According to a special report prepared by Youngstown's
via680 on the state of email communications, business professionals send and receive 112 emails a day, on average, but 42 percent of them are ignored, and 50 percent are misunderstood.
“Email has evolved very little over 20 plus years from being a one-way delivery of text,” says Brad Gant, via680’s vice president of marketing. “When you send out an email, you wonder: Did they get it? Did they view it? Did they understand it? And are they working on it?”
To address these questions and combat the high level of ignored and misunderstood emails, via 680 developed
Ving, a new web-hosted email service that, the company says, is “transforming email from being a one-way delivery of text to a dynamic two-way exchange of information.”
According to the company's website, the software application enables users to “create, distribute and track attention-grabbing, multi-media messages, including videos, documents, audio files, pictures and surveys.” These communications “packages” can then be sent through email, social media or text messaging.
The claim that Ving is “transforming email” is a bold assertion, however, and Gant acknowledges that other email providers, like Constant Contact and iContact, also enable users to deliver videos, photos and surveys and receive responses to them.
“It's true that some email providers let you send out a survey and an html email, and others let you attach videos and photos,” he says. “But they can’t bundle together all the elements of a multi-media message, including videos, documents, audio, pictures and questionnaires, and send them all out at one time, which you can do with Ving.”
Another advantage Ving offers, according to Gant, is the ability to track individual recipients’ interaction with each different element at a “granular level.” “I can see who opened each element and at what time,” he explains. "Other email services, like ConstantContact for example, only offer aggregate data about open rates, bounces, click-throughs and responses."
The two biggest users of Ving are in the fields of human resources and education. “Human resource and C-level professionals are turning to Ving to improve internal communications, automate compliance tracking and enhance new-employee orientation,” Gant reports. “Educators are using it to enhance learning in the classroom, create media-rich assignments, communicate with parents, recruit students and improve internal communications.”
Via680 is a portfolio company of the
Youngstown Business Incubator. Established in 2010 with four employees, it currently has 12. It started with nine clients and now has 1,265, the largest of which is Northern Illinois University.
Source: Brad Gant, via680
Writer: Lynne Meyer