Tampa Florida - Enthusem.com’s new breakthrough web application for printed postal mailers is now available to more than 2 million Box.net users, instantly accessible from your Box.net account or anywhere on the web that you choose to display your Box files, such as on your Linkedin Profile page.

 

Simply login to your Box account and add Enthusem as a service and you will be able to send printed postal mail that same day using your online files.

 

Marc Fors, co-founder of Enthusem, says:  “We were inspired to establish a partnership with Box because of their unique approach to online collaboration – it’s all about sharing, usability and access – essentially giving users the power to do more with their data. Enthusem is just one of the newest services that makes Box so exciting.  Now you can use your online files to create a printed postal mailer in under 30 seconds – a single piece going to a friend, a sales lead, a customer, or a series of mailers sent to an entire group – automatically printed and mailed for you by Enthusem. Being able to send high-quality mail from the web to one person at a time is novel, but what really makes enthusem relevant today, is that each mailer can have online attachments - just like an email – and when those attachments are viewed, you get an instant email alert. It’s just like having your own personal response marketing system.”

“Box.net is excited to provide Enthusem’s custom printed cards to our business users via our Open Box platform.  The ability to generate thank you notes, invitations and other tailored communications is a perfect addition to Box, and the thousands of sales and marketing professionals on Box will certainly embrace this new tool” said Karen Appleton, Box.net’s VP of Business Development.

Steve Tingiris, Founder and CEO says, “Enthusem is uniquely positioned to instigate and aggregate print events across the web and the social media space.  We have long believed that print is the original social media and is now being rediscovered by a whole new segment as an effective way to market. Enthusem has not only made it easy to create high quality mail in a few clicks, but through the online attachment and response feature, Enthusem has connected traditional printed postal mail to the online world of social media. We like to say that we have reinvented the greeting card – that Enthusem’s features and functionality have breathed new life into print – a proven effective marketing method. We have an open API for the developer community and more partnerships are in the works that should transform and expand how print is accessed and produced in today’s social media sector.”

About Enthusem.com
Enthusem makes sending personalized PRINTED greeting cards as easy as sending an email. Even better, like an email, enthusem cards can include attachments. That’s right; you can attach electronic files like videos, PDFs or web pages to printed greeting cards – and get email alerts when the files are viewed. If that’s not enough, you can also use any image you want for the front of the card, you can write your own personalized message, you can buy and send cards one-at-a-time and you can try Enthusem for free.

About Box.net
Founded in 2005, Box.net (box.net) now serves more than 50,000 companies from small businesses to Fortune 1000 that look to Box for collaboration tools that simplify online content management, accelerate team productivity and connect employees with a familiar interface that anyone can use. Box.net is a privately held company headquartered in Palo Alto, CA, and is backed by venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson and U.S. Venture Partners.

 

For more information contact:
Angela Medlar Phone: (800) 709-1755
E-mail: angela@enthusem.com

If you’re one of the over 2 million box.net users I’ve got some good news. You can now send enthusem cards right from your box.net accounts. That’s right, you can use you box image files as card designs and you can even create enthusem attachments to files you’ve stored in your box account.

For those who are box.net users and LinkedIn users you can access your box.net files from LinkedIn and send an enthusem through box without leaving LinkedIn.

If you’re not a box.net users I’d highly encourage you to go signup for a free account. It’s WAY more than online storage – it a way to put you files to work using some of the best services the Internet has to offer.

 View Demo

 

September 22, 2008

Steve Tingiris, CEO
Prospect Smarter

Tell us about Prospect Smarter.

Prospect Smarter provides software and services to automate, measure and maximize marketing effectiveness with direct mail. We’re an odd mix of software development shop and marketing service provider and our customers have traditionally been other marketing services firms, print service providers and corporate sales & marketing groups. However, we’ve recently launched a new software service that is targeted at individual sales professionals, consultants and small business owners

Your company has been around since 1995. In what ways have you seen the marketing, direct mail, and software industries transform in the past 13 years?

We focused on email marketing until 2004 but the email marketing space changed a lot in those seven years and unfortunately not in our favor. The space had become very crowded, tainted by SPAM issues and regulated by anti-spam laws amongst other things. As a result, we decided to change direction and began to focus on direct mail.

My interest in direct mail was driven by technology advances in variable data printing (VDP) that I thought would open up a lot of new possibilities for marketers. Direct mail marketing has been around forever, but most direct mailers weren’t leveraging the possibilities VDP holds. They were still sending large quantities of non-variable mail and settling for super 1-2% response rates. In the email space, we enjoyed double digit response rates and no paper or postage costs. Plus, email is easy to personalize and it’s 100% measurable. I thought we could make direct mail more like that. So our company mission became figuring out how to make direct mail as practical and effective as email.

We drew on our email marketing experience and in 2005 launched a software platform called Prospect Links, which was one of the first commercially available personal URL (PURL) platforms for direct mail. Prospect Links was extremely successful. Last year, we sold our intellectual property rights to Printable Technologies, a leading provider of variable data printing software based in California.

The sale of Prospect Links was sweet and sour. The sale price was fair and Printable is a great company but I regret that we never really accomplished our mission to make direct mail as practical and effective as email – that’s why we we’re back at it again with a new software project we’re calling Enthusem.

You offer a variety of services. Which ones are in the greatest demand among your clients?

Today, we’re focused 100% on making direct mail easy, effective, efficient and affordable enough for anyone – even individual salespeople and consultants who don’t have a marketing budget.

There are lots of great marketing tools and tactics out there but the demand we’re seeing is not so much for a type of marketing but rather for marketing that is more accountable and practical for targeting smaller markets. One of the marketing buzz terms you hear these days is “The Long Tail” which refers to a trend towards highly personalized projects and services causing big markets to break down into smaller niche markets. This trend is creating both opportunities and challenges for marketers.

On one hand, smaller companies can compete because they can carve out a profitable niche. However, there aren’t enough marketing services that are truly tailored for companies who might only be able to spend a few hundred dollars a year on marketing or advertising. Most advertising and marketing services are still targeted to companies with big budgets. The problem there is big companies are watching their marketing response rates drop because their markets are breaking down into these smaller niches. So the challenge is affecting companies of all sizes. So I’d say again that the demand is really for practical marketing solutions that are effective for targeting the best markets which in my opinion are the markets of one.

Tell us more about Enthusem.

Enthusem lets anyone send a single personalized direct mail communication that seamlessly integrates online content. It’s as close as we’ve ever been to making direct mail as simple as email. You can send a single mailer in about 15 seconds and you can even include attachments and get an email alert when the attachment is viewed. It's direct mail for markets of one and it’s making individuals into sales and marketing forces of one.

We released our first beta a few months back and we’re expecting the final release this year. We’re still ironing out a few things but we’ve opened the beta program up to the public now so anyone can go to www.prospectsmarter.com or www.enthusem.com and try it free. Any users who sign up during the beta period will get five free mailers (postage and printing included) and a free account with free upgrades for the next two years.

We’re also getting ready to release a Web services API into public beta. The Web services will let programmers enable any Internet application to send Enthusem mailers by making SOAP or REST calls to our API methods. If there are any developers out there who are interested in being part of that beta they can send an email request to developers@enthusem.com.

Enthusem allows any individual to create and mail a printed, full-color direct mail piece in an envelope with their personal message inside. Enthusem mailers also have free online attachments that are created by the sender and are hosted for free at Enthusem. An online attachment, much like an attachment to an email, is a file that is viewable when the recipient of the mailer enters a simple 5-digit code at the Enthusem.com website or at any other designated landing page. The sender then receives an instant email notification alerting them that their recipient has viewed the file attachment, completing the process. Online attachments can be anything: Company Brochures, Sales Literature, Product Information, Photos, Videos, Resumes or a link to an existing web page.

Because Enthusem mailers contain a one-to-one, personal message the mailers are printed one-at-a-time and mailed each day in a premium vellum envelope with first class postage speeding them along. There is no sign-up fee or monthly subscription to use Enthusem. Users simply create an account and pay for mailers as they are sent through the purchase of account credits.

Feature enhancements to version 2.0 include:

• Custom Image Upload – build your own gallery of mailer images

• Multi-User Accounts - enabling organizations to share approved mailer images and credits

• Mailing List Upload – mail to a list as an entire group or individually

• Pre-Schedule Mailing Dates – create your own year-long personal direct mail campaign

• Plug-in for Microsoft Outlook – easily add contacts to your Enthusem account

• Unlimited Free Storage – for Online Attachments and Free Email Alerts

Corporate sales representatives looking for an edge will find that ENTHUSEM is a productivity enhancer that can boost sales revenue and image without waiting for the roll-out of a corporate direct mail program – instantly cutting through clutter, setting you apart from the competition and getting your message read in a world of email spam filters and clients who are increasingly tired of clogged inboxes. With the free and instant email response notification, you’ll know that your sales pitch has gotten through.

Co-Founder and Director Marc B. Fors states that:

“Enthusem is really an instigator and aggregator of print. We are unlocking a whole new segment of print that didn’t exist before - one-at-a-time personal direct mail from the web - a fresh new source of print demand that will grow exponentially now that it is as easy as this.”
“This is what personalized mail to customers and prospects should be. Mass mail-merge certainly has its place, but our testing has revealed what people really want in their business and personal life, is to easily send, in a few clicks, a truly personal note to a client, to a friend or to a visitor to their web-site. They want something that has real immediacy and real intimacy in those situations where the ubiquitous E-Card just won’t do - a piece that enters the mail at the exact moment when it will have its highest impact.”
“Enthusem allows a sales representative to send a mailer from an airport which thanks a client for the meeting, while including a link to a viewable file such as a proposal, product specifications, demonstration video, a discount coupon, or a specific page on your company’s website. With the included email alert after the file is viewed, it’s like having your own purl response system.”

“Most users find Enthusem irresistible for use in their personal lives as well - for invitations or for that heartfelt Thank You card that you always intend to send but can never quite match up all the pieces in one place at the right time. And now, you amplify the impact of your communications because of the viewable file attachment -whether it is a picture of you together with friends, your favorite YouTube video, the Google directions to your party, or your child’s art work for Grandma. Enthusem connects traditional print to Web 2.0 in a positive way.”

Co-Founder and CEO Steve Tingiris says:

“Most importantly, we believe that Enthusem provides a way to make direct mail environmentally responsible again – you no longer have to send mass-mailings to people who do not want to receive them. You can send high-quality direct mail now to a market of one – and that is what technology should be doing for us now. Even more significant is that you no longer have to print and store vast quantities of Product Literature that may be outdated or wasted - languishing in a field representative’s garage. Enthusem online attachments make that inventory a thing of the past. Now your organization’s sales literature is always fresh and available – not hidden – or buried inside a deeply layered website, but brought to the immediate attention of a hot prospect through a beautiful Enthusem mailer and easy retrieval code.”

“We have focused on stepping ahead of the current crop of web-to-print systems to build a portal that really increases the use of direct mail by making it as easy for the casual user as setting up his or her social networking account. That’s the way it should be - direct mail has just been way too hard for most sales professionals up until now. We are changing that with each new release of Enthusem.”

“When you step back and look at all the features, you begin to realize that Enthusem is really a personal direct mail system available at the retail level. The file attachments, hosting, data capture and address management features taken all together are just an astonishing value – and there is tremendous convenience in being able to choose from hundreds of designs in the Enthusem library without leaving your home or office. The per-piece price makes sense for all potential users and the Enthusem pickup code is easier to use than cumbersome personal URL addresses. We have had a lot of fun interacting with our user community and adding in the features they want. We have some very cool things in the works that expand the reach of Enthusem while staying true to our core principles of simplicity”.

About Prospect Smarter Inc.

Prospect Smarter has been using Variable Data and SaaS technology since 1998, bringing together the online and offline experience to engage prospects and customers with precision and grace. Prospect Smarter offers Campaign Design and Hosting, Software Design, Variable Data Printing, Personalized Mail, Purls, Campaign Tracking, and Measurement.

The Enthusem founders are dedicated to instigating the growth of printed communications and to advancing the marriage of print and the Web 2.0 world in practical and accessible ways. We believe that to be truly personal, one-to-one direct mail should be created one-at-a-time by a caring sender – by an author who knows just what to say.

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For more information contact:

Angela Medlar Phone: (800) 709-1755
E-mail: angela@prospectsmarter.com

All trademarks mentioned in this document are the property of their respective owners.