I am excited to announce the release of Echo 2.0.  A New Year and a major update to our on-demand email, mobile and social marketing platform with plenty of useful email marketing features.   Here’s my pick of 5 changes I’d been waiting for the most. You don’t have to agree with me and come up with your own list. We might even throw a short poll about which feature you find to be the most useful one and win a prize.

1. Easy to use and navigate: We re-decorated our entire online platform. We call it Echo, by the way. That last year’s fashion is all gone in favor of bright colors, large buttons, and eye-friendly fonts. My personal favorite in this category is greatly improved site navigation: now I can jump to any page on the site with pretty much one click.

2. Email editor for designers and those of us who are not there just yet: we built a sparkling and shiny drag-and-drop editor that can be described in three words:

• Fun: You can assemble your email elements just like you would create a castle with Lego blocks
• Stylish: Using your imagination and our starter templates, you can design stunning emails just like you would create drawings in a Crayola factory
• Friendly: We have created our editor to to be email client friendly, which means that it will only create elements that can be displayed correctly in all email clients. This way you should not be very concerned with extensively testing how your email displays in various browsers and email clients. We let our editor do all the hard work

3. Design Emails from scratch: express yourself with our email design templates. We created a number of email layouts for you to paint and fill with images and text.

4. A Guiding light: Our new “to-dos” widget is a smart, self learning tool that will create helpful suggestions and to-dos to guide our users based on the actions they perform. From the very first time a user logs in to when they have launched a successful campaign the “to-do” widget attempts to help the user navigate to the next step they need to take

5. Marketing ROI measurement and segmentation: Our powerful tracking and reporting tool has a new look to help easily see how your marketing campaign has performed. Segmentation of your audience based on their preference and exporting segments of contact information has improved tremendously.

Some upcoming improvements in the coming months include a seamless email and social marketing experience, tracking social marketing, a better way to organize and track your prospects and customers and most importantly many more reports. Stay tuned…

Many experts predict that 2011 is the year US economy improves.  We like your marketing efforts to take advantage and increase your revenue. Our resolution this year is to continue to improve Echo to help you achieve your marketing goals.