Send and Receive Free Emails (NetBanker)

Use Non-Financial Content Areas to Support Your Online Strategies with

Free Email: Send and Receive

Yahoo promotes its email service when
searching on “free email.”

One of the hotter areas online is “free email” Web sites. The largest of the group, Hotmail purchased in January by Microsoft for $400 million, is registering 80,000 new users each day. These Webs allow users to set-up a unique email address, such as yourname@hotmail.com, and then send and receive email directly from that Web site at no charge. Banner ads and other forms of promotion foot the bill for the email services. Users must still purchase Internet access elsewhere.

Building Killer Non-Financial Content

Last month we identified three important guidelines to follow when planning non-financial content for a financial institution Web site.

1. Only build what you can realistically keep
up-to-date.

2. Make it relevant to your audience (think local, local, local!).

3. Use only content that supports a business goal/strategy, otherwise it will get trashed
during the next budget-setting cycle.

This month we add four corollaries:

1. Keep it Simple: Save the fancy bells and whistles for the core banking functions. Non-financial content should be easy to use, easy
to digest, and memorable. Complicated
programs detract from your core online
services: data delivery, customer service, and
loan rates/applications.

2. Outsource Whenever Practical: Save your in-house talent and energy for maintaining and improving core function and customer service. Non-financial content can be purchased cost effectively from content specialists or contracted out to interns or consultants.

3. Display Non-Financial Content Only to Interested Users: Ask users what they want
to see, and use cookies to keep the superfluous material from being shown. For instance, 30-something users shouldn’t see the links to your seniors travel club.

4. Consider Leveraging Non-Financial Content into Standalone Kiosks: With the cost of PC hardware plummeting, the business case for delivering Web services over kiosks is improving. Non-financial content could attract users to your kiosk. For example, imagine a kiosk located in the local mall adorned with signage inviting passerbys to check out the four-day weather forecast. You could build bridges from non-financial content to your banking services.

Users usually have free email bundled with their Internet service, so why would anyone subject themselves to numerous advertising pitches in order to use free email at these sites?

Email Address for Life: No matter where you work, or where you purchase Internet access, your HotMail email address stays with you.
Better/Disguised Email Address: Many users would prefer not to disclose their employer, university or ISP within their email address. Email addresses such as anyname@hotmail.com meet that need.
Privacy: Users accessing the Internet from their company’s machines can use the email services at HotMail to keep their email off the corporate servers where it could potentially be read.
Simplicity: During the past two weeks I visited with two new Web users who were successfully using the Web but were frustrated because they couldn’t use services that required an email address. As far as these users were concerned, they didn’t have an email address. Of course, they did have one, they just didn’t know how to use it. Heavily promoted free email services with simple, intuitive user interfaces can snag new users before they learn how to use the email in their browsers.
Public Terminal Users. The growing number of users accessing the Web from Internet cafes, Kinko’s, and other public venues, need email.
Travelers. Travelers accessing the Internet from a variety of places may find a central Web-based site the most convenient method of staying on top of their email.

Financial institutions could offer “advertising free” email on their Webs. Free email could be a standalone function designed to draw traffic, or it could be partitioned off within your online banking service, augmenting the standard “email the bank” function. Either way, users would register, select an email identity and password, then send and receive email directly from your site. For maximum appeal, select a generic domain name such as yourtown.net. Be sure to incorporate anti-spam functions such as a limit on the number of recipients for each email message.

A number of licensing sources are available for the email software. The largest providers are listed in the table to the left, others are available on Yahoo! www.yahoo.com/Business_and_Economy/Companies/Internet_Services/Email_Providers/Free_Email/ .

and www.yahoo.com/Business_and_Economy/Companies/Internet_Services/Email_Providers/ .