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TemplateZone Software Reviews

Technology Tools - High Impact eMail

Email With Clout

by Ben E. Brady
The Fog Horn Review

You're busily typing along composing a new email in Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, and ACT! to send a message to your customers and friends regarding a new product you have just launched and suddenly it occurs to you... "This email is BO- R-I-N-G!" But what on earth can you do about it. Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, and ACT! provide very limited capability with regard to 'dressing up' an email. Sure you can use one of the stationery templates but what if you want to use graphics and other elements to spruce up your messages? Well, fear not, the answer to your blah email is at hand. TemplateZone, located in Concord Massachusetts, is the creator of a program called High Impact eMail and let me tell you, once you start using it you will never compose an email in Outlook again! This product is so cool! Using colorful, customizable templates, High Impact eMail provides a seamless interface to Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, and ACT! that allows you to send exciting and impactful email to your recipients. The first time I used it I fell in love with it.

How does it work?

Actually pretty darn quick! All you do is run the program (you can put a convenient icon on your desktop) and you are immediately presented with an easy to use catalog where you can preview the various email template layouts. All you do to compose your email is to double click on the template you like and then follow the prompts to fill in your content. That's it!

Installing the program.

High Impact eMail can be purchased from TemplateZone for $99.95, once you have completed the download you can launch the install program, which runs very quickly. The program comes with hundreds of great looking templates and you also have the option to purchase additional templates targeted for specific types of email. Once you run the install, you will be presented with a dialog box for entering some information that will be used for your email 'business card', name, address, etc., as well as any links to graphics you might like to use such as a company logo or a digital photo. When you have completed the entry of the information you are ready to go.

Decisions, decisions...

Perhaps the hardest aspect for me in using the product was actually choosing a template to use. There are so many nice ones! They are all so colorful and exciting it took me a while to pick one that suited my message. There are templates for all kinds of emails... From advertising a product to quotable quotes to customizable email resumes and great looking memos. You can also purchase additional email template packs for all kinds of other subjects and layouts and the installation of these template packs are very quick and easy. You simply run the installation program and they are immediately extracted and made available to the program.

Image Is Everything!

One of the really cool features of High Impact eMail is the ability to use images in your emails. KMT Software has actually perfected the use of images in email by providing special 'placeholders' in each of the templates to correctly reference the images you would like to use. How many times have you received an email with an image in it that doesn't show up? With High Impact eMail this problem is solved because the program automatically provides the correct image reference tags. Now your customers can read your emails with virtually any email client with the images intact. You even have the ability to use a graphical signature in your email using your own handwriting (the program doesn't provide the ability to scan your signature, you must do that on your own).

Excellent Support

TemplateZone provides excellent support for their product and I have found dealing with their personnel to be very pleasurable. The help file for the product is well written and contains easy to understand instructions for using High Impact eMail, as well as some nifty tips to enable you to get the most out of any email campaign.

Definitely a 10!

High Impact eMail is probably one of the coolest (and easiest) pieces of software I have reviewed in quite some time. I heartily recommend it to anyone that wants to create a positive and compelling image for their email correspondence, whether it be for commercial or personal use. A downloadable trial version with a limited number of templates is available from www.kmt.com and I would urge you to give it a try. It's time to put an end to B-O-R-I-N-G emails!

Ben E. Brady is Managing Owner of Brady & Associates, LLC in Dinuba, the "No Tech" capital of CA, where he shares an office with his wife and business partner Rita. Ben is author of the popular ClearICE Report Utility for BlackICE and ClearZone Report Utility for ZoneAlarm. His hobbies are guitar, singing, songwriting, film and digital photography and, of course, computers. He can be reached at bbrady@iname.com.

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Technology Tools - High Impact eMail

Sales & Marketing Magazine
March/April 2004 issue

Best Software, Scottsdale, AZ., recently formed a partnership with KMT Software that allows it to offer High Impact eMail for ACT!, one of 170 products offered through the ACT! Add-on Partner Program. Designed to enhance the current e-mail marketing tools within ACT!, High Impact eMail provides easy-to-use tools for crafting graphical, HTML-based emails to individuals, as well as to current and prospective customers.

High Impact eMail for ACT! offers a collection of more than 400 professionally designed HTML e-mail templates that work with ACT! 6.0 e-mail, as well as Microsoft Outlook for organizations using both solutions. Users with High Impact eMail and ACT! 6.0 can use ACT!'s mail merge feature to send personalized HTML emails to ACT! contacts or lists using a wizard, without using the generic blind carbon copy field.

While e-mails composed with High Impact eMail are rich in color and design, their file size is minimized to an average size of 3-5Kb because all of the images are referenced, not attached or embedded into the HTML. Customers also can use High Impact's ReadyShare feature to upload images to the Web and create compatible, graphical e-mail.

Best Software is currently offering High Impact eMail for $99.95, including free newsletter templates and a marketing eBook valued at $60. For new users, there is also a bundle of ACT! 6.0 for 2004 and High Impact eMail for $254.90.

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OfficeReady Pro

From: The Bridge-Journal of the Memphis PC User's Group
Volume 19 Number 11 Nov - Dec 2003

Templates. Lots of them. Templates for Word. Templates for Excel. Templates for PowerPoint. We've been talking about templates at our monthly meetings.

OfficeReady Pro is a complete package that includes a tidy interface called the Template Browser and hundreds of useful templates for three of Microsoft Office's  most popular programs. The interface serves to organize your templates by program and category and lets you preview a template before opening it.

Some of the reasons users are interested in templates is because someone has taken the time to build in formulas or macros that are beyond our skill level or someone has given a professional look to a document or form. There's also the fairly universal need to just save time. And, while Office  has gotten easier to use, it has also grown more complex. The basic need for a good set of templates remains.

Show me the . . .

The full listing of templates is available at TemplateZone. Have a look, in this review I am only scratching the surface. Under Word  you get 27 business forms, 15 choices for a fax cover sheet, 13 variants of a memo, five that can be used to manage a project and 13 templates that can be classified as marketing material.

These are not cheesy documents. There are more for the family and home, like labels and cards. You get resume templates and certificate blanks. I am just getting started on the many templates available for Word.

Excel  has 26 for personal finance: a 401K planner, a sheet for balloon loans, buy or lease decisions, a capital gains and losses calculator, four retirement worksheets and a financial calculator. There are even more for office use.

The PowerPoint  templates consist of lots and lots of themes and backgrounds for your slide presentations. Yes, I have purchased sets of justPowerPoint templates for more then the cost of OfficeReady Pro.

And, the PowerPoint  templates have sample slides representing most of the standard slide configurations, so it goes beyond just a pretty background. It should make preparing a new presentation a snap.
I counted nine topic categories with about 100 templates to choose from.
The Find function allows you to search through your all your templates for a particular topic or name. I gave it a try. That's where I learned I had 522 templates.

You wanna make it personal?

When you load OfficeReady Pro  you are asked to enter personal information, e.g., name, address, phone, e-mail, that can replace boilerplate text when you open a template for the first time - a nice touch. OfficeReady   includes a built-in photo editor, watermark insertion utility and pdf conversion utility. Yes, you can use OfficeReady Pro  as your PDF conversion utility.
You can buy additional individual templates or packs of templates from www.templatezone.com to add on to your collection. You download them and they are integrated right into the OfficeReady Pro  interface. There's a button to go look for more templates.

I wanted to know whether I might be able to put other templates, e.g., from Microsoft's Template Gallery (http:// office.microsoft.com/ templates/officeready-pro.aspx) or templates that I use regularly for memos and such. There was no mention in the Help files and because of the way the templates are indexed in OfficeReady Pro, I suspect integrating them would require a major hack. It is something I think the decision-makers at the Template Zone might want to think about for the next version.

Help = manual

I printed the entire Help file. I used it to get oriented to the program's features and now have it bound. It serves as the manual. You probably won't need it, but readers of my reviews know I like manuals.
I bought my first set of templates to go with Ami Pro  many years ago. I still think they are useful and appreciate what it takes to produce a well-designed template. These are first rate.

Printed with permission of Memphis PC User's Group.

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