Thalasar Ventures

A new company, Zookoda.com, has decided to bring email marketing to bloggers, making it comparatively easy for bloggers to integrate email campaigns directly into their blogs. Zookoda.com has a simple web based process for setting up email list management, broadcasts etc.

I have always been a big believer in the power of the email marketing. One of the standard features with the open source ecommerce suit we developed at Brave New Worlds was a majodomo mailing list. It always surprised me when merchants didn’t actively use their mailing lists. Most of the time they simply didn’t want to take the effort to mail to the list. Other times they didn’t want to manage the unsubscribe notices or even manage the lists. Granted when we first started in 1996, it was Majodomo which was a major pain to manage. Later we switched to Mailman which was Web based but merchants didn’t seem to use it any more. If we had a process as easy to use as Zookoda’s perhaps more merchants would have used it.
Zookoda clearly understands that creating and managing a mail list can be a little daunting. That why they have broken the process up into a series of clear steps. After creating an account at Zookoda they have thoughtfully broken the process out into a series of steps.
Zookoda makes email marketing incredibly easy to set up and manage. The process is entire web based and Zookoda.com does a good job of walking you through process. They have put a big green button labeled “Start” at the upper left hand side.

The site then walks you through setting up a mail list and allows you to customize numerous aspects of the opt in form, the mailing list information and more. They then syndicate your mail list via Javascript. As you can see by my site I have already created a mailing list using Zookoda. Please note since this is a hosted service, the signup and opt in forms are hosted on the Zookoda site, minimizing the amount of software configuration you have to do.You can even manually set the bounce rate before someone is removed from the list.

One of the interesting features of the Zookoda site is that they allow you to give feedback on any part of the mailing list creation process including the form order and more. Clearly they understand as I do that setting up a mailing list can be intimidating for the average user. I will be using my Zookoda mailing list to give out special tips on management, startups and getting off the ground. That will be material that you won’t get from the blog and with Zookoda managing the process, you can unsubscribe at any time.