Zoho Campaigns App Aids Email Marketing Initiatives

There’s a new addition to the Zoho suite of applications: The cloud-based competitor to the likes of Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) Docs and the rest of the standard Google Apps suite is entering the email marketing application space with the launch of Zoho Campaigns.

Introduced at the CRM Evolution Conference, Zoho Campaigns was designed for tight integration with CRM while also providing email and social media marketing functionality. Since Zoho sells through a network of resellers, there are two potential opportunities here for the channel — adding this new application to the resale of Zoho applications and using it themselves to conduct their own email marketing campaigns.

End users are able to send mass emails, create templates with an easy-to-use editor, collect information and get detailed reports and analytics that also tie into Google Analytics, and create a variety of different types of campaigns.

Zoho is also hoping to solve what it calls a “real pain” point. Keeping contact lists in sync between CRM and email marketing apps is a challenge, the company noted, but Zoho CRM and Zoho Campaigns help to alleviate that pain with easy-to-manage contact lists. Naturally, both being Zoho apps, there is tight integration between the two.

Email is only the first step to any marketing campaign in this fast-moving social media world, though. Zoho Campaigns has been outfitted with social media features that integrate with popular social media sites including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Users can deploy and manage social media campaigns and perform tasks such as schedule posts to various social media sites, which isn’t exactly a new feature (consumer social media management tools have been providing this for some time), but it also helps to manage Facebook page campaigns within the app.

The good news for end user customers without a lot of contacts is that Zoho Campaigns is available as a free edition that allows them to send up to 2,500 emails per month for 500 contacts. Monthly subscription and pay-per-use models are also available, with structured pricing available based on number of emails and number of contacts.