Objective
Every business wants to keep its clients informed about new opportunities and reach potential customers with the solutions it offers. Working with these goals in mind leads to better commercial outcomes and brings to light the possibilities of doing business with both established and new companies. All of this must be conducted in compliance with privacy regulations (GDPR) and with respect for the preferences of your contacts — a consideration of particular importance in today's environment, where everyone is bombarded with an enormous volume of unsolicited commercial communications.
Overview
Email communication has long since replaced traditional mail and fax — and for good reason. Its advantages are undeniable: dramatically reduced time and costs, to name just the most obvious. Email is an extremely convenient and cost-effective way to establish and maintain contact with clients and colleagues anywhere in the world. Compared to traditional direct marketing, it also offers the significant advantage of enabling more precise, timely and targeted communication, reaching audiences that large-scale marketing campaigns simply cannot.
Managing a service as complex as email marketing — now governed by strict regulations and presenting considerable variation from case to case — requires a dedicated newsletter application, even for volumes as low as a few hundred recipients.
Business News is an application created to automate the sending of commercial, promotional and informational newsletters, carefully personalised for each recipient.
Business News collects and manages contact lists and email addresses, organising them into categories and/or distribution groups. Through a simple interface, Business News enables the creation of newsletters in both plain text and HTML format, with the ability to select recipient groups or categories, or to choose recipients directly from the available list.
Draft message creation allows for a final review before the actual send. To make messages more direct and personal, newsletters can be customised using tags embedded in the text — for example, the recipient's first and last name, or their company name.
Advanced scheduling functionality lets you choose precisely when to deliver messages, giving you full control over every scenario. Logging helps measure the effectiveness of marketing actions — or at the very least, the extent to which recipients have been reached.
The application has been tested with HCL Domino 11 and previous versions.
Features
The product is built on a Domino database in which the user manages content through straightforward, software-guided functions via an intuitive graphical interface.
Contact Database
- Complete contact records with full address and contact data management
- Formal validation of email address format
- Consent flag management for data receipt (required to comply with applicable regulations)
- Organisation of contacts into macro-categories
- Creation of distribution groups (resellers, clients, etc.)
- Management of newsletter format preferences (plain text or HTML)
- Support for generic addresses and multiple contacts
- Contact import with data validation and duplicate detection
- Import from Microsoft Excel or CSV files
- Push or Pull synchronisation with an external Lotus Domino Names & Address Book
- Access management with separate assignment of functional roles
- Test contact management for trial message receipt
Professional Email
- Newsletter creation in plain text or HTML multipart format
- Custom sender name selection
- Test send or HTML preview before actual delivery
- Tag management in both subject line and message body for personalised recipient information (first name, last name, title, company)
- Archive of previously sent newsletters
- Starting template management for new newsletter composition
- Online viewing of the newsletter by the recipient
- HTML newsletter preview
Sending
- Manual or scheduled server-side sending
- Priority management
- Outgoing batch size management
- Scheduled sending via preferred days and times, modifiable even during an active send
- Newsletter start date setting
Technical Specifications
Security Organisations requiring the highest levels of data security are the ideal clients for the Lotus Domino platform, through which extremely high and fully customisable levels of protection can be achieved.
Remote Working Staff working off-site can use Business News in its entirety, even when not connected to their server. This is made possible by the Notes replication mechanism, which keeps local data in sync with the server and allows updates to be submitted remotely. Data synchronisation can take place even during periods away from the office, using all available networking infrastructure.
Prerequisites The application was originally developed for Lotus Domino version 8.5 or later. It is now tested for use with all versions including HCL (IBM) Domino V14.0, and is also usable as a web application via HCL Nomad.
Updated May 2024