Dr. Weil.com Promotes Healthy Living Using Email Marketing Solutions From Sparklist, Sending 15 Million Emails Per Month; Bounce Rates Drop 70 Percent With Sparklist
EMERYVILLE, Calif.—Aug. 1, 2006—Sparklist, a subsidiary of J.L. Halsey (OTCBB:JLHY) and a leading provider of hosted, self-service email marketing solutions for small businesses, today announced that the Dr. Weil website, run by Weil Lifestyle, sends approximately 15 million emails per month using Sparklist. Weil Lifestyle is the company begun by world-renowned author and physician Dr. Andrew Weil who is the founder of the field of integrative medicine. The company's email communications include a Daily Tip, a weekly bulletin, and a weekly newsletter. These email newsletters help to educate people about the benefits of integrative medicine, a field which espouses a more holistic approach to health and healing.
In terms of their email communications, Pamela Lynch, Operations Manager for Weil Lifestyle, states, "We figured out right away that we needed a better solution -- like Sparklist. Our members' needs come first, and we required an application that would be easy to use and that was reliable." Lynch continues, "Quick implementation and ongoing reliability were also important because we send out a lot of email every month. We also wanted an email provider that would be responsive to our needs and could meet our very specific requests to build out our email program."
Weil Lifestyle also saw an improvement in the validity of their opt-in subscriber email addresses after they began using Sparklist. In terms of bounce rates, the difference between their previous email vendor and Sparklist was significant. Before Sparklist, Weil Lifestyle was sending to a number of addresses that its former email vendor did not flag as invalid, nor alert the Company to remove. According to Weil Lifestyle, after signing-up with Sparklist, bounce rates were 70% lower.
"We also like all of the different features that Sparklist has," adds Lynch. "The built-in deliverability tool, EmailAdvisor, lets us see where there are delivery problems. We run it 2-3 times a month to see how our email renders when it gets to the inbox. EmailAdvisor tests against 40 or more ISPs and lets us know which ones are experiencing delays."
"One of the main benefits of Sparklist is that it's very user friendly," says Jason Han, Director of Sales Operations, Sparklist. "Customers can easily set-up and control various aspects of their email marketing campaigns. It's easy for in-house developers at customer sites too who want to create emails based on templates and load them for quick, efficient delivery. Customer service teams have also successfully used Sparklist to respond to user inquiries and requests, and administrators find its reporting very straightforward and easy to navigate. We also pride ourselves on being open to quite a few special requests — our team is very capable of implementing our customers' unique technical requirements."
In the future, Weil Lifestyle plans to do more targeted email campaigns, including incorporating more dynamic content and other condition-specific campaigns. The Company has also begun utilizing Sparklist's split-testing capabilities to assess different campaigns and content before sending. Weil Lifestyle has recently launched some other initiatives to build its lists and has already started realizing significant results.
One new such aspect of Weil Lifestyle's email marketing is purchase tracking. By tracking what sites and pages its visitors view and what purchases they make, Weil Lifestyle will learn about its visitors' interests and preferences and can better provide its members with the content and the products they're looking for.
Also, Weil Lifestyle can track how these visitors came to the Weil website, whether they are making purchases at the e-commerce site, Vitamin Advisor, or the Healthy Aging site. This new information will give Weil Lifestyle a much better assessment of the ROI of its email marketing and enable the company to further refine its already highly successful customer communications and product offerings related to health and integrative medicine.
The field of integrative medicine seeks to combine the best practices of both conventional and alternative medical disciplines and focuses on health and healing rather than disease and treatment. Its founder, Dr. Weil, is a Harvard-trained physician and the author of several best-selling books. In addition to the website (www.drweil.com), Dr. Weil also founded the Weil Foundation which seeks to further the practice of integrative medicine through training and education initiatives. As a more holistic approach to health and medicine, the field has made tremendous impact on how people view health and healing, and Dr. Weil, through both his website and foundation, has devoted his life to supporting and furthering its ideals. He devotes 100% of the after-tax profits from his website and his Lifestyle products to fund the Weil Foundation.
The parent company, Weil Lifestyle LLC, is the company behind both the website and the foundation and also licenses Dr. Weil products.
About Sparklist
One of the largest email list hosting services in the world, Sparklist serves over 1,000 businesses in widely diverse industries and has an impressive client list, sending millions of opt-in email messages every month. The success of Sparklist is based on the power and scalability of its hosting packages, the company's expertise in email marketing, and the cutting-edge technology behind the solution. Serving small to medium-sized businesses with highly sophisticated email marketing programs, Sparklist promotes the highest standards of opt-in email marketing best practices through its hosting service which is unrivalled in terms of reliability, deliverability, speed and capacity. Sparklist is a subsidiary of the J.L. Halsey Corporation (OTCBB:JLHY), along with Lyris Technologies and EmailLabs. For more information, go to http://www.sparklist.com.
