Get ready for social media in your email. A new startup, BrandMyMail.com, offers a service whereby your Twitter feed, blog items, Facebook posts, and other social media content can be integrated directly into your emails. Right now, the service works with your Gmail account on PCs running Chrome and Firefox, as well as iPads and iPhones. Integration into other clients and email services is forthcoming.
I gave the service a whirl with my personal Gmail account the other night and found it surprisingly easy. It took me less than five minutes to set up a template that integrated my twitter feed, the RSS feed to this blog, and links to my other social media content. The settings are incredibly customizable and while it's possible to set up a pretty busy looking email, the defaults are pretty clean.
As you can see, this email has a Twitter feed and YouTube video integrated along the side. You can also produce a custom signature that includes a photo, icon links to your social media pages and other websites, and other customizable options. When I was playing with it, there wasn't any slowdown - emails seemed to go as fast as usual. And the result was pretty easy to read on Gmail, Outlook, and a few other services I tried. It's definitely clean and easy to use.
That said, as slick as it is, I'm not sure how many people will use it for their personal accounts. After all, you might not want people you email to see your latest updates. It does help that you can choose whether or not to have your social media updates included on an email-by-email basis, which is handy if you want your friends to see your Facebook updates, but not potential employers.
However, for small businesses, self-employed people, or customer-focused individuals like insurance agents or financial advisers, it could be a really handy tool. Indeed, that seems to be where the company wants to focus.
“BrandMyMail offers small and medium businesses a new way to promote themselves and really establish a distinctive brand through a custom social signature,” said Limor Schweitzer, Co-Founder of BrandMyMail in a press release. “It becomes an additional channel to integrate email communication with social networks, so a simple email can be a vehicle for teaching potential customers or partners about the latest marketing initiatives or other important announcements. BrandMyMail is ideal for various business units, for example customer care staff who respond to prospective or current customers via email.”
So at this point, you're probably thinking the same thing I was - "So how do they plan to make money?" I sent an email to the company and asked that very same question. As it turns out, the company has three basic routes that they want to take in order to start earning revenue on the service.
The first way is to allow companies let BrandMyMail users use logos, videos, or other otherwise copyrighted material in their emails. A portion of the revenue generated from that would go directly to BrandMyMail. To induce users to actually include those materials in their email, the rest of the revenue will either go directly to the user or to a charity of the user's choice.
The second way the company plans to earn revenue is to offer a premium service on top of the free service. For a fee, the businesses that intend to make a lot of use from the service can have several additional features. These include CRM (from Salesforce.com and other services), integrated commerce options with Amazon and Ebay, and access to analytics to see how the service is meeting marketing goals.
"We believe that a much higher degree of attention is given by the recipient of the email in comparison to typical CPM/CPA web advertisement or newsletters," says Limor Schweitzer, one of the company's co-founders. "Depending on the type of products sold by the customer, a single sale due to in-email ads can justify the premium fee."
The third way the company plans to earn revenue is through offering corporate email for companies that want employees’ emails to be branded with the company’s social media information and content. This will include central management (so IT or marketing can set up individual employee templates), private partitions within servers or private servers, and other management and promotion services.
Social media branded emails in the way BrandMyMail is doing it seems like an obvious business opportunity. Of course, the history of the internet is littered with the remains of companies that failed doing the obvious. One encouraging note about this company is that they've done quite a bit on a lean and mean budget. The initial project was funded in January for 227.120.00 Euro from public sources as well as investments from two of the co-founders, and they've accomplished quite a bit with it.
The company is currently exploring options for a second round of funding in order to develop additional versions of the service. Is integrated social media the future of email? Time will tell. But BrandMyMail is banking that it is.
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