IXACT Contact Real Estate CRM Celebrates a Record Breaking 2011

Toronto, ON (PRWEB) January 12, 2012

2011 was a year of growth for IXACT Contact ? a year marked by more than a 100% increase in the company?s customer base. This growth has been attributed to many important initiatives IXACT Contact undertook throughout the year including joining with new strategic partners, enhancing the real estate contact management system with innovative and time-saving features, and receiving overwhelmingly positive reviews from top real estate coaches and trainers, such as Gary David Hall, Jennifer Allan, and Chris Leader.

In early 2011, IXACT Contact joined forces with Jennifer Allan-Hagedorn, Real Estate Trainer, Speaker, and Author of Sell with Soul: The New Agent?s Guide to an Extraordinary Career in Real Estate. Ms. Allan-Hagedorn runs frequent webinars that help agents use their contact management system to do a better job in the key areas of conTACT and conTRACT management. Ms. Allan-Hagedorn?s preferred contact management system, and the one she uses in her webinars, is IXACT Contact. Listing and closing Activity Plans created by Ms. Allan-Hagedorn have been made available free of charge to all IXACT Contact subscribers and have received overwhelmingly positive acclaim.

In mid 2011, IXACT Contact joined forces with Hobbs/Herder, one of the leading real estate marketing training firms in North America. IXACT Contact launched a custom version of the real estate marketing software specifically for Hobbs/herder clients. This version of IXACT Contact?s real estate CRM includes five unique Activity Plans and all associated letters, call scripts, PowerKards, and Special Reports, specifically designed by Hobbs/Herder. The partnership has been tremendously successful and will expand in 2012 with the integration of IXACT Contact into Hobbs/Herder?s website offering.

The company also worked with renowned real estate CRM Consultant Gary David Hall to make Mr. Hall?s Trans-Plans available to IXACT Contact customers. Trans-Plans are comprehensive real estate transaction management plans that help REALTORS? ensure that nothing is forgotten or missed in the complex process of buying or selling real estate. Mr. Hall is the author of myriad real estate CRM publications and is known as the ?guru? of real estate database and CRM systems.

Various new features and product enhancements to the system were also released in 2011 including Email Campaign Reporting. IXACT Contact is the only real estate contact management system on the market today to have this feature. The powerful Email Campaign Reporting functionality allows users to view statistics on overall deliverability of email campaigns, including open rate, click-through rate, forward rate, and bounce rate. This feature has eliminated the need for subscribers to pay for two different systems: a real estate CRM system and an email marketing platform. Email Campaign Reporting has greatly propelled the success of the real estate contact manager.

IXACT Contact also released the ability for subscribers to create custom, graphical mass email headers and graphical mass email and letter signatures. This important enhancement to IXACT Contact has allowed subscribers to truly create a brand for themselves by designing and sending out eye-catching and impactful emails and letters.

Another key enhancement to the email marketing side of the real estate CRM has been the ability for customers to insert mail merge fields anywhere within the body of an email or letter, taking personalization to a new level.

?We?re exceptionally proud of our accomplishments as a company in 2011 and what we?ve been able to provide to our customer base. We expect 2012 will be our best year to date and we look forward to continue to provide value to our subscribers and truly exceed their expectations,? said Rich Gaasenbeek, Vice President, Sales and Marketing.

About IXACT Solutions Inc.

IXACT Contact? is an easy-to-use web-based real estate CRM system that helps REALTORS? build lasting relationships with past clients, hot prospects and important referral sources. IXACT Contact makes it easy to maintain full contact profiles and to stay in touch with clients in a way that?s personalized, relevant and timely. With IXACT Contact, real estate agents can convert more leads into listings and attract more referrals and repeat business. Real estate sales and real estate prospecting become easy. Real estate marketing is also a snap with IXACT Contact?s personalized mass email, drip marketing, and email campaign reporting features. The Active Business side of the system helps REALTORS? keep control of transactions by managing all the to-do?s associated with listings and buyers. Sign up for a free 5-week trial today at http://www.ixactcontact.com.

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Opower Celebrates 25 Millionth Home Energy Report Milestone; Savings of More Than 650 Gigawatt Hours

San Antonio, TX (PRWEB) January 24, 2012

Opower ? the global leader in customer engagement and energy reporting software for the utility industry ? today celebrated the calculation of its 25 millionth Home Energy Report, demonstrating industry-leading scale. The 25 millionth report will be sent to a utility customer at the end of the month. In addition, the company revealed that it will double the number of all Home Energy Reports sent-to-date during 2012, bringing the total number of reports sent to households to 75 million over 5 years.

?Each Home Energy Report that heads to a customer on behalf of our utility partners carries with it an opportunity for that customer to save energy based on the clear information and personalized insights we provide,? said Dan Yates, CEO and cofounder of Opower. ?In our fifth year of operation, Opower will continue to demonstrate industry-leading scale, as we expect to send out 50 million additional Home Energy Reports in 2012, and hit our savings goal of 1 terawatt hour nearly six months early. This incredible forecast for the upcoming year is a testament to the effectiveness of Opower?s Home Energy Reports, which have led to savings of more than $ 66 million in energy for customers to date? he said.

Opower?s Home Energy Reports have evolved significantly to become the gold standard within the industry. There are now more than 95 different permutations of reports, which contain various dynamic modules that can be chosen by the utility. Each individual report is dynamically generated with personalized content based on each customer?s energy use patterns and demographic information, as well as seasonality and weather. The reports are optimized based on high levels of measurement and verification scrutiny.

In 2011 alone, Opower ran about 150 in-treatment tests to optimize for impact across customer segments. These test groups each contained a minimum of 12,500 participants and averaged 25,000, allowing the company to measure the impact of each unique treatment at an extremely granular level (about point three percent at an 80 percent confidence level). In total, the company has accumulated over 85 ?utility years? of results?all of which has led to refinement and evolution of products and services.

Last year Opower set a goal to hit 1 terawatt hour in energy savings by the end of 2012. It now looks like the company is on track to hit that goal more than six months early, partly due to expansions of its Home Energy Report programs with utility partners. To date, the company has measured and verified savings of more than 650 GWh, which is enough energy to power more than 60,000 homes in the U.S. for a year.

?Opower has demonstrated the power of using behavioral science to encourage energy savings at a tremendous scale,? said Opower Chief Scientist, Dr. Robert Cialdini. ?As the company expands its offerings, behavioral motivation will continue to be a core tenet,? he said.

Today, the company also announced Opower Marketplace, which builds upon the Home Energy Report by connecting utilities with big box retailers and equipment manufacturers to offer highly targeted rebates, coupons, and promotions. The offers are delivered within a customer?s Home Energy Report, which is the precise time when people are in the mindset to be considering making efficiency upgrades in their homes. Opower research has shown than offers in this context can lift participation rates by more than 80 percent. In addition, due to the uniquely identifiable bar code, the burden of tracking redemptions and evaluating program effectiveness becomes a problem of the past. The Home Depot is the first nationwide retailer to join Opower Marketplace.

Opower?s Home Energy Reports provide utility customers with the context they need in order to make better sense of their household energy use?something that has mystified people for years. The reports, which provide information for both electric and gas customers, put energy use in the context of similar homes and compare use relative to efficient others to encourage savings.

The company serves more than 60 utilities and reaches nearly 11 million households with its customer engagement platform. Opower has also been selected as the front-end for most of the U.S.?s marquee Smart Grid deployments, including PG&E and BGE. Founders Dan Yates and Alex Laskey were recently noted by Fortune within its highly regarded list of ?40 Under 40.? In addition, Opower was named by FORBES as number ten on its list America?s most promising companies.

With the launch of Opower Marketplace, the new social energy application in partnership with Facebook and NRDC, and work with Honeywell to provide mobile and web software for thermostats, Opower is taking its industry-leading results to the next level, providing unparalleled service to utilities seeking higher customer engagement, cost-effective energy efficiency, and improved customer experience and satisfaction.

About Opower

Opower is a leader in customer engagement and energy management software, providing the utility industry?s only cross-channel customer engagement platform proven to drive energy efficiency gains on a large scale. Using cutting-edge behavioral science and patent-pending data analytics, the Opower platform enables utilities to provide targeted energy data and advice to individual customers. More than 60 utilities?including 8 of the 10 largest in the US?partner with Opower to improve the effectiveness of their energy-efficiency portfolios and motivate their customers to become more energy efficient, and increase the level of customer engagement and overall customer satisfaction. For utilities with Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), the Opower platform represents a cost-effective way to convert hourly data into measurable energy savings, delivering a clear return on investment directly to the customers. Founded in 2007 and privately held, Opower is headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, and has regional offices in San Francisco, California, and London, England. For more information, please visit http://www.opower.com.

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