Twelve Horses, FranklinCovey write, market Outlook plug-in

Twelve Horses, an online marketing and messaging technology company headquartered in Reno, partnered with FranklinCovey Products to deliver an email marketing and tracking software plug-in for use with the Microsoft Outlook email program.

The partnership grew out of business relationships forged by the companies' Salt Lake City offices, where FranklinCovey is headquartered, says Robert Payne, marketing director for Twelve Horses.

"We do a lot of product development there," Payne says. "We are well known within the tech community and are a player in the email marketing space. FranklinCovey always is looking to provide new products and software for business professionals help them do their jobs better.

"It was just a perfect match in regards to Twelve Horses providing technical capabilities and FranklinCovey offering their network. They have a huge distribution and are well known within the business community."

The email plug-in, called "EmailPlus," enables users to send branded, trackable email messages. Tracking and an alert occur when a user opens the message, clicks on a link within the message, or forwards the email to someone else.

It also gives non-technical users the ability to edit email templates and create detailed reports all within Microsoft Outlook.

"We've plugged sophisticated email marketing features directly into Outlook to give people more power where they are already working," said Steve Spencer, president and chief technical officer of Twelve Horses.

Payne calls the partnership with FranklinCovey Products a matter of "fate," but adds Twelve Horses often seeks strategic partnerships to leverage the company's reach. One of the challenges associated with the project was ensuring that Twelve Horses' development efforts stayed in synch with the latest versions of Microsoft's software.

"Anytime you are leveraging software built by a third party like Microsoft, you run into some challenges," Payne says. "The technology is flexible, so we are able to run along side them and make sure it is compatible."

Separately, Twelve Horses says one of its clients, California's Monterey County Convention and Visitors Bureau, earned two awards from the California Travel & Tourism Commission for Web marketing developed by the Reno company.