, or the first month after you add this service to an existing site.) The cost is not dependent on how many emails you send. You are free to email the people in your database as often as you'd like.

Terms

The 9dx Email Blast service cannot be used to send unsolicited email (spam). Ninth Degree reserves the right to cancel this service without notice if we are receiving complaints that our service is being used to send spam. 

You do not need to host your email with us in order to use this service. But all email use counts against the total amount of bandwidth for an Xpress site. This means that, if you send large numbers of large HTML email blasts to your contacts, this may impact your monthly fee if you exceed the bandwidth limitation for your service plan.