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Case Study: Breeze

Breeze is a great example on how easy it is to add MailBuild to your existing product line-up. In fact, Element Fusion's re-branding was so successful that we've had dozens of other customers get in touch to make sure they weren't a direct competitor. We sat down with Tim Wall, director of product marketing for Element Fusion to find out how successful it's been at their end.

What gave you the idea to re-brand MailBuild?

"We wouldn't have even considered this if Mailbuild weren't such a terrific product... We are completely comfortable offering it as a part of our own product line."

Our company offers a line of web based content management system products and one of the most common feature requests we received was for a newsletter manager or email tool. We knew that building such a tool the right way would take a huge amount of time and divert our attention away from our core product offerings, so we decided to try something new and rebrand someone else's products.

We wouldn't have even considered this if Mailbuild weren't such a terrific product. We wouldn't want to put our name on anything that couldn't live up to our own standards of software development. But we love Mailbuild and we feel that it meshes well with our own approach and philosophy, so we are completely comfortable offering it as a part of our own product line.

Also, one of our other products is, itself, a resellable product called Light. Light is a content management system that designers and agencies can resell as their own. Since we provide a resellable product to others, we thought it would be good experience to utilize a resellable product like Mailbuild so that through our interactions with Mailbuild we can learn how our own customers interact with Light. This has actually been one of the biggest benefits to us in using Mailbuild.

The Breeze brand and site looks great, how did you come up with it?

We have a sort of "elemental" naming theme going in our product line with our other products including Water, Sky and Light. We think Breeze fits that model and also connotes the swift nature of email delivery. Once we had the name, we simply turned it over to our Creative Director, Jason Zimdars, who has a pretty highly developed web 2.0 application style. He's been recognized for several of his designs and we think Breeze is one of his best.

How are you promoting your email services to existing customers?

When we launched, we featured Breeze in our monthly product newsletters that go out to existing customers using our CMS systems. In addition, our primary strategy for marketing to our existing end-user clients is through our team of internet sales consultants.

How are you trying to attract new customers?

"We get tons of requests for Breeze accounts every day from around the world."

For us, Breeze is not a primary product that we market aggressively, but a secondary product used primarily by those already in one of our other products. Therefore, we haven't spent any money on any marketing efforts for Breeze itself.

But even so, because of its fantastic design, it's been featured on a lot of design gallery sites and blogs and the social networking engines has driven a lot of traffic to Breeze. We get tons of requests for Breeze accounts every day from around the world.

What have the results been - has it been an easy sell?

In an effort to be very careful about spam, we require that each request goes through one of our internet consultants and we require a signature on our anti-spam policy form before we will set up the account. The product sells itself very well, but for the client to really use the product to its fullest, they must contract us to create a design for them. We offer several options for this on the Breeze website but design always provides a little bit of a barrier to someone getting in and getting started.

All of the above notwithstanding, the results for us have been great because our true goals for this products were to 1) provide an email to clients already using our other CMS products, and 2) to generate exposure to the CMS products through cross linking from the Breeze website to Water, Sky and Light. On both counts, Breeze has been very successful.

Any advice for other designers considering reselling MailBuild?

I would simply say that Mailbuild is an outstanding product and you should definitely promote it to your clients. You shouldn't even think twice. Just start using it. Right now.

Other case studies

We actually tried to fault MailBuild, but we couldn't. You guys have obviously put a lot of thought into how the system would be used and re-branded.
Michael Troy
Read Michael's interview

MailBuild is very easy to resell - there are so many good points to the service to pick up on, you could build a site around any one of them, but the most effective is it's simplicity.
Luc Pestille
Read Luc's interview

It took us about 10 minutes to switch to MailBuild, and another 10 to rebrand it as our own product.
Paul Sculthorpe
Read Paul's interview

Adding Mailbuild to your tool kit of services makes you look like a smarter company. Its easy to set up and offer a new profit stream to your business.
Paul Fairbairn
Read Paul's interview