Case Study: Mail & Go
Mail & Go is a brilliant example of rebranding MailBuild as your own product by in2, a successful UK based full service marketing agency. They've created a brilliant site around the product and have had incredible success since they launched a few months back. We sat down with Luc Pestille, a designer from in2, to ask how and why they did it.
What gave you the idea to re-brand MailBuild?
"The fact that all the hard work has already been done and that we can add our own mark-up for each client makes it a no-brainer."
Money? It's a great product, and the fact that all the hard work has already been done in building the system, and that we can add our own mark-up for each client (or not, for those we're felling generous towards), makes it a no-brainer. We've been so impressed with Campaign Monitor that we had no qualms about MailBuild as a platform being stable and reliable, and most importantly, easy to use.
The Mail & Go brand looks fantastic, how did you come up with it?
Thanks! We have a CMS solution in the works called "edit & go", so the name "mail & go" seemed like a good fit, both in name, and as a reflection of what the product does. One of our studio team came up with the logo and colour scheme and passed it on to our web team ('web designers' as a title isn't strictly true, they do a lot more than
that!) who came up with the design, sliced and coded it, and worked their Flash magic for the homepage animation, all in about 2 weeks.
The web team suck in as much of the latest design and coding techniques on a daily basis, and they always like smaller projects like this where the hard work has already been done!
How are you promoting your email services to existing customers?
Live demos and conference calls have been going down a storm - everyone's very impressed with how easy it is to use and how powerful the instant stats tracking can be. It's not suitable for all of our existing customers, so we've refrained from sending out HTML emails to them (through Campaign Monitor, of course) just yet, although I'm sure we will be in the future.
How are you trying to attract new customers?
We're not actively trying at the minute - the traffic we've managed to generate after being featured on a few web design galleries (WebCreme, Screenalicious, CSSBased, and a few more) has been enough to cope with at the minute. A lot of people are signing up for the demo account we've set up, and we can see them testing out the system, which is the best way to see if it's fit for their purpose. Once people have had time to play with the system we'll contact them to see if they want to take it further.
What have the results been - has it been an easy sell?
"Once we've shown existing customers what it does and how easy it is to use, they can't help but want to use it themselves."
For existing customers it's been easy - once we've shown them what it does and how easy it is to use, they can't help but want to use it themselves. I don't think anyone we've demoed it to has had anything negative to say. For new customers it's been tougher - signup for the demo has been increasing, but it's not something we had at launch, when I think we would have attracted a lot more interest.
A few people have been asking "Why don't I just send out my emails via Outlook?", so that's something we want to make a feature of, to highlight more why you shouldn't do that. We've got enough signups to be getting on with in the meantime - when we run out of people I'm sure we'll be contacting everyone that's been playing with the demo and pushing our services a bit harder!
Any advice for other designers considering reselling MailBuild?
No - we want all the customers ourselves! Only joking - I'd say 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 - if you can get that idea across to people, and let them try it out for free, you're on to something.
Related topics
- The different types of email marketing you can offer
- Ideas you can use when pitching to your clients
- How to charge for email marketing
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