Competing with MailCheat(Chimp)

[KirbyRaymund]

Need you help... critique... advice...

The objective is to compete with MailCheat(Chimp).

THE SELLING POINT
we are doing it two ways...
1) while MailCheat(Chimp) has a 1,000 free monthly email, we are offering 2,000 free email monthly.
2) we also have a proprietary technology that will group email lists to certain categories to allow business owners or marketers to create campaigns that are better suited for their list.

THE MARKETING STRATEGY
1) right now, we are doing PP and SEO
2) we are doing direct marketing, essentially emailing those who we think may have interest in email marketing

i need advice on two things:
1) you think we stand a chance against MailCheat(Chimp)?
2) you think the marketing strategy is enough?

here is our website: Email Marketing Services | Email Marketing Company - Emercury

 

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[theag]

we also have a proprietary technology that will group email lists to certain categories to allow business owners or marketers to create campaigns that are better suited for their list.

Instead of competing with a bunch of big and successful companies I would try to license this to them.

 

[dknise]

Two things to point out:

1) I see your pricing model is nearly identical with their Monthly Plans.
2) You don't have any of the other pricing models, including the "High-Volume" which would net you biggg clients.
3) From MailCheat(Chimp)'s pricing page, their "Forever Free" option offers up to 2,000 subscribers for 12,000 emails a month. To double what they're doing, you'd have to hit 24,000 free emails a month.

MailCheat(Chimp)'s been around for a while and has had a lot of time to perfect and innovate. Besides the email grouping, what other incentive is their to go with you guys over MailCheat(Chimp)? Pricing's the same, but it looks like MailCheat(Chimp) may offer more features overall. Food for thought.

 

[AllenCrawley]

But MailCheat(Chimp) is 2000 free, not 1000.

we also have a proprietary technology that will group email lists to certain categories to allow business owners or marketers to create campaigns that are better suited for their list.

I don't see anything about this on the home page. i gave it a quick glance to see if it would catch my attention. This feature sounds great but you should really tell how this will really benefit me. If this is the biggest differentiator it should be front and center. Is this a similar feature to what you can be done in Infusionsoft? If so, that could be great to offer a high end feature cheaper than what you would normally find in a more expensive email solution.

i need advice on two things:
1) you think we stand a chance against MailCheat(Chimp)?
2) you think the marketing strategy is enough?

1) Do you only consider MailCheat(Chimp) your competition? What about aweber, getresponse, infusionsoft, officeautopilot, contantcontact, etc? Anyway, maybe you could stand a chance by providing more value; find out the biggest complaints or challenges with the others and provide the solution, what features or services do people want that no one else offers, etc?

2) Going off the vague description of your marketing I'd say no.

 

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[Milkanic]

It seems odd you are asking these questions after having the site/infrastructure up.

Sending email is easy. It's the tracking and scaling that is the hard part.

You are competing with Sendgrid, Postmark, Amazon SES, etc also. I'm going with one of the big boys when it comes to sending email unless you can offer an amazing value proposition which you really aren't right now.

 

[theag]

Sending email is easy. It's the tracking and scaling that is the hard part.

Inboxing at scale is the hard part.

 

[valuegiver]

I assume you don't have venture capitals to back you up. If I were you, I would avoid competing in that competitive space.

 

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[mentalic]

I also thing that your sales pitch is a bit 'vague', although I am into social media I didn't understand what "2) we also have a proprietary technology that will group email lists to certain categories to allow business owners or marketers to create campaigns that are better suited for their list. ". Everyone can claim that has 'proprietary technology' for 'certain categories'.

I don't think that it is easy to compete with MailCheat(Chimp), for example:
1. Are you sending emails from different IPs so that you don't have problems with clients that abuse your service?
2. Do you offer embedding forms etc services?
3. Are your services localized and translated?
4. If they are, are you aware of any local laws that are required about mailing lists?
5. Do you offer an API that I can integrate with my application?

In reality, your point is not to compete with MailCheat(Chimp), but to acquire a market that MailCheat(Chimp) cannot, and that is what you can do with direct marketing.

 

[Mike39]

Inboxing at scale is the hard part.

Theag is completely correct, all it takes is a couple people abusing your system and your deliverability rate can drop, and if you can't inbox emails you provide zero value.

If you can improve on the current system of email marketing sure you could do well but I would say just adding some categorization features is not enough, other features would probably need to be proprietary as well because your big competitors could just add in the same features as you. You probably can't compete with them on price either, so you would have to find another way of providing value.

Lastly, from what I got your marketing campaigns is basically sending out spam emails so if I had a newsletter, I am not sure I would want to use your service in the first place, you may already be trashing your own deliverability rate. If this service is just to send spam, more power to you but I hope your not in the US and you shouldn't market it as a MailCheat(Chimp) competitor because that is a different animal altogether.

 

[valuegiver]

Your mistake is #1.

Read this: 9 Ways to Decrease Your Chance of Bootstrapping a Successful Company | Software by Rob

 

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[Pinnacle]

Need you help... critique... advice...

Man, you did a lot of work to be asking these questions. You would be in a better situation had you not yet set up your infrastructure, like Milkanic touched on. I know what it is like to shoot first and aim later, though.

See if you can get some customers at this point and let them answer those questions for you.

 

[Tiger]

MailCheat(Chimp) is integrated with a ton of other SaaS apps that makes it easy to become a customer.

Who is your target market? Small business people, direct marketers or large businesses?

 

[DennisD]

I would not risk using an email service I am not confident will exist in 3 months.

it's better to start with the end customer and niche down to meet a particular set of needs that MailCheat(Chimp) is currently not satisfying.

-A service that has a lower carbon footprint than the bigger guys because you operate your servers off of renewable energy.
-A service that intigrates a click-to-call service within their emails.
-A service that does emails particularly well suited to mobile devices.
-A service targeted towards content creators that automatically aggregates podcast, twitter, youtube, and blog RSS feeds and autoemails weekly updates.

You're competing on price without having a better business model than MailCheat(Chimp) or a significant differentiator. Big mistake.

 

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[ZDS]

How about creating a service directed towards a specific niche?

Ex: If i'm a real estate agent(or what ever), another mailing list tool doesn't seem useful. However, if I see a specific tool that is designed with real estate agents in mind(and benefits to accompany this) it becomes much more attractive. Not to mention, it makes it much easier to find your target audience with ads.

On price.. my philosophy is I don't want to compete on price unless I can radically disrupt the market.(IE: Don't get in a 6 minutes / 7 minute abs war)

 

[dknise]

How about creating a service directed towards a specific niche?

I hear this all the time in entrepreneur circles. Kevin O'Leary extensively gives input on how he feels about "niche's" quite a lot on the shark tank as well.

What it comes down to is why would you want to limit your market, when your product could be used by the masses? If you limit your emailing service from every single potential business on the planet... to say 4% of the market... well that's just bad business.


Hitting an automated email marketing industry offering a better product with features only available through your company is a niche. Limiting your market to a specific industry is a niche within a niche, and should be avoided at all cost.

 

[Brander]

So much negativity.

Have a look at how MailCheat(Chimp) started. In the landscape of a few established and stale players they framed themselves as the new cool kid, made a silly mascot and appealed to the young marketers/opportunity seekers/unemployed by their playful image and free accounts. Their system sucked in terms of usability and still does, but no one cares, as it's the "cool" kid of choices. They might be cool, but constantcontact beats the pants off of them in terms of profitability. MC chose the "grow quickly and sell" strategy, but might have got stuck sometime a few years ago.

Have a listen through some Richard Branson on strategy and contact me if you need some pointers on entering established markets.

BTW, your site design is not good enough.

 

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[ZDS]

Because when you target a vertical niche, your able to offer a value proposition your competition is unable to match(due to there horizontal targeting) There may be a million dollar opportunity in a niche, however the billion dollar company doesn't really care about it.

Obviously, if you're able to beat the current market leader, on features, usability and a better product then that's a better alternative, so go for it(and this is even debatable). But that's hard to do in established markets and you're fighting an uphill battle. Even then, Usually products end up being marginally better at best and not giving the customers enough reason to switch over.

While on the other hand many niches are relatively untapped(Not to mention, its much easier to branch out, once you've dominated a niche. You have the technology, the staff and systems in place - There's no reason you have to STAY in the niche)

Yes targeting a niche is limiting your market, but also increasing your chances of success.

 

[dknise]

While on the other hand many niches are relatively untapped(Not to mention, its much easier to branch out, once you've dominated a niche. You have the technology, the staff and systems in place - There's no reason you have to STAY in the niche)

Glad you added that part.

There's an energy drink company here in the Seattle area that is targeted towards Latino's who like soccer... It's a great energy drink that everyone would enjoy, yet they purposely attempt to exclude 90% of their market in the region. I will never understand that decision, ever. That's the danger of "hitting a niche" that I'm talking about.

 

[DennisD]

I hear this all the time in entrepreneur circles. Kevin O'Leary extensively gives input on how he feels about "niche's" quite a lot on the shark tank as well.

What it comes down to is why would you want to limit your market, when your product could be used by the masses? If you limit your emailing service from every single potential business on the planet... to say 4% of the market... well that's just bad business.


Hitting an automated email marketing industry offering a better product with features only available through your company is a niche. Limiting your market to a specific industry is a niche within a niche, and should be avoided at all cost.

That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard in my life.

Facebook was restricted towards college kids before they opened up to the entire world. When I joined it was required to have a college .edu email to sign up. Niche. P&G made soap and candles for the military. Niche.

Always start solving the needs for a smaller particular group of people with a particular group of needs... and then grow, expand, and adapt to let everybody else in.

It's not "limiting yourself" to use a strategy in which you succeed.

Sent from my Kindle Fire using Tapatalk 2

 

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[journey24]

Need you help... critique... advice...

The objective is to compete with MailCheat(Chimp).

THE SELLING POINT
we are doing it two ways...
1) while MailCheat(Chimp) has a 1,000 free monthly email, we are offering 2,000 free email monthly.
2) we also have a proprietary technology that will group email lists to certain categories to allow business owners or marketers to create campaigns that are better suited for their list.

THE MARKETING STRATEGY
1) right now, we are doing PP and SEO
2) we are doing direct marketing, essentially emailing those who we think may have interest in email marketing

i need advice on two things:
1) you think we stand a chance against MailCheat(Chimp)?
2) you think the marketing strategy is enough?

here is our website: Email Marketing Services | Email Marketing Company - Emercury

regarding your selling points, it looks like for #1, you are targeting people who are on a budget, and want to try a service which has a bigger free plan.

this is a bit different than #2 selling point (business owners and/or marketers who can afford the typical $50 - $100 per month to get more than 2000 on the list).

IMO i would choose one market to start out with.

also, alot of people are now using transactional email systems (amazon SES, sendgrid, mailgun, mandrill from MailCheat(Chimp)) and adding it to a self-hosted program (one time fee) - for instance, Sendy - Send Newsletters 100x cheaper via Amazon SES

when you do this, you are paying for usage, rather than based on the size of your list.

i noticed your pay per send plan is $8 for up to 25,000 emails - amazon SES can do this for $2.50.

i would never have price as a selling point, especially in this market.

EDIT: also, are you white labeling an email service? it really looks like it.

 

[DeletedUser2]

tough crowd,

BUT

if you go back and re read all these, and make a playbook, you will have a great blueprint for your next steps, in setting up and testing. and some GREAT pain points to solve.


good luck on that!

I'm watching

Z

 

[KirbyRaymund]

Two things to point out:

1) I see your pricing model is nearly identical with their Monthly Plans.
2) You don't have any of the other pricing models, including the "High-Volume" which would net you biggg clients.
3) From MailCheat(Chimp)'s pricing page, their "Forever Free" option offers up to 2,000 subscribers for 12,000 emails a month. To double what they're doing, you'd have to hit 24,000 free emails a month.

MailCheat(Chimp)'s been around for a while and has had a lot of time to perfect and innovate. Besides the email grouping, what other incentive is their to go with you guys over MailCheat(Chimp)? Pricing's the same, but it looks like MailCheat(Chimp) may offer more features overall. Food for thought.

hmmm, as of now, it's really the email segmentation which no other company offers. they have segmentation but it's according to IP and other "obvious" categories.

 

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[KirbyRaymund]

But MailCheat(Chimp) is 2000 free, not 1000.



I don't see anything about this on the home page. i gave it a quick glance to see if it would catch my attention. This feature sounds great but you should really tell how this will really benefit me. If this is the biggest differentiator it should be front and center. Is this a similar feature to what you can be done in Infusionsoft? If so, that could be great to offer a high end feature cheaper than what you would normally find in a more expensive email solution.



1) Do you only consider MailCheat(Chimp) your competition? What about aweber, getresponse, infusionsoft, officeautopilot, contantcontact, etc? Anyway, maybe you could stand a chance by providing more value; find out the biggest complaints or challenges with the others and provide the solution, what features or services do people want that no one else offers, etc?

2) Going off the vague description of your marketing I'd say no.

1) it's not there yet because we wanted to go directly to businesses first before making it public, to minimize risk fo being copied. it's different from infusionsoft. our is really the most detailed segmentation your can get but that is a good idea actually. i will look at the pricing of infusionsoft.

2) we are always looking at MailCheat(Chimp) because they are the leader, of course. but as for complaints, the most common always the pricing. i think they find it "unfair" to be charged according to the size of their list instead of delivery.

3) there really is nothing new about the marketing, it's hardcore direct marketing.

 

[KirbyRaymund]

It seems odd you are asking these questions after having the site/infrastructure up.

Sending email is easy. It's the tracking and scaling that is the hard part.

You are competing with Sendgrid, Postmark, Amazon SES, etc also. I'm going with one of the big boys when it comes to sending email unless you can offer an amazing value proposition which you really aren't right now.

the segmentation is not attractive enough? imagine knowing the behavior of each person behind that email... you'd be able to create customized email campaigns.

 

[KirbyRaymund]

I also thing that your sales pitch is a bit 'vague', although I am into social media I didn't understand what "2) we also have a proprietary technology that will group email lists to certain categories to allow business owners or marketers to create campaigns that are better suited for their list. ". Everyone can claim that has 'proprietary technology' for 'certain categories'.

I don't think that it is easy to compete with MailCheat(Chimp), for example:
1. Are you sending emails from different IPs so that you don't have problems with clients that abuse your service?
2. Do you offer embedding forms etc services?
3. Are your services localized and translated?
4. If they are, are you aware of any local laws that are required about mailing lists?
5. Do you offer an API that I can integrate with my application?

In reality, your point is not to compete with MailCheat(Chimp), but to acquire a market that MailCheat(Chimp) cannot, and that is what you can do with direct marketing.

1. Yes and we have an extra level of security to make sure our emails don't get blocked
2. yes.
3. no our service is not translated
4. yes
5. yes we offer an api that you can integrate with your application...

that's initially why we set out to target new and small businesses because the more established ones might already be with mailchim and other big boys

 

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[KirbyRaymund]

MailCheat(Chimp) is integrated with a ton of other SaaS apps that makes it easy to become a customer.

Who is your target market? Small business people, direct marketers or large businesses?

Small business people, direct marketers or large businesses

 

[KirbyRaymund]

I would not risk using an email service I am not confident will exist in 3 months.

-A service that intigrates a click-to-call service within their emails.
-A service targeted towards content creators that automatically aggregates podcast, twitter, youtube, and blog RSS feeds and autoemails weekly updates.

You're competing on price without having a better business model than MailCheat(Chimp) or a significant differentiator. Big mistake.

these two i will look at... our differentiator is the segmentation of the list

 

[DennisD]

these two i will look at... our differentiator is the segmentation of the list

What does this mean? Can you explain your segmentation features better?

 

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[KirbyRaymund]

So much negativity.

BTW, your site design is not good enough.

you are not the first person to say this, i have to admit

 

[KirbyRaymund]

regarding your selling points, it looks like for #1, you are targeting people who are on a budget, and want to try a service which has a bigger free plan.

this is a bit different than #2 selling point (business owners and/or marketers who can afford the typical $50 - $100 per month to get more than 2000 on the list).

IMO i would choose one market to start out with.

also, alot of people are now using transactional email systems (amazon SES, sendgrid, mailgun, mandrill from MailCheat(Chimp)) and adding it to a self-hosted program (one time fee) - for instance, Sendy - Send Newsletters 100x cheaper via Amazon SES

when you do this, you are paying for usage, rather than based on the size of your list.

i noticed your pay per send plan is $8 for up to 25,000 emails - amazon SES can do this for $2.50.

i would never have price as a selling point, especially in this market.

EDIT: also, are you white labeling an email service? it really looks like it.

yes we are labeling it an email service.

90% of our current subs are HIGH VOLUME users but we want to capture small businesses and new marketers.
Amazon's SES is messy, isn't it?