direct marketing

Direct marketing made easy on Canada Post site

Don't call it junk mail. Canada Post prefers the term "direct marketing," and despite its poor reputation among some consumers, it can be an effective way for companies to create new business. Canada Post has made it even easier for small companies to conduct their own direct-marketing campaigns thanks to a new website dedicated to that purpose.

Templates supplied. Use your own mailing list or buy one from the site

Mark Stachiew , The Gazette found at canada.com Monday, November 12, 2007

You've got mail

www.directmarketingonline.ca

The bilingual site is called Direct Marketing Online and it allows business owners to create professional-looking mailers using templates supplied on the site that are tailored to different types of businesses. You can customize them with your own marketing message and photos. There are templates designed for different formats of mailers such as postcards, fliers or brochures.

Once your message has been customized to your satisfaction, you schedule when you want to send out your mailing items and can either use a mailing list of your own that you can upload or purchase one from the site. When purchasing a list, you can choose from residential or business lists that are based on the postal code or codes that you want to target.

You also have the option to track the response rate of the campaign by using personalized website URLs that are customized for each piece you mail out.

When someone visits the URL, you know that they've read and responded to your mailer.

How much you pay for the service depends on how many pieces of mail you send out and which of the various options you select.

Read your voice mail

www.spinvox.com

SpinVox is a system that lets you speak into your mobile phone and then have your words converted to text so that they can be sent as email, posted to a blog, a social network or simply saved as a text file for you to review later.

The British-based SpinVox is a relatively new service in North America, so the number of carriers that support them in Canada is limited and the amount of SpinVox features that they carry is small. At the moment, only Rogers and SaskTel support SpinVox, and the only service they offer allows you to have your voice-mail messages sent to you as text.

Other services that SpinVox offers includes the ability to send text messages from your voice messages, have your spoken message converted into text to be sent to someone's instant messenger account, send yourself a text reminder from a spoken message or send out a group text message to multiple recipients from your voice message. If they are successful enough at marketing these services, you should soon be able to get them from Canada's major voice carriers.

Save a copy for me

www.adrive.com

Running out of space on your hard drive? Why not move some of those files off your desktop computer and store them on a remote server online? There are many such sites, but one worth investigating is Adrive, which gives you an impressive 50 gigabytes of free storage space.

Simply sign up for an account and you can start uploading files to its server. It's a great way to back up data because it's in a remote location and you don't have to worry about losing everything in case some disaster strikes that destroys not only your computer but your backup media if they happen to be stored in the same location.

Adrive plans to offer premium services that will offer more storage space on top of the basic amount it offers. It's also working on a number of other interesting enhancements, including a client program that will let you drag and drop files from your desktop to the remote server as if it were a local drive.

Home page for homes

www.procore.com

Most project management sites available online are flexible enough that they can be used for any kind of business, but that flexibility usually means you have to compromise on certain features. Procore is one of those project management sites, but it's designed exclusively for only one kind of business - the construction business.

With Procore, you can easily schedule and track the progress of a building project or multiple projects. It can be accessed in a variety of ways, including email or via BlackBerry, so you don't have to be sitting at your desk to update the site. If you already use other scheduling software, such as Microsoft Project, it can be integrated with Procore.

Multiple people, such as suppliers, contractors and project managers, can have access to the site with different levels of access for each. Everyone can easily track tasks to be done for that day or for any point in the future along with any documents or images that you choose to store online that are relevant to your projects. There is even a built-in weather module that shows you forecasts for your work site.

Do you have a site that is NETworthy? Send it to mstachiew@canwest.com

Previous columns can be read online at www.canada.com/topics/technology/columnists/stachiew.html