Blog - Katoo

We are pleased to announce the arrival of our brand new editing tool designed to allow you to produce your emails faster and more efficiently than ever before. You'll see a number of new features that ensure creating professional emails and editing them is as simple as possible.

We will be closing for Christmas and the New Year from Friday 24th (noon) until Monday 4th January 2011. We wish all our customers a Happy Christmas and prosperous New Year.

After much deliberation and searching we can now confirm we have joined forces with several of the UK's leading data suppliers and can provide high quality, up-to-date data sets for rental. We can provide either email address, mobile number, or often both, to match the most demanding criteria. What ever your customer profile we can supply the opportunity to build your customer list. Please note that we only provide B2B data, B2C are notoriously problematic in their accuracy.

The team has been working hard over the summer and our much awaited front end site revamp is now complete. Some back end functionality has also been added to make sending, tracking and receiving emails and SMS's that much easier. We hope you like what we've done.

On Thursday 24th June 2009 we will be at the HBI organised Network and Business Expo held at the Galleria centre, Hatfield so why not come along and say hello.

If you’ve checked the news recently you’ll may have heard about the change to the law that will, from the 15th March, oblige all Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to keep a log of all emails exchanged through their system. ISPs won’t be obliged to keep the contents of those emails, just who sent a message to whom and when. These records must be kept for a year, and disclosed to the government, police or any other public body which makes a lawful request.

The lack of privacy associated with this EU led decision has got various groups up in arms, from Human Rights activists to those who point to our government’s recent failings with regard to data security. What I’d like to cover here though is what this means for our clients, and us.

The email messages you send through Katoo, whether as a large campaign or as the result of an auto-responder you’ve set up, are all logged. This has always been the case and will always have to be - we need this information to present your tracking information and to permit you to exclude recent recipients. So in that context this is a law that we already adhere to.

The law affects us in another way that’s perhaps not so obvious. We send millions of emails a week (all logged as mentioned) from our servers located in three UK datacentres. For redundancy, each data centre has more than one internet service provider. As a data centre user we can do some digging and find out exactly who those suppliers are, but what’s important to us is that we are presented with a fast, dependable connection by the data centre. So in our scenario, who is the ISP responsible for logging our mail?

We considered this for a while, and decided that the safest bet was to ensure we logged everything. We’ve always done this too, as I imagine do most corporations. They’ll either have a perpetual retention policy, or a fixed retention policy. Those who don’t are likely to have their email requirements outsourced.

The chances are then that unless you happen to be an ISP, you don’t need to do anything to comply with the law.

New Auto responders.

Hot on the heels of our User Interface update, we're pleased to announce a new feature: Auto-Responders. When you send a fully personalised email or sms campaign to a new subscriber to thank them for their subscription you can now automatically send them a follow up email a week later. All tracking information and graphs from these responses are just as they would be for a normal broadcast campaign.

Auto responders are fully tracked, one-off campaign messages that are sent to your new subscribers as soon as they sign up - or after a delay if desired. They're easy to set up, and a great way to quickly reward your subscribers and set expectations for future contact. Auto Responders are in your account and ready to use right now, so why not check out our help documentation and improve your subscribers' experience today?

Katoo secured one of the top three prizes in the FLARE Entrepreneurial Competition.

Judged by a panel of highly successful entrepreneurs KATOO's ethos "of doing ordinary things extraordinarily well" was recognised and highly commended by receiving one of the top three prizes.

For it's unique application of SMS to classroom interaction Katoo has been selected for the Finals of the prestigious FLARE entrepreneurial competition sponsored by such companies as Deloitte, Igloo, Mioomi, Netcel and Exemplas, to be held at Tower Bridge on 25th April, wish us luck!

Katoo has recently joined the prestigious Business Link Supplier Brokerage Index and supplies, via their e-voucher scheme, cost effective advice on all aspects of email and sms marketing, particularly to newly formed start-ups and those in their pre-launch phase.

Using names to personalise your emails or SMS's is practically guaranteed to have a positive impact on both reader loyalty and response rates. There are many different ways and degrees to which you can personalise your messages, so let’s take a look at some of the easiest.

Personalising your email or SMS greeting with the recipient’s name is a great way to get their attention and show that you’ve made an effort to treat them as an individual. Provided you’ve got name information stored in your database, it’s also really simple – in Katoo's email creator simply click where you want to insert the person’s name and select ‘First Name’ from the personalisation options at the bottom of the screen, it's just as simple for text messages.

Be careful however to set your line up so that if you don't have their names then the message still reads ok e.g. you might want to put 'Hi <first_name>' but if you don't have their first name make sure you put an alternative word, 'there' for an example.

Crash Course - 5th October 2008 at the prestigious Next Generation Club, Hatfield, Herts.

We are running a "Crash Course in SMS & Email Marketing" on Tuesday 5th October. This two hour session will touch on many aspects of SMS & Email marketing and try to answer some questions including;