Looking to allow organizations and e-commerce companies to offer customized messages to users, Web-based ASP Atomz today announced the launch of Atomz Alert, an online application designed to deliver e-mail content alerts to Web site visitors.
Atomz Alerts, is “the next step in our suite,” Steve Kusmer Atomz CEO told ASPnews and is aimed at marketing, media and customer support organizations. (That product line also includes Publish, Search and Promote.)
The service allows customers to leverage online content and deliver personalized messages to users through an opt-in basis. Early on in the days of dotcom euphoria, this type of approach had been called “push technology” as it allows content providers to push information when and how users want it.
“It allows subscribers to customize exactly what information they want to receive and when, providing a personalized channel of content that’s important to them,” Kusmer said. “With Atomz Alert, companies can disseminate information rapidly, build brand loyalty, improve customer satisfaction and retention and drive traffic and incremental revenue through their Web sites.” For example, users of an employment sites, could have alerts sent when a job is posted with specific user-defined keywords.
While subscribing to Atomz Search is not required to use Alert, the underlying content mining technology driving the new service is based on Search, Seth Brenzel, director of marketing, said.
Brenzel said there are also benefits to using Alert with Atomz Publish (the company’s content management system) such as the capability to send an entire Web page or the portion of the page. However, he added that the new service does work with other software and other CMS products. Atomz is not currently shipping a software developers kit (SDK) or application programming interface (API), but Brenzel told ASPnews that the company is considering making them available.
The browser-based service offers the following features, according to Atomz:
- Customizable administrative console for managing content alerts.
- Subscriber center for managing alert subscriptions.
- The capability to send Alerts as as either HTML or text.
- Capacity to handle hundreds of thousands of customized e-mail alerts per day.
- Capability to send weekly digest or instant alerts.
Atomz Alert, the company hopes, will open new doors for the company while also providing a natural add-on service for existing customers.
“The service will be targeted first to our installed based. but it also offers different entry points and new people to call,” Kusmer told ASPnews. For example, the new service will extend Atomz reach to included marketing departments looking to driving repeat business.
In positioning the Atomz product line, Kusmer points to the success of the two software industry giants as guides. He said the company wants to continually tap its installed based as Microsoft does with its Office suite products. He added that company also wants to enjoy brand recognition in the Web-based software industry similar to what the largest graphics independent software vendors (ISV) has done. “We want to be the Net-native Adobe.”
Atomz Alert pricing begins at $25,000 for the first year, and $15,000 for subsequent years. That price includes implementation for one Web site, the configuration of a subscriber database and initial content subscriber interface and training for Web site administrators.
While there is no fixed price list per se for users of multiple Atomz products, Kusmer said, the company will offer discounts on a case-by-case basis.
Atomz is listed by ASPnews as a Top 20 Service Provider.
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