Glooq reminds charities of the power of email signatures
Howard Lake | 16 November 2007 | News
An Israeli start-up has launched an email marketing product called ‘glooq’ which uses the often-overlooked power of every outgoing email message to build an organisation’s brand and drive sales or donations. Yaron Peled, Managing Director of glooq UK told UK Fundraising how the new product works.
Given the current focus on social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace, it is easy to overlook the powerful impact of the old ‘new media’ of email. Yaron Peled believes that email offers such “a strong social network” that “it is astounding that so many organisations, fighting for revenue, do not address it.” This channel is “the day to day email conversations undertaken by staff in the normal course of their business day.” Peled says that “these are emails that can claim 100% open rates by recipients and high read rates too”.
But how do you get every staff member to include a current or relevant message within all of their email messages to colleagues, suppliers and contacts? Some charities automatically append standard email signatures to staff members’ messages, highlighting the current fundraising appeal or campaign, but many do not. Sometimes, however, this one-size-fits-all approach is not relevant or effective.
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To address this opportunity Peled launched ‘glooq’ in the UK earlier this year to transform ordinary email messages into marketing messages. The tool does this by placing managed communications, in the form of a banner or text, into corporate emails. Peled realises that these messages need to be both elegant and non-intrusive, so only one banner or text message is added per email conversation. A choice of position means that the message can match the location. So you could use a skyscraper banner for promotion and a text-based header for internal reminders.
Glooq campaigns can be filtered based on senders and recipients, ensuring appropriate messaging from both correspondents’ perspectives. Multiple campaigns can be scheduled with the filtering and diary feature taking care of delivery, and overlapping campaigns can simply rotate while active.
Glooq is available in both hosted and self-hosted formats. GlooqConnect, the hosted model, can be switched on and active within minutes “and is compatible with all SMTP based email systems”. GlooqPro is the installed solution and can either be installed directly onto a MS Exchange server or on a dedicated in-house glooq server. Glooq charges a license per seat, regardless of how many emails are sent.
The system features reporting tools, enabling fundraisers to discover which messages work best and when.
The power of branded emails is simple, according to Peled. “You are more likely to investigate a recommendation from someone you know well than from an unknown advertiser”, he said.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.