Early this week, I was at Hostingcon 2010. This is the hosting industry’s annual conference. This years attendance was up considerably and the conference featured several new speakers, including yours truly. Due to meetings and networking, I did not catch too many sessions, but three companies really stood out this year: SendGrid, cPanel, and ExactTarget. In case you missed it, here’s the scoop.

SendGrid

I am still checking into SendGrid and what they have to offer, but in short, they provide an easy way to send email from your web applications. Instead of using your server to send email, you can point your code to their SMTP servers. As a result, email flows out from them instead of you. What’s the benefit? They manage your sender reputation by participating in programs such as ReturnPath, handling DKIM, SPF and other email items that impact delivery rates.

When Denise Hulce, Sendgrid’s VP of Sales, describe the solution to me, I saw many immediate benefits if it works as advertised. I advocate splitting your promotional emails from your transactional ones. Say you have a busy e-commerce store with a popular recommend to a friend, feedback or forum. These emails could be routed through your own server while you could use SendGrid to deliver items like order confirmations, shipping notices, or account updates. Given SendGrid’s pricing, you could easily segment your emails even further with specific SendGrid queues for each class of email.

cPanel

Between sessions, networking events and VIP parties, I managed to catch up with an old friend, Mario Rodriguez. I first met Mario nearly a decade ago when Robert Marsh was buying Cobalt Raq servers by the truck load. Now Mario is the Strategic Partner Manager at cPanel. We’ve always been reluctant to support cPanel here because historically, there have been some quality control and security issues. However, in the past couple of years, we’ve seen considerable improvement in their product. Mario says that they are 100% behind improving the quality of the product and have hired dozens of new developers, put in place code verification procedures, and made other advances in quality assurance.

This is good news for our cPanel clients. I find many small business owners simply use the control panel given to them by their server providers. With this increased focus on quality, which we’ve seen the results of in our own operations, we will be increasing our involvement with cPanel.

ExactTarget

Joel Book presented some amazing results from ExactTarget’s marketing campaigns. By leveraging social media, text messaging and impulse decision making, his company helped Scott’s lawn care company really improve their sales. While Joel presented many great case studies, such as SkyMall improving shopping cart abandonment by 33%, the key theme was integration, persistence and timing.

For example, Pier 1 needed a mailing list. So they struck a deal with Barnes and Nobel’s campus division to provide a free giveaway of a reading chair. To sign up, you had to send a text message containing your email address to Pier 1. As a result, Pier 1 developed a targeted email list for future mailing campaigns. Being able to instantly capture the right demographics email proved very powerful and they soon had a list of 100,000’s of college students — Pier 1’s primary target demographic.

Other examples included integrating social media, sending appropriate follow-up emails and carefully designing the layout of the emails and landing pages. When you get all of these elements right, email marketing can deliver very high ROI.

Oh Yeah, My Talk

I gave a presentation on Outsourcing IT Management and was asked some good questions at the end. I just wish people were brave enough to ask them in front of the group as everyone could benefit by the discussion. Next time, I think I will include a few more hard numbers about success stories from our clients, but I did not want it to be a sales pitch. All of the Hostingcon attendees were well aware that too many speakers don’t know how to give an educational presentation without pitching.