BrandMyMail is launching a new web-based platform for customizing your email messages using social media. The service is designed mainly for businesses, but can be used by anyone who wants to spice up their email with real-time content, including Twitter feeds, YouTube videos, Flickr photos, blog posts from WordPress and Tumblr, Quora posts, eBay listings and more.
To use the service, you set up a customizable template to control what pieces of content appear in your email message. This content, which comes in the form of “plugins,” is added to templates via drag-and-drop from the BrandMyMail website. You can also customize the design and the layout of the message, too, using the provided templates.
Currently, BrandMyMail supports Gmail users on the Firefox or Chrome browsers, plus iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch users. Support for Android and SMTP clients is in development as is support for other email providers, like Hotmail.
For what it’s worth, Gmail itself provides a bit of added functionality to email messages itself, by extracting the photos and YouTube videos mentioned in the messages and placing them at the bottom of the message for easy access. But BrandMyMail wants to go further, allowing you to include dynamic content – like Twitter updates or Facebook messages – in addition to static media, like a hosted YouTube video.
The idea of making email more interactive is something we’ve seen before, with the email startup PowerInbox, for example. That service works in a similar way to BrandMyMail, except that it’s focused on making incoming messages more interactive, not outgoing ones.
It’s somewhat incredible how relatively unchanged email has been over the years, which has allowed for some interesting integrations from outside vendors, like PowerInbox, Rapportive, Xobni, and others.
BrandMyMail was started by Shay Rojansky, Limor Schweitzer and Roberto Varela, and is based in Funchal, Portugal. It currently has €227,000+ (EUR) in angel funding.
