Thanks StartupDigest for the nod last week when you included us in your Email Mafia as “The Upstart” -http://thestartupdigest.com/2010/07/28/email-mafia-paypal-mafia-email/.

We like the scrappy nature of the name that conjures up an image of a fighter in the ring with new moves and something to prove. We are that company, and as part of those new moves look for more blog posts, collateral, and market coverage on how our Horizon solution is changing the game of email from quantity to quality.

What isn’t included in this choice piece of media meat is that we are also serious technologists, entrepreneurs, marketeers, and business developers. We have created, bought, sold, marketed, developed strategy for, and implemented some amazing technological solutions. We have also brought on a cadre of experienced technology and media investors to compliment our growth in premium online content, community, and marketplace clients.

What does all this mean for you? First, stay in contact with our blog, newsletter, twitter, or smoke signals to hear what the “The Upstart” does next. Second, we promise to beat any existing contract you have with an email service provider to deliver your mass and transactional emails to your community.

Yep, you read that right. We will provide you an email solution which will match or exceed your current technology at a better price. If we can’t, we’ll post on our blog who beat us and why. We’re that confident.

What’s the catch? Zilch. We know our solution will outperform what you have. We just ask you to speak with us, try it out, and come on board without all the flashy marketing promotions and collateral. As a savvy business person yourself, we suspect you’ll prefer performance, reliability, and reducing that ESP line item much more than a video, animal mascot, or folders of collateral on your shelf.

Now we believe we’ll always compete well with any email provider out there, but we can’t guarantee this forever (our investors might start asking questions). So take a break from your vacation quarter and give us a call to find out more and try out the system. There’s nothing like starting off Q4 with a cost reduction of up to 50% and a performance increase to boot.

Cheers,
The Upstart

Do you send an authentication email AND a welcome email or are they one and the same?

Do you send an email to a new user that hasn’t signed in again for a month?

Does your reset password email just contain a single link? Your touchpoints with your users are the best chance to tell them about your twitter account, or a new promotion. Just because it’s a reset password email doesn’t mean it can’t have extra information. Just make sure the purpose of the email is the main call to action. (And I hope you have a reset password email, not a “here’s your password” email – ALL passwords should be encrypted on ALL sites – lots of people still use the same passwords for all accounts and if you are not encrypting then you are a security flaw for the unfortunate).

I suggest you do a periodic review of your emails, make sure they contain good content, timely content, are easy to read, and engage your users. Think about it from your users point of view, would you like to receive these emails? Finally look at your bounce rates from your emails, you want to aim to keep your bounce rate as low as possible, a high bounce rate from traffic generated by email means something is not right.