review

A Review of OmniStar Mailer

August 16, 2008 By Jim Reyes

There are many ways to make a website or a blog an effective communications tool for businesses. I think you would agree with me that the days when websites merely function as online brochures are over. Sure, you could just have a static page telling people what the company does and how great their products or services are. But this will usually just go ignored. People want interactivity. People want something engaging.

According to Google Analytics the average website keeps a visitor for about 20 seconds before they navigate elsewhere. And most of the time, when users leave your page, they forget to come back. They forget you ever existed.

What can make your audience visit you frequently and stay a little bit longer? Aside from your site being interactive, you have to help out people by telling them what’s happening on your side of the forest! Tell them what’s new and why it’s important for them to know. A handful of popular blogs these days offer newsletters. While a lot of savvy blog users already read updates on their RSS readers, there are still a lot out there who appreciate being sent updates by email.

And this is where an email marketing service would come in. These applications can be useful as newsletters or as public relations tools.

Email marketing systems are usually applications or services that can send email en masse to target audiences. This can be for purposes of sending out newsletters, promotional materials or other messages to opt-in subscribers. Such software would usually contain a database of contact information, campaign statistics, and reports.

Of course, these can also be used for bulk, unsolicited emails, but that would depend on the intent of the sender, too.

There are about 20 million results for “email marketing software” on Google, and if you’re in search for an effective system, we’ve been approached to try out one such service by Omnistar Mailer.

OmniStar’s Mailer service was created with efficiency in mind, with the aim of helping businesses reach out to customers effectively without having to funnel money towards administrative employees who spend countless hours sorting through spreadsheets and emailing clients.

Introduction

Now I’ve used several Email Marketing Systems for the past 5 years. And one of the very first things I look out for are the following: a free trial and/or a money-back guarantee, immediate installation and quick support responses, and an interface that’s easy to operate.

I tried an OmniStar demo account and to tell you frankly, my first impressions were “clean”, “uncluttered”, “organized”, and a “pleasing workspace”. Check out their Admin Main Page below.

I think this Admin Page tells a whole lot about what’s under the hood. It’s not scary, nor undaunting even for the first-timers. Now let’s see the other areas and find out what makes OmniStar useful.

Features Set

OmniStar Mailer has numerous features that will surely address your personal or corporate needs. While it tries to offer the best features available, OmniStar stands out by understanding that not all would immediately understand the use of such tools.

They have conveniently placed a Getting Started Wizard to immediately get you developing your first newsletter. I think that is very important. They have taken that extra step to make you understand what steps are needed to get you on your toes.

Installation & Set-up

I’ll have to say it’s easy. Once you sign up, OmniStar will send an email to you explaining the steps needed for you to get going. You will need to download the application software and install it on your webserver. Your clients or future subscribers do not need to download anything at all. However, if you have problems with the installation process, you can also request a free install by their engineers, which I think is very very cool!

Setting up your subscriber database is very easy too. I have a small mailing list of 3,000+ saved in CSV format. OmniStar works well with it and took me a few moments to get all my subscribers in and active. They have said that they’ve worked with lists that are as huge as 250k subscribers. Not bad at all!

Ease of Use

Because of OmniStar’s uncluttered interface, I personally loved using it. Important areas are easily understood and provision for easy navigation was excellent. They offer quite an extensive FAQ and 24-hour tech (telephone or email) support! Great!

Email Creation

There are just many tools to help you build your first spectacular newsletter. It is very easy to add/customize your project with your images/pictures, texts, hyperlinks, special characters, anchors, lines, table, time, date, post/sub scripts–the works! Alternately, you can also choose to develop your newsletter as an HTML file using either DreamWeaver or FrontPage, and then import that whole page into OmniStar to send it out.

Reporting

OmniStar offers in-depth reports on every email campaign you send out. For example, if your email contains links, OmniStar will tell you which of your subscribers clicked on those links. It will generally track every click your subscriber makes on your emails.

A very important matter to me. When I shoot my arrows, I’d like to know if I am hitting the target or not!

Summary

I can say that OmniStar’s web based email marketing software is within the league of useful and user-friendly Email Marketing Systems currently available. It’s almost turn-key, scalable, robust, private and secure (because it runs on your own web servers) AND is intuitive to a great degree. It just has all the standard things I would look out for in these systems. I would just mention 2 things though

That the application price of US$257 per website is a little “out there”, but with all the bells and whistles OmniStar offers, the price may be “just right”.
When I entered the search key “report” in their knowledge database… their system doesn’t seem to know what “report” means.

Finally, Omnistar Interactive has offered all readers of this blog 20% off by simply entering the promotion code devlounge when you order Omnistar Mailer.

Other than that I’d tell you to go get your FREE demo account right now and give this baby a test drive. We’re all on the semester of the year where there’s just several holidays every month. You’d need OmniStar to catch on that holiday fever!

Disclosure: The above review was done upon the request of OmniStar, and written by guest poster Jim Reyes, who is a regular contributor on Splashpress Media blogs Blogging Pro, Froodee, Gadzooki and Forever Geek.

3DEnvironments Flash Component Review

January 10, 2008 By David Peralty

When Flash first made its debut online, I was really excited about all it could do. Creating more immersive environments online, Flash seemed like it was going to open up a whole new layer of experience and interaction for the web.

Quickly though, like many, I realized that over use of Flash could be a bad thing, and basically tossed it aside. What I didn’t realize at the time is how big of a role Flash was going take online as time progressed.

Now we watch Flash videos all the time, and people are quickly realizing once again how great, properly used Flash can be.

Flash still provides a much more immersive interface than other technologies currently available online, and can be used for a myriad of different things.

Recently, I was able to try out the 3DEnvironment component created by Flashloaded. Flashloaded is a company dedicated to providing the world with innovative and cost-effective Flash extensions and components. One thing that really excited me about the company was that it is based in Toronto, Ontario Canada, only two and a half hours drive from where I live and I am a sucker for Canadian companies.

The 3DEnvironment is a Flash component that makes it easier to create 3D interactive interfaces and environments in Flash.

For example, if you want to create layout tours for a building, allow visitors to fly through the solar system, or create a custom interactive navigational system, 3DEnvironment can help you easily achieve that goal. My favourite demonstration that they have on their site is the colour wheel as I could definitely see something like that used for a variety of applications.

Featuring fully customizable controls and full keyboard and mouse interactivity you can bring together graphics, or movie clip symbols to engage your audience in a new and interesting way. I have seen tutorials on how to create three dimensional effects before, but my limited skills with Flash or 3D modeling have always stopped me from creating anything worthwhile.

I have always then just given in and created a flat website without any flash at all. Trying to convey distances, object size comparisons, and even just simple landscaping, and building layouts is much more difficult with text, and some images. I could definitely see this useful in a variety of different corporate projects as well as smaller freelance projects.

The best thing that any developer or designer can do is find ways to create something without re-inventing the wheel each time, and the 3DEnvironment component from Flashloaded will save you time and energy when developing such environments and interfaces with Flash.

Features

Create realistic 3D environments with depth and perspective
Build unique interactive interfaces
Custom keyboard controls for users to navigate around the 3D environment
Mouse wheel support for navigation
Move objects in the environment with built-in tweening and customizable tween duration
Rotate the world around all three axes (x, y and z)
Camera controls for panning and zooming to change the perspective on the environment
Add objects through an intuitive user interface, external XML file or using flexible ActionScript controls
Built-in preloader for loading external files.
Use any movie clip in your library to display in your 3D environment
Full ActionScript API – including the ability to move the camera through ActionScript
Only 15Kb

Requirements
As with any Flash development, you will need to have one of the following to use 3DEnvironment: Macromedia Flash MX 2004, Flash 8 (standard or professional) or Adobe Flash CS3 for authoring (Windows or Mac). Movies using this component may be published for either Flash Player 7, 8 or 9, ActionScript 2.0.

How Much is 3DEnvironment?
Of course the question that all developers and designers ask themselves when coming on anything that is supposed to save them time is, how much money will it cost? Flashloaded lists 3DEnvironment for $59.95 on their site, and at first I wondered if I could find equivalent value for such a product? After viewing the examples on their site and trying out the component myself, I have to give a resounding “yes”.

The time it would take me to build even one of the examples on my own in Flash would take me longer than a couple hours, and even at a cheap development rate, 3DEnvironment by comparison becomes a value. Also note that the license allows you to use the product to generate content for as many sites as you want.

I really wish I had this product when I was working on a product for a house builder, as it would have been very useful to show off the open plots of land, give a quick way for clients to see what houses are already up and for sale, and creating an interactive, easy to use, user experience.

If you are constantly spending too much time building three dimensional environments and user interfaces in Flash, 3DEnvironments could save you time and energy, allowing you to focus on the finer details. Now if only there was something to make me a better graphic designer…

Fluxiom Review

July 18, 2006 By Prashant Sugand

This week I had the great chance to take a deeper look into Fluxiom, I’ve been waiting to try this web application out for quite a while now and I must say I was totally impressed when I got my hands on this masterpiece of AJAX.

What is Fluxiom? Fluxiom makes it easy to organize and share your digital assets within your company, your colleagues and friends. Manage any kind of file like corporate media assets, marketing materials, product folders, contracts, images, text documents, logos or artwork – you name it.

Getting Started

Obviously the first thing that has to be done with your Fluxiom account is starting to upload all sorts of media you have. Fluxiom makes it very easy to upload your files, there’s no need for an external application and it works with all browsers.

Furthermore, unlike other sites where you just have the upload button Fluxiom makes it easy to track the progress of your upload, it has a nice little animated progress bar displaying how much has been uploaded and at what speed its uploading.

Pages: 1 2 3 4