Andrew Gluck: Good afternoon
everybody. This is Andrew Gluck. I’m the President and CEO of www.advisorproducts.com. Welcome to
you all to our Marketing Smart Webinar. On this day, July 8, 2009, a Wednesday,
it’s 4:00 p.m. and today we are going to talk about email archiving and instant
messaging, plus update you on some advanced online marketing techniques and
some special features that you get with the Advisor Products platform. Thank
you all for attending. This webinar is being recorded and we are now posting
the slides for this webinar and we will chat out the link to you to download
the slides in just a couple of minutes.
We have with us today an www.advisorproducts.com partner from www.fusemail.com and I just want to give you
all some history about how we partnered with www.fusemail.com.
The partnership dates back about one year and prior to that, www.advisorproducts.com was in the
email hosting business itself and we directly supported something like, I don’t
know, about 1200 firms, quite frankly, with the email hosting services that we
were providing and to be honest with you, it was really a courtesy that we did
it.
With websites, we wanted to offer email accounts, but as
our but as our business grew—we started hosting websites in ’97 and as our
business grew, it was very resource-intensive to host the emails. It required
server redundancy. You know, of course, email is a mission-critical
application and it required a lot of customer service. So at about a year ago,
finally, we found a new kind of firm that we could partner with to host emails
for advisors and that’s how we found www.fusemail.com.
Firms like www.fusemail.com
did not exist until pretty recently, and so it was a new kind of firm and www.fusemail.com is on its way to, it looks
like, becoming very successful in its own right and we’re helping them with the
advisor channel, but the company hosts emails for about a half million people.
What that’s done over the past year for us, quite frankly, is it has freed up
our technicians to focus on bottom-line producing and much more important
chores that are really the ones that we want to be great at. Email is not our
core competency and so this really has worked out well for us, this partnership
with www.fusemail.com over the past
year.
Really, I can only think of one incident – one complaint
incident over the last year – and when you’re hosting hundreds and hundreds of
email accounts like www.fusemail.com is
for our firm, and for all the advisors that work with us, having just one
complaint in a year is really excellent. So I’m pleased with the client
experience.
There is the face of www.fusemail.com
for you. That’s Bryan Heitman, and Bryan is the founder and President of www.fusemail.com. Before starting www.fusemail.com, he was the co-founder of
another startup called CommuniTech.Net,
which was a hosting service for small- and medium-sized businesses and Bryan,
as co-founder of CommuniTech, helped build that company up to eight million dollars
($8,000,000) in revenue. It’s margins exceeded thirty-five percent (35%) and
they sold the company in 2002.
Bryan is a licensed pilot and
he’s a hobbyist that really enjoys marine aquariums, I’m told. So what I’d
like to do now is ask Bryan to tell us about www.fusemail.com’s
newest capabilities and welcome you to the MarketingSmart Webinar http://www.advisorproducts.com/mswebinars.aspx for www.advisorproducts.com,
Bryan.
Bryan Heitman: Thank you, Andy, and hello
everybody. Thank you all for joining us here today. I wanted to tell you just
a little bit more information about www.fusemail.com
and what our history is, and then we’ll dive right into those new products Andy
was talking about.
As Andy said, www.fusemail.com
was formed in 2003. We’re located here in Kansas City, Missouri. This is
where I’ve lived all my life and it’s also where CommuniTech.Net got its
start.
CommuniTech.Net was in the webhosting space so we’re very
familiar with the small- and medium-sized businesses. We started our first
generation webmail application in 2006 and that’s what you all are using today
if you’re not using Outlook. So if you’re on the road and you’re logging into
a webmail interface, that’s what you’re seeing is our Webmail version 2.0
interface.
www.fusemail.com has
servers in the Kansas City, Ashburn, Virginia, and San Jose markets. Just to
give you a little bit of background about the company and CommuniTech, we all
started the company by investing in the company. So when we earn revenue from
the company, we reinvest it as opposed to taking venture capital money. So
this means we don’t have concessions that we have to meet. This means that we
really can set our own destiny and www.fusemail.com,
like CommuniTech, has been profitable since day one and www.fusemail.com has enjoyed one hundred
percent (100%) growth rates since the beginning of the company.
I wanted to tell you a little bit about the mail clusters
that you all are currently hosted on. A mail cluster means that your data is
on two physical servers. This is for redundancy purposes. Each one of these
machines is either in active or inactive state. So when an active server goes
offline, an inactive server automatically takes over to make sure that your
email stays online 24x7.
In addition to that, www.fusemail.com
monitors every aspect of your email service. Not only do the basics of
connecting to our servers, but also minute details that are not customer
impacting. www.fusemail.com is extremely
proactive about monitoring all of these aspects to make sure that your service
stays online 24x7.
The three datacenters that www.fusemail.com has: Kansas City, Ashburn,
and San Jose, allow us to locate our customers’ data closest geographically to
you as a user. This speeds up greatly the email service to you.
In case any of you are wondering what the hardware looks
like in any of our servers, you can see here we currently have eight (8)
terabyte capacity of hard disk capacity per machine and twenty-four (24)
gigabytes of memory capacity per machine. We also support Dual x Quad Core
Intel Processors on all of those machines.
And in case any of you are wondering, www.fusemail.com currently processes about
ten million (10,000,000) emails a day for all of our clients and this includes
much of it is spam and viruses that we are filtering out for our clients. In
addition to that, our incoming email servers process about sixty million
(60,000,000) SMTP transactions per day. These are new emails attempting to be
delivered our network.
www.fusemail.com
hosts are infrastructure at a datacenter called Equinix. If anyone is familiar
with Equinix, they would know that the datacenters that Equinix provides are
extremely state of the art and very, very secure. These facilities, for
example, in the D.C. area have about five (5) different buildings of about two
hundred thousand (200,000) square feet plus in capacity.
This datacenter is also home to IBM, Sony, Microsoft, and
others that call Equinix home. If anyone ever gets a chance to tour an Equinix
facility, I would highly recommend it, as it is quite a tour going through all
of the power infrastructure, cooling, and just to know, if any of you are
familiar with internet sites out there that you love to visit every day, just knowing
that you walk by and there is www.amazon.com
servers or www.google.com or www.yahoo.com or whoever it happens to be, is
kind of a neat feeling to know that’s where their infrastructure is.
The datacenter is completely redundant from a power
perspective. You have multiple utility connections to the building, multiple
generators, multiple UPS gear and so forth.
The facility also features anti-terror provisions. So for
example, the shipping and receiving area is completely walled off from the
datacenter itself.
The building also has no windows and exterior walls are
completely bullet-resistant. When you approach one of these buildings, it doesn’t
really look like a datacenter at all, but more or less just a really large
building with what looks like no entrances into the building.
When you enter the building, you are put through a
rigorous security process of usually an hour or an hour and a half entry
process into the building.
www.fusemail.com has
just launched this Webmail v3 interface and I know most of you are used to
using Outlook on your PCs and so forth, but if you’re traveling on the road or
just would like to take a look at our new product, you certainly can log into
our new webmail interface, and this is our Webmail v3, as I stated.
You’re going to find this interface is going to look a lot
like Outlook. So for example, you’ve got your mail folders on your left, your
message list in the center, and of course, your preview pane over to the right
of that.
The interface is completely customizable so you can drag
around any of the panels, is what we call them, onto different parts of the
screen. Here I’m just demonstrating the paneling capabilities of the Webmail
v3. As you can tell, we have completely rearranged the interface so that the
mail folder’s on the right side and message list and preview pane on the left.
So you, as end-user, can rearrange the interface however you like.
And here we’re just demonstrating some of the calendar
functionality of the Webmail interface. Again, you’re going to find this much
like the Outlook that you’re used to using on your PC.
And again, just the Calendar interface here we are
seeing. We’re just moving an appointment on the week view from the June 30
date to the July 1 data just simply by dragging and dropping. This is quite
unique for a web-based application to operate much like Outlook.
Okay, and moving on, we are seeing the Instant Messaging
application that is now available to all customers of www.fusemail.com and I believe www.advisorproducts.com as well.
The Instant Messaging capabilities allow you to securely
encrypt all of your communication between Instant Messaging clients. This
means that your employees within your office can have encrypted communication
back and forth. If you’re currently using ICQ, Yahoo!, and many of the other
public networks, that is most likely not encrypted in your communication.
In addition to being encrypted, we also support the
ability to automatically update your roster list so as you add employees to
your company, all of your clients are automatically kept up to date with the
latest contacts. Of course, the interface is completely private labeled so
your company logo can show up within the interface.
You also have the capability within that Webmail v3
interface to also access your Instant Messaging client directly without
installing a third-party application onto your machine on the road. This
application does still support connecting to the public networks of Yahoo!,
MSN, AIM, and ICQ.
Okay, here we are seeing the email archiving interface and
www.advisorproducts.com came to us
when they joined us about a year ago and wondered where is our archiving
interface; what do we have in the plans for it? So over the past year, we have
worked closely with www.advisorproducts.com
to come up with an email archiving solution and many of the things were
mandatory to be included in the interface you are going to see here in this
interface.
First off, the backend for this infrastructure is
completely Geo Redundant. What we mean by that is your data is located in
multiple datacenters at the same time. So for example, you can withstand a
complete datacenter outage of say, a national disaster event that would wipe
out one of the facilities, however rare that may be. You would still be online
instantaneously in another facility.
We are archiving both your outbound and inbound email
communication, as well as your Instant Messaging communication. Because this
interface is really an insurance policy to make sure that all of your
information is stored and archived and is not an interface that you would
regularly log into on a daily basis, we will monitor the volume of your traffic
to make sure that we are getting all of the communication that is supposed to
be recorded and if those thresholds are not met, then we will be alerted so our
staff can investigate a technical issue. So that’s what we mean by volume
monitoring.
The interface has capabilities for a Search Engine so that
we can process hundreds of thousands of pieces of data and you can search it
much like you could going to www.google.com
or www.yahoo.com and searching for a website.
The interface also features audit controls so that you can
set up multiple users within your organization, or even a third party such as
an attorney or an accountant to log into the interface, but all of the
information and everything that that third party or user does is completely
logged and also has capabilities of restricting access to those third-party
users.
You also have the ability to get email and SMS alerts of
certain things that are discovered or archived automatically, you will be
alerted that a certain keyword, for example, has been triggered. So for
example, if you put in the keyword “guarantee” as something that you wanted to
automatically flag, you would get an SMS or email alert that someone sent or
received an email with the word “guarantee” in it.
And here we’re showing the Search Engine results. I just
searched for my last name, Heitman, and I see the various results that are
displayed.
We also will archive your Word documents, PowerPoint,
Excel documents and so forth and also make those searchable. So if we receive
a PowerPoint Presentation with various words within in the slides, you will be
able to search that just like you could search an email within the interface.
Here we are seeing the advanced search capabilities of the
interface. If you are looking for something specific or on a specific day and
you would like to narrow your results, the advanced search is going to be what
you would like to use so that you can narrow it down to a specific month and so
forth, or search in specific fields of your data that is archived.
With the interface, we do have the capability of also
adding comments so as you open a piece of your email, you can actually add a
comment to the particular communication so that you can go back to it for historical
purposes and search those comments as well as review them in the future.
Over here on the right you are noticing that we have the
tags capability. The tags are something that you can manually turn on for a
specific piece of archived communication. You could also then automatically
tag an item if a certain keyword is met. We talked briefly about the word
“guarantee”. You could set it up so that the word “guarantee” automatically
triggers one of the tags for review or data leak or something like that.
You also have the capability of searching within the
interface and producing either a DVD copy of your archived data, or also be
able to download a zip file of all of the communication or archived information
that matches your search results.
And here we are just seeing the start of the settings
interface within the application and this will be much further expanded as we
get along towards a launch of the email archiving product.
Okay, and that’s all I have for today, so I’ll just turn
it over to you, Andy.
Andy Gluckman: We have a question from one
advisor here who’s asked us to cover whitelisting. For example, Comcast, he
says, will not allow one to receive broadcast emails. Do you want to just
explain the whitelisting system that we’ve worked out with you, Bryan?
Bryan Heitman: Sure. First, I’m not sure
if this is in regard to incoming or outgoing emails, but let me just try to hit
both here.
With incoming emails with the email service in particular,
you have the capability of whitelisting certain email addresses or domain
names. So within the interface, if you receive an email from susan@mydomain.com, you can go in and
whitelist that particular email address so that in the future, if our systems
detect that as spam, it will still go to your inbox folder instead of it being
detected as spam.
As for the outbound email, if we’re talking about outbound
email to Comcast service, this could be forwarded communication, this could be
an email communication that you’re sending directly to Comcast, www.fusemail.com actually will monitor to
make sure that the servers that we are sending to, we are not blacklisted
against. For example, if we detect that Comcast is rejecting a certain email
communication, our staff can work that up in our log files and make sure that
that communication gets delivered.
If we’re talking about forwarded communication, this might
be a little bit different matter. Forwarded communication such as an email
forwarded, this is being sent from a different server and so we attempt to
deliver that to whatever recipient email address we were going to, but if
you’re having difficulty with that, that is something that definitely can be
researched on a technical support level and make sure that that communication
to Comcast server gets sent.
Andrew Gluck: Good, thanks for that,
and by the way, he was mostly concerned about incoming whitelisting, but I
think your answer holds up well. Is there anything you want to add to that now
that you know he’s specifically talking about whitelisting on incoming emails?
Bryan Heitman: No, not really. Like I
said, the income side of it is just a matter of whitelisting the email address
or domain name. It’s pretty easy to do and certainly we can help out that user
with it if they have some difficulty in the future in getting that email
address whitelisted.
Andrew Gluck: Okay, and we have a
question about the launch date on Webmail 3.0. Has that been launched yet?
Bryan Heitman: The interface, yes, it has
technically been launched to your www.fusemail.com
customers. It is still in sort of a pre-launch phase for our resellers and
higher end-users such as www.advisorproducts.com
and we’ll be working with you, Andy, and www.advisorproducts.com in getting
that out to your users.
Andrew Gluck: Yeah, because I know some
of this we’re going to be doing in phases as I recall. The email archiving, I
think, is going to be rolled out over the next few weeks, right?
Bryan Heitman: Yeah, absolutely.
Andrew Gluck: Regarding the email
archivie service – and you and I have covered this, and I think we’re good, but
is it WORM capable? WORM is Write Once, Read Many. It is WORM capable,
correct?
Bryan Heitman: Yes, if I understand that
acronym correctly, that would be correct, yes.
Andrew Gluck: Meaning that it cannot be
deleted. Do you just want to cover how that works in terms of the archive not
being deletable by a user?
Bryan Heitman: A very good point, and I
apologize for missing that. The interface, once an email or IM has been
archived, or any piece of data has been archived within the interface, no user
can go in and delete. This could be spam, it could be email communication that
perhaps might be personal, but nonetheless, that communication can’t be deleted
so it’s going to remain in the archive serve as long as you’re a customer.
Andrew Gluck: We have a question about
the cost of the service and I’m glad we got that question because what we’re
seeing here is a real disruptive technology. Email archiving, when it was
first rolled out close to ten (10) years ago now, I think, that advisors really
started, I think after ’99 with the change in the ’40 Act, I believe there was
some rule changes and advisors had to start archiving emails. It was a very
expensive proposition. It’s no longer expensive. You can archive five (5)
email accounts with us now for $200 a year and ten (10) email accounts for $300
a year. So hopefully that’s going to make some of our attendees smile.
Regarding a comparison of www.fusemail.com
capabilities versus www.gmail.com
capabilities, obviously the archiving is a real advantage. What do you think,
Bryan? Can you make some comparisons with www.gmail.com?
Bryan Heitman: Yeah, absolutely. I would
say that our service was built from the ground up for businesses, with www.gmail.com, I think it’s the opposite. I
think it was built for consumers and it has been adapted to businesses. In
terms of numbers of features and services, I think you’re going to find with
our particular products, they are quite more lengthy in terms of the features
that we support and the different functionality that you have.
If you just look at the Webmail interface, you’re going to
find that the www.gmail.com interface is a
very basic interface. It certainly is an interface that is aesthetically
pleasing to certain types of users, but our interface is really designed more
of an end-user that’s used to using Outlook. So you’re going to find the
interface looks a lot more similar to Outlook’s type of interface and has the
visual aspects of it of being able to customize the interface, drag and drop
elements, right-click, and so forth.
So I think those are kind of the really high-level
overview of the differences between the services. Obviously, that would be a
long conversation to really dive into too much detail on that topic.
Andrew Gluck: We have another question
about whether the email archiving and IM archiving are included. Yeah, that’s
one price that covers both. If you want to add Instant Messaging, however, to
your email account, please let us at www.advisorproducts.com
know and there will be a modest upcharge for that, so please let us know.
If you’re currently using another archive provider, is it
possible to transfer the history over to www.fusemail.com?
If not, how do you maintain the history once you transition? Will they send
you CDs?
I’m going to let Bryan try to answer it, but you’re
probably going to have to consult your current provider on your exit strategy.
Whenever you’re getting into a web-based application, by the way, you should
know what your exit strategy is before you get in. Bryan, any thoughts on
advisory firms that want to transition over to us?
Bryan Heitman: Yeah, absolutely. We are
going to provide mechanism for you to be able to move your data from one
provider to the other. Now, there’s going to be certain users out there that
that is going to work for quite well and it will be easy for them to extract
the information either by DVD or via an IMAP or POP3 connection to that
particular server. We’re going to work with that end-user to get that data over
to us.
Now, there may be some users that simply don’t want to
important the data, or they simply can’t get it out of their existing
provider. In those cases then, you would be archiving new communications
starting at whenever you start with our service. I can tell you, like Andy
said, with an exit strategy, we’re providing you zip file as well as DVD access
to get your information out of our service. So if you decide to move to
someone else, that is going to be very easy with our service.
Andy Gluck: Yeah, just to make it
clear to everybody, with www.advisorproducts.com,
everything that we do, we try to make really in your interests that way and
that’s why it’s been such a pleasure to partner with a company like www.fusemail.com because they have the same
sort of values and way of conducting themselves in the business and very
transparent, very easy to work with and it’s really been great for us, so I
just wanted to mention that.
I think we pretty much answered all the questions we have
at this point about email archiving. Bryan, if you want to stay on the line,
I’m going to talk about some other things, but if you want to hang out, then
that would be great, but I’m going to move on and talk about our email
newsletter capabilities.
In case we do have questions at the end of the session,
please bear with us, Bryan, and stay with us for a little while. But thank you
very much, Bryan, for that great presentation and for answering our questions
about www.fusemail.com’s email
archiving and IM and IM archiving capabilities.
Bryan Heitman: Sure, thank you everyone.
Andy Gluck: Congratulations on it.
It looks great, Bryan.
Bryan Heitman: Thank you.
Andy Gluck: What I want to handle
now is some issues related to advanced email newsletters. There are a lot of
features that we offer in our BackOffice that I fear advisors may not be
totally familiar with. Just to give you an overview of the email newsletter
capabilities, we rolled it out—email, is of course, it’s a crucial medium for
client communication, of course, and in 2001 after 911, we fortunately, at that
point, had just finished the work on the email newsletter and rolled it out at
that point. It was a critical time, of course, to get client communications
out by email and we were there. So the product is now – it’s been nine (9)
years and it’s come a long way.
What our email newsletter allows you to do that is very
important is that you can send email newsletters using the content that www.advisorproducts.com provides.
Every email contains a brief summary of an article that we produce, and we’re
known for producing very excellent content. We produce about fifteen (15)
FINRA reviewed financial news articles each month and they really are financial
news. They’re off the news as much as possible. I assign all of the articles
myself and really look for angles that clients need to know about and that help
financial advisors really communicate their value proposition most effectively.
You can have a button on your site that enables visitors
to sign up for the email newsletter, so it really becomes a part of your
website.
The email newsletter offers you some very granular
compliance controls. If a BD wants to, it can approve each and every email
newsletter before it goes out. Since a lot of the email newsletters are just
apprised of content that’s already been review by FINRA, many BDs don’t feel
the need to review each and every newsletter, especially since we can fix it so
that the advisors can’t change it.
The other thing we could do is make it so that a BD can,
for instance, pre-approve articles so that they know exactly which articles are
available for advisors to use in building their email newsletters on our
system. That really can help to streamline the compliance process and speed
the delivery of an email newsletter.
Every Friday at 5 p.m. EST, in addition to being able to
build the newsletters with our articles, you’re able to send a Weekly Market
Update which is really just a summary of what occurred in the markets. So
we’re linking to other articles, explaining what occurred in the markets and in
the economy, and we’re summarizing in a table the Index activity over the
previous week, showing what bonds have done, as well as stocks. You can even
automate that Market Update so that it will go out automatically to a list that
you create and you won’t have to go and send it out every week. That’s a
feature that advisors asked for and we actually implemented it several years
ago.
You can also use the email newsletter to send mass HTML
emails. We have a Word-like editor built into The BackOffice. You can also
use our staff, if you have any questions, in setting up an email like that, so
the staff can help you with that.
The other thing is that you can create groups in the email
newsletter BackOffice that allow you target, say, retirees, business owners,
pre-retirees. Our content is actually created to target those three segments
and so we make it very easy for you to segment your client list among those
groups.
Just to show you some of the features and functionality,
really how simple it is to use, this is what happens when you log in in the
BackOffice. I just want to point out four of the areas over here. On the
upper left, you can see the menu for managing different features on your
website and then the long box on the left shows you how you can change
content. You can click on any of those pages and that is representative.
That’s your site map. That’s representative of your menu, your navigation
buttons on your website.
On the upper right, the button that says View Site,
you can actually click on that and it will pop open another browser so that you
can view your website. You can also, below that, click on Edit Site Map
and that allows you to add new pages on your site and move around any page to
change the site’s navigation menu. You can actually just point and click where
you want different pages to go and move them around on the site in seconds.
And then below that in The BackOffice on the right, you
see a picture of me and my blog and company news releases. So that’s just a
quick tour overview of The BackOffice.
Just looking at how you build an email newsletter, we’ll
show you this. A video is available on this as well. You can just click on
the left where it says E-Newsletters and you come to this page where you
can Select Articles that are going to appear in your email newsletter.
You just check them off in those checkboxes.
To the right over there, the red box shows you the dates
of the articles and where they appear in your site. Then you just click on Preview/Send
Newsletter. When you do that, you can see the already-built email
newsletter with the stories that you’ve selected.
Now a client receives an email with your Welcome message
and with your branding, and at the bottom of each story that you select for the
email newsletter, the client just clicks on click for more and that pops
open a browser and takes the client or the prospect or referral source over to
your website so he or she sees your entire website, in addition to the specific
article.
So what we’re doing is really using our content to communicate
and create a conversation and letting financial planning and money management
ideas lead the conversation.
Now below that, you can see a button there that says Send
to EZ-Data and what I want to touch on is an integration that we’re
introducing for the first time here today that is going to be broadened over
the next few weeks.
You’re able now to send email newsletters through the
EZ-Data SmartOffice web-based CRM system. EZ-Data is, of course, probably the
largest CRM system used by financial advisors. They have something like one
hundred twenty thousand (120,000) users and the company has about two hundred
fifty (250) employees.
The E-Newsletter integration that we’re introducing now
allows you to leverage many of the strengths of the EZ-Data CRM systems, but it
also integrated it with our client portals and our content. So you could, in
EZ-Data create mailing lists, manage all your contacts, and do all of the
things that you would do in a CRM system, include embedding your processes and
tracking your tasks. So this is the first stage of our integration with
EZ-Data.
Now, the E-Newsletter is, just like I said, phase one and
you can expect a deeper integration to be announced where you’re going to be
able to assign clients to-dos from EZ-Data and clients can assign you to-dos
and reminders from their client portal and that will feed into EZ-Data, so it’s
a two-way integration. The calendar is being integrated as well, and so are
many other SmartOffice features.
For now we’re focusing on the newsletter integration.
We’ve prepared a three-minute video that I’ll just run through very quickly.
EZ-Data Video: Welcome to www.advisorproducts.com BackOffice
Training Review. In this video, I’ll show you how to send an E-Newsletter from
The BackOffice into EZ-Data so that you can send it out to clients or prospects
using EZ-Data’s mass correspondence function.
Once the EZ-Data integration has been enabled by your www.advisorproducts.com
representative, log into your www.advisorproducts.com
BackOffice as the Admin.
You have a choice to create a customized newsletter with
articles you choose, or to send our Weekly Update that contains a snapshot of
the main three Indexes and links to articles covering the important topics for
the past week.
To create a customized newsletter, click the E-Newsletter
link on the left-hand menu. Start building your newsletter by clicking the Build
E-Newsletter link.
The first step is to personalize your newsletter with a
custom title, an introductory paragraph, and a footer for your newsletter. The
newsletter intro will appear above your article links. The trailer section
allows you to write a closing paragraph which will appear below your chosen
articles.
Once you’re finished customizing each section, click Save
and Select Stories. The next step allows you to select articles for your
newsletter. Select up to four articles from the list by checking them off.
Once you are done selecting your articles, click Save
and Preview. The next section, Preview/Send Newsletter allows you
to see what your newsletter will look like. If you’re happy with the preview,
click Send to EZ-Data.
Once you’ve successfully sent a newsletter to EZ-Data, you
should receive a message at the top that says, “The newsletter has been sent to
EZ-Data.”
You can save your newsletter if you’re not ready to send
it yet by clicking the Save Email button.
When you want to send or edit your saved email, click the Saved
Emails link in the left-hand menu.
To edit an article, click the title in the Subject
field. Once you’re ready to send your saved newsletter to EZ-Data, click the Send
Email button next to it and then click Send to EZ-Data.
To send the Weekly Update to EZ-Data, click the Weekly
Update link in the left-hand menu. Now you will see a preview of what the
Weekly Update will look like. To send it to EZ-Data, click the Send to
EZ-Data button.
Now log into EZ-Data to send your newsletter to clients or
prospective clients using EZ-Data’s mass correspondence feature. To send your
newsletter, click the Sales and Marketing link and then select Mass
Correspondence from the dropdown. Choose whether you’d like to send your
newsletter to all clients, certain clients based on a filter, or a set of
clients.
Once you’ve made your selection, click Email Form
Letter. Search for the title of your newsletter and then select the latest
newsletter from the list.
Before you send it, fill out the email Subject line and
then click OK to send it to the list of clients you selected.
The system will now send the newsletter to the clients you
selected.
[End of Video]
Andrew Gluck: Okay, I just want to
thank Steve Shop on our staff for putting
together that video for us today. So hopefully we’ll take some questions in a
few minutes, but I just want to cover some other features in the email
newsletter.
Now if you don’t use EZ-Data, quite honestly you could
still create groups directly in The BackOffice and create targeted marketing
campaigns in The BackOffice.
The way you create a group is just to fill in a couple of
fields over here that are highlighted. Just name the group and click Create
Group.
When you create the group, you can see the test group now
appears and it literally takes just thirty (30) seconds to do that and create
your group and name it, and you’re ready to do some niche marketing.
The way you create your list is you can upload a master
list from say, Excel. You’ve got all your client contacts in Excel. You can
export them to an Excel spreadsheet and then you can also manually upload each
email if you want. Of course, that’s going to be a lot more time consuming.
You create that master list and then just check off the
names, as I’ve shown you here, that you want to appear in your new group – in
your targeted-marketing group. The names then show up on the left side. The
group is populated with all of the names for a targeted-marketing list and,
like I said, we have content specifically geared to different target markets.
Another feature that I want to cover briefly is some
advances that we’ve made in our online Portfolio Reporting System. We offer
portfolio reporting integrations with many of the Portfolio Management Software
Systems and the way that you are going to use this is a client can log into his
portal and that’s going to allow him to look in the vault for his performance
reports.
I’m going to just quickly log into the client portal
system and I’m going to show you where the reports reside in the vault. A
couple of the features that we’ve added lately are pretty useful to advisors.
I don’t believe they’re available from other online providers.
One thing you could do is when you go into the Detailed
Report section – we have many reports – and what we’ve added most recently is
the ability to print any of these reports. We’ve created a printer-friendly
version of each of these reports that your clients can now print out.
The other feature that we’ve added is the ability to
export to Excel so again, you can click over here and your client can now
export his transactions or holdings. Any of these reports that we create can
now be exported to Excel. You can see that the reports are quite nice and these
are, of course, HTML reports so that allows you to be able to click on any link
also and see just a ton of other information about a security. On stocks, this
feature is particularly good.
That pretty much covers the enhancements to Portfolio
Reporting and so what I’d like to do at this point is just open it up to some
questions.
Question: Are the emails copied
to the BD automatically?
Answer: Like I said, there
are granular controls in the email newsletter. The BD can have as much control
as it needs. We really do offer a very—there are a lot of options, so if the
BD wants to see every email newsletter, then they can. An email is
automatically generated by the system telling the BD compliance person, or if
it’s an RIA, it could be a compliance consultant, of course, but an email is
automatically generated when you want to send an email newsletter telling the
Compliance Officer to log in and look at the email newsletter.
Question: Can I place a button
on my website offering free signup to the email newsletter and automatically
enroll them into the database?
Answer: Good question and
the answer is yes, absolutely. You can.
Question: Can we upload email
addresses to The BackOffice from www.fusemail.com’s
Webmail application? Brian, if you’re still with us, can you generate a plain
file of email addresses that can be downloaded? Is that within your system? I
wonder. I kind of doubt it, but I wonder if you can do that.
Answer: No answer – Bryan
dropped from the call.
Question: Is there a setup
cost?
Answer: There is a setup
cost on the email newsletter system of, I believe, $300 and the system is
available for $500 a year. Of course, you need to have our content in order to
fully utilize that.
Question: Is there a setup cost
for email archiving?
Answer: No, there is no
setup cost for email archiving. I don’t believe that we’re going to be
charging a setup cost for that. I’ll double-check that, though, but I don’t
believe we are.
Question: I have a question
about www.finfolio.com, and whether
that’s going to be integrated into the client portal.
Answer: Matt Abar and I are
old friends and we probably will get into that. I think he’s had other fish to
fry in trying to get his company off the ground, so we’re not ready. I don’t
think he was quite ready for that yet, but I look forward to working with Matt
on that.
Question: Are the emails
personally addressed?
Answer: Good question, and
the answer is no, not in the current version. That is a feature that we’d like
to add and we will be working on that.
With that, I just want to remind everybody about some
other things going on. This week we are going to have, on Friday, our
Financial Crisis Webinar Series (http://www.advisorproducts.com/webinars.aspx)
will continue and we’re going to have a really great session about reducing
client failures.
You may want to check out my column in Financial
Advisor Magazine, http://www.fa-mag.com,
before coming to that session. I interviewed David Maxfield, who is the
Research Director over at www.vitalsmarts.com.
The story is called Advisors Who Get Fired. http://www.fa-mag.com/component/content/article/4262.html?magazineID=1&issue=110&Itemid=73.
David and I created some original research in which we
surveyed advisors and got their answers and that’s what he’s going to be
talking about on Friday, and that’s what this article is about.
David is the author of The Power To Change Anything
and www.vitalsmarts.com, where he is
the Research Director. It’s a consulting firm mostly to Fortune 500
companies. www.vitalsmarts.com was
founded by the authors of a best-selling business book called Crucial
Conversations that is really an excellent book. If you haven’t read it,
then you really want to pick it up. So that’s Friday.
Other upcoming sessions that we’re going to be having
include how to prepare your firm and your clients for the possibility of
another stock market slide. Of course, in the couple weeks since we planned
that, the market has started to dip. Maybe I ought to do a story about
preparing for an upturn in the market. Maybe that would work.
Please also, on the way out, fill in our exit survey.
Another thing that you might want to check out is a website that we built about
our integration with www.redtailtechnology.com
and www.financelogix.com. That
website is www.integratedadvisor.com
and is really just a lot of information about how you can use the client portal
system with www.financelogix.com, a
really beautiful-looking financial planning system and with www.redtailtechnology.com, so
please check that out.
And then also check out the Financial Crisis Webinar
Series www.advisorproducts.com/webinars
on Friday, but you can now go to our site at any time and see replays of
Webinars. Just click on the gray button on the right and see replays of all of
our webinars and CE credit for many of them.
Also, we now host the MarketingSmart Webinar Series, http://www.advisorproducts.com/mswebinars.aspx,
so check all of those out also available from our homepage.
I am tweeting all the time about Advisor frauds, the continuing
saga, and stream of frauds that we’ve seen recently and also check out my
article in Financial Advisor Magazine, http://www.fa-mag.com.
Once again, I want to thank Bryan Heitman, our guest from www.fusemail.com today, and thank all of you
for attending and please let me know if you have any questions. You can always
email me at agluck@advisorproducts.com
or give us a call at (516) 333-0066 and the extension for the Sales Department
is 224.
Thank you all for coming and we hope that you found this
useful. Please join us the second Wednesday of every month for our
MarketingSmart Webinar Series, http://www.advisorproducts.com/mswebinars.aspx.
Thanks again.
[END OF TRANSCRIPT]