Mindfire vs EasyPURL

[Peter Wann]

does anyone have insight into these competing products? Price, features, support?

[devin.voorsanger]

First of all a little bit of disclosure, I am the Director of Client Services at Indros Group The maker of the Easypurl.com personalized URL solution. This having been said my thoughts on the differences below:

In terms of the different features supported by our EasyPURL cross-media suite and not by any other suite there are quite a few. These features are truly unique to INDROS (i.e., not available in competitive products). As stated earlier, we pride ourselves in our ability to provide high level on-going support in both technical and business development focuses.

If you’re bidding a job and are waiting for the close, the value of leveraging our team can be seen immediately once you can demonstrate to your prospects a strong working knowledge of cross-media, and powerful examples of your services in action.

1) *Free-form Page Design* - In addition to simple-to-use template-based design, we also feature plug ins for Dreamweaver and Frontpage, making ours the only product in the market that includes "free-form" page design. You can even build your own templates for future ease of use. This feature enables our client to deliver completely unique landing sites that are not restricted to built-in templates. And you are not limited to only five pages 'behind' the Personalized URL, as you are with our competition. With EasyPURL's Express Landing pages, you can build microsites as robust as your client's demands require.

2) *No limits on the number of pages *you can build behind EasyPersonalized URLs.

3) *Variable Flash/Streaming Video Support* - We provide the most robust support for rich content. You can embed flash, streaming video or any other broadband content on your landing pages and also include personalization within the broadband content - imagine the possibilities!

4) *Triggered Emails and a fully-functional email blaster *- Not only can you send triggered, timed emails that each contribute to increased response and site conversion rates, we have a fully-functional, 'white listed,' "Can-Spam Compliant" variable email blaster, so you can now offer your clients email blasting as a compliment to their direct mail campaigns, tieing in the common design features and including PURLs, or you can offer it as a stand-alone product/feature.

5) *USPS Confirm* - Intelligent Mail Bar code support is unique to our cross-media tool. Not only that, we can even trigger e-mail follow-ups or notification based upon receipt of the direct mail piece by the prospect.... which used in tandem with PURLs has been proven to increase response by 30% or more, above and beyond the increase attributable to the PURLs themselves.

6) *Credit Card Capture/E-commerce support* - The only platform, where EVERY page is secured by 128 Bit Secure-socket Encryption. Additionally, our platform is the only one to offer stringent Security certification enabling you to exceed the data security standards set by your financial or health care services customers.

7) *Graphical Reporting Dashboard* - Our dashboard includes the 3D graphics and charts by Crystal Reports -- the most popular reporting engine amongst marketing professionals and the GOLD standard in web reporting. And your clients' reports are available forever, they don't 'expire' after three months like they do with our competitor's product.

8) *Customer Relationship Manager* - only product in the industry to have a fully featured CRM built into the technology. As well there is full integration into the Salesforce.com CRM straight from EasyPURL.com

9) *Tell-a-friend* - The only product in the market to feature an organic tell-a-friend application that increases response rates by enabling your direct mail recipients to refer new prospects into the pipeline by automatically creating a Personalized URL on Demand which is sent to their friends via e-mail.

10) World Class Technical Support and Sales Training. As a part of your license, you will have industry veterans backing both your technical abilities and business strategy. From top level technical support and training to business and sales strategy coaching, training and support, our agency experience allows us to provide truly relevant direction to all of our clients taking this service to market.


and the list goes on...

This is just a short summary of some of the capabilities unique to our platform. It's no wonder INDROS' CrossTouch 3.0 cross-media suite is considered the platform of choice by the largest printers and direct mailers in the country and by most industry trade organizations. like the Print Industry Association (PIA/GATF) or the Direct Marketing Association (DMA).

If you would like to discuss the EasyPURL platform you can feel free to contact Rio Longacre at 866.463.7671 xt 83 or via email [e-mail]

Regards,

Devin Voorsanger
Director of Client Services
Indros Group, makers of easypurl.com the leading Personalized URL solution

[Arie]

My name is Arie Abecassis, and I’m the President of MindFireInc. Peter’s question is timely given the tremendous market opportunities for digital marketers – and the increased demand that is being placed on them.

The truth is, if you’re looking for a product that offers personalized, integrated marketing, there are numerous choices in the marketplace; in that regard, we are one of many. However, if you’re looking for a trusted business partner that can provide you with a proven, innovative solution to help you profitably grow your business, the list narrows substantially. In fact, for more than 500 companies like yours, there’s only one name on that list: MindFireInc (post-script: that list now includes Peter Wann of Measurable Marketing Solutions, who joined us since his initial posting).

We strongly believe that in this challenging environment, digital marketers require industry-leading software, training, and support to compete effectively. MindFireInc’s LookWho’sClicking web-based software manages thousands of unique campaigns every single month. The product’s features and functions have all been developed with the user experience in mind; they reflect the input of our clients as they look to address the dynamic requirements of multi-channel marketing and real-time reporting and analysis. Our users range from the industry’s most sophisticated direct marketers to printers still making the transition into the digital economy.

However, we learned early on that software by itself is usually not enough to convert opportunity into sales, so a couple of years ago we developed a proprietary training program called FastLaunch. A modular training program that has been developed in conjunction with our clients, FastLaunch provides best-practices training across the executive, sales, and technical areas of your organization. More than 2,000 users have experienced the immediate benefits of participating in this program.

From your very first sale, we support your business development efforts with the industry’s most comprehensive set of content and tools. Our 24x7 Online Resource Center includes a comprehensive suite of presentations, case studies, and tools that have been developed to support the growth of your business throughout the year. Exclusive workshops and webinars are regularly scheduled to keep organizations like yours informed and up-to-date on leading industry practices, as well as provide an opportunity to network with, and learn from, peers.

We recognize that your clients are more demanding than ever, and that responsiveness can be the difference between success and failure. Our dedicated customer support team is on stand-by to help you respond to the needs of your clients. In addition, our experienced professional service team is available to serve as an extended part of your business to convert time-sensitive sales opportunities or support specialized requirements that you or your clients may have.

These are several considerations that we think are important in making an investment decision for your business. I invite you to reach out to me or any members of the MindFireInc team to explore how we can help support the growth of your business. Please feel free to contact me by phone at 1-877-560-3473 or by email at [e-mail].

Sincerely,

Arie H. Abecassis
President
MindFireInc

[Yale Rieck]

As an innocent bystander (I'm not going to get into the crossfire here). I would like to state for other readers, both of these solutions are excellent. What I'd like to propose to other readers is the following: How is the solution you are looking for going to integrate with your "brand"? My personal opinion (for what its worth) is that regardless of the technical direction you take, the ability to have the software integrate with your company brand and ancillary sales and offerings is critical. In direct reply the initial question, I think a hidden gem for any cross-media solution is the ability to enable templates for the end-users to review, modify or approve. If the process is difficult to enable the template for the end user (in this case the marketer with the campaign) the solution will always have a bottleneck at the provider level. Hope that made sense. I would also agree that the future of print providers is crossing over into becoming full-fledged marketing firms and the competition will continue to be fierce. Again, my personal opinion is the technology will separate the men from the boys, but then when the dust settles it will come down to the relationship of the provider and their users.

[Karen R. Walker]

It was rather recent when I was asking the very same question as the OP -- which do I choose?

My story's a little different, though, because I was crossing over from a similar system (BlueTree, for those who are familiar.) Already, I had some knowledge of what I needed, and a lot of knowledge of what I did not want. BlueTree was unresponsive and uninspired, and their support system was harder to get hold of than a greased up pig. This is ultimately where they failed, causing me to find a whole new system (mid-campaign, mind you.)

I was given a demo of both products (and a third that shall go unmentioned.) MindFire was the earlier demo, so I'll start with my impressions. MindFire, when I was watching the demo, seemed like a perfectly fine company and tool. In fact, compared to what I had been using, MindFire was above and beyond. I liked the layout, felt the system was rather intuitive, and believe (even now) that the features are fantastic.

The later demo was, of course, EasyPURL. When comparing the systems, I found the functionality to be fairly similar. I knew by then that both systems would likely do what I needed them to do. EasyPURL has a fantastic reporting dashboard, lots of hidden functionality, and gave me a great impression as to what would be needed when creating a campaign. Again, another system with fantastic features, making the decision very difficult for me.

Which, of course, brings me to the crux of this post: The reason I chose EasyPURL over MindFire was the immense amount of support offered to me, my clients, my bosses, my neighbors with the PURL postcard (and so on...) From second-one, I have had the dedicated EasyPURL support staff urging me and encouraging me.

Proof-positive that support can make all the difference. While I can't speak tons for the support from MindFire, I can say that EasyPURL has done a fantastic job with the challenges I brought to the table. With their help, I was able to move (and improve) a campaign while it was live and in use, despite the fact that it was formatted completely different from what they were used to.

EasyPURL's support team gladly bent over backwards for me, creating specialized coding that allowed me to save 50,000 imprinted postcards from becoming trash, and saving me from having to have another 50,000 postcards printed with new PURLs.

On top of all of that, EasyPURL offers two hours of co-pilot time, which gives me a greater sense of confidence; If I do something wrong, EasyPURL will have my back.

In the end, I cannot help but stress that support is probably one of the most important features a system can incorporate. Without a dedicated staff for support, it's so easy to slip through the cracks and become a frustrated client.

EasyPURL was there for me, and in the end, that was what made the choice easy(purl) for me!

[Ryan Kirk]

I'd vote in favor of MindFire on this one. I've been with them for a couple of years, and I think they're a good company with good people, and I've always received excellent support. As a professional web developer, I'm tearing my hair out working within the constraints of their product (fortunately the company I work at doesn't do very much cross-media work). MindFire creates invalid markup, throws the browsers into quirks mode, inserts tables, iframes, and spacer gifs, and reformats your code in an undesirable way. But I'm hanging on because they've promised me this will all be fixed with the September release, and I believe them. It may be that all the above things don't bother you, and if all you use is the point and click interface, they probably won't. It just depends on your knowledge level and what you are trying to do. Just be aware that you'll have difficulty trying to do anything cutting-edge, and forget about any of but the most basic CSS -- you're in table hell (until the September release). I will say that for the non-techie, the interface is pretty user-friendly.

I did check into EasyPURL which looked and sounded more promising (direct FTP access being the huge, huge benefit), but for the low volume my company does, it made sense to stick with MindFire's lower pricing. As long as the above issues are fixed, I'll be a happy camper.

[Ryan Lou]

This is a good discussion on what a multi-channel provider should give you.

I am Marketing Manager at L2, Inc. ( http://www.L2soft.com ) and I think you should have a look at what our product, Fuse, can do for you.

Working with us is a very different process simply because the way we operate is that 'we make money when you make money'.

What you can do with Mindfire and EasyPURL is all good, but we've found that what our customers need is a solution that can help them realize all the much talked about benefits that personalization and multi-channel promises (we know many have been burnt by the high costs and low ROI some products give)

So what we've got is a platform that makes creating complex applications really simple. Trust me, I'm not a programmer and I've been building highly personalized marketing campaigns like these:

Mad Marketing Application (Build your own poster) at http://madmarketing.L2soft.com

Test Drive 1:1 campaigns (Uses Geolocating and Google Maps): http://www.1to1campaigns.com

(Just imagine what a web developer like Ryan Kirk can do with the platform!)

Our key differentiator: Is that we provide all the channels you need: Personalized Direct Mail, VDP, Personalized Email, Personalized URLs, Data collection sites, SMS all in one platform, served from your internet browser! No moving data list from one server to another!

What's more each of these channels are highly integrated with each other for multi-touch campaigns.

This means you can:

1) Send someone to a URL (e.g. http://madmarketing.L2soft.com) from a google ad
2) Immediately take them to a personalized website (with their first and last name)
3) Schedule an email to go out to them to tell them of an additional offer
4) Send a print file to your printer to send to selected individuals (you can batch jobs for cost-savings)
5) Track everything they did on your site and use that to gauge response for follow-up messaging
6) Create a system for lead scoring (single out which leads responded most)
7) Immediately notify your sales staff to contact the lead after a trigger event.

Never mind the features, what we have is a program that helps you automate this entire process!

Feel free to contact me personally if you have a specific question. We also have a new facebook group over at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=92797656494 where you can network with cross media experts.

Twitter: www.twitter.com/ryanlou
Email: [e-mail]

Thanks for the opportunity to share.

Ryan Lou

[Lisa Parish]

I know MindFire was due to release an update in September and Easypurl has recently released it's 4.0 version. Does anyone have any additional feedback to post?
Karen, have you continued to have success with Easypurl?
Ryan, are you happy with the new release from MindFire?

[Karen R. Walker]

Lisa,

I have had amazingly continual success with EasyPURL as a product and a vendor. If you're looking for specifics, feel free to drop me a message.

Needless to say, EasyPURL has consistently been stellar with support and always makes me feel as if I'm their only customer, with their personal support and vast knowledge base. The rollout of 4.0 added some features that make the experience that much easier, and the new "support" tab and its functions are out of this world!

Lisa Parish said:

I know MindFire was due to release an update in September and Easypurl has recently released it's 4.0 version. Does anyone have any additional feedback to post?
Karen, have you continued to have success with Easypurl? Ryan, are you happy with the new release from MindFire?

[Peter Wann]

Thanks to all of you for keeping this post going. I initially started this post when I was exploring which solution I should pick as we launched our new marketing company Measurable Marketing www.measurablemarketingnow.com. I did review Easypurl and L2 Fuse. I ended up picking Mindfire and have launched several campaigns. I would agree with Ryan that their system is maddening sometimes. I have spent hours trying to solve crazy issues that the Mindfire system generates. The Mindfire tech support folks are very supportive and helpful in solving these issues.

The new release is called MarketFire. From the demo's I have seen it looks more like a straight CMS system. I hope they have solved all the quirky problems. They are rolling us over in Nov and Dec.

For the price you pay you not only get the technical training, but you get a wealth of Sales and Marketing Training and support. The library of case study's, white papers, and presentation templates is substantial. There are monthly sales training calls that highlight best practices. It has definitely helped me in growing our business. I am excited about the new release and can't wait to see what the new features have to offer.