What is part Nimble.com, part Constant Contact, part Web site authoring tool, part SurveyMonkey, part wiki all rolled into one? The answer is a new service called GreenRope, available now.
This is a Swiss Army Knife of the Web. There are more tools here than you can possibly review in a short article, and the idea is to put in one place everything you need to get started online.
To get started, there are an impressive number of imports for your contacts, including Yahoo, Gmail. Salesforce.com and CSV uploads. It had trouble importing more than my 5,000 contacts, however. Once you have uploaded your contacts, you can group them, email them, and collect information on them such as their location or gender to refine your marketing and messaging.
Everything is done within a browser, with copious tabs and menus that for the most part segregates the various functions and makes it easy to find a particular feature.
Internet entrepreneur Lars Helgeson, who is also the creator of the popular Cooler Email system, developed GreenRope. It enters a very crowded market with Socialcast, Socialtext, Yammer and others. But it has an interesting focus, to handle marketing and other communications functions, and is worth a closer look.
If you have a small business and aren’t familiar with the tools mentioned in our lead, then it is worth a try to see if you can use GreenRope to organize your business and improve your outbound marketing efforts and start collaborating with your colleagues. If you are already using Constant Contact or some other email list manager or Salesforce to handle your sales team and customers, then the cost of switching to GreenRope might be onerous.
There are lots of instructional video how-tos to help you get started and focus your energies. The basic starter plan is $10 per month that can handle up to 250 contacts and an unlimited number of users. There are other more capable plans that can cost up to $100 per month, as well as private white-label versions for your business.
