Does anyone use Constant Contact or Mail Chimp (or another program) for email creation and sending? Does it link in any way with Vin65? Is there anyone who is loving their email system that would be kind enough to talk to me about it?
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We use Campaign Monitor for marketing emails (MailChimp is good too, but somewhat omnivorous when it comes to your contacts and segments).
For all intents and purposes, there are no current integrations with third-party EMS’s. We built one that does a one-way push sync to Campaign Monitor from List Builder, but you are going to find the current APIs aren’t really receptive to anything coming back.
Vin65 is not an EMS and so their tools will always lag behind major EMS players. I personally would like to see them open up and create integrations or better facilitate integrations because there are a lot of important tools out of there that can make a significant impact on your email marketing.
BUT (and here’s my rallying cry), we need more Vin65 customers to spend less time demanding things like refund enhancements and more time pushing for technology that helps us sell wine in modern ways.
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Good info; I would like to ask to define EMS; in your case is defined as Email Marketing Service/System…? I thought of many other acronyms it would have fit into 
It would probably be advantageous to push to integrate…
I personally feel that while I do agree with you, if that is the case and Vin65 is being slowed down due to more requests for features, there may be more of a fundamental issue to look into for them.
Vertical Integration maybe … What capability would Vin65 have to entice outside of a ‘niche with wine’? Would utilizing Constant Contact be an effective model for customers and Vin65 business? Or is their in-house developed/open source modified/whatever List Builder and email marketing be sufficient? What about something like Microsoft Flow, Microsoft PowerBI, Google Email Mgr, Dynamics, SalesForce, etc…etc… (Microsoft is definitely in the forefront with the foundation they have made and their Beta program shows the large extent of their expansion coming.
What about the data Constant Contact has that would be valuable for Vin65 platform to receive, is Constant Contact going to let us share that data back to Vin65 and if external data is there, would Vin65 (speaking years out) be accommodating to that ability, such as via API.
Vertical Integration in my opinion is different in IT, than it is elsewhere. Silicon Valley calls it Full Stack Integration which I think is more specific to IT as the realization of providing a service instantly through the Internet, with little expense, is a reality.
INSTANT GRATIFICATION & CONSUMERIZATION OF BASE-IT = Our next 5,10,50? Years of technology…
If we cant start making these things happen feasibly, at some point it will fall apart; taking the reins on it sooner will expand a niche
Joe Miller
Hearst Ranch Winery
SLO, California
TLDR?
Related Reading: FruITion, by Chris Potts https://goo.gl/pLFU3y If someone wants to be ahead of it, such as a C-Class exec, they should obtain all 3 of Chris’ books.
Here’s the solution I would propose. Vin65 should continue offering their basic email tools to their basic level of Vin65 accounts. For Plus or Enterprise clients, they should offer enhanced tools and APIs at a higher fee.
Vin65 is already using the SendGrid email backbone, the easiest thing for them would be to integrate with SendGrid’s marketing suite.
https://sendgrid.com/use-cases/email-marketing/
There they can build on top of the SendGrid email API and the contact API to make it fairly seamless and offer clients much better tools without a ton of work and ongoing development on their end.
I think that would be a good beta test to see how, or if, they could expand upon their APIs and create a third-party integration ecosystem that provides value and is easy to maintain.
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In this context it’s Enterprise Management System. Examples would be SalesForce, Netsuite, Microsoft Dynamics, etc.
I would personally LOVE SalesForce integration.
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Agree completely.
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn659847.aspx as there are a lot of new capability in the dawning.