Apex Car Rentals, one of New Zealand’s largest rental car companies has recently announced a $25 million fleet expansion.
Part of the fleet growth for this season with include the addition of an extra 1200 cars. 700 of these will be new 2010 model Toyota Corollas and Toyota Previas. The new cars started arriving from 28 September.
Apex has had a stellar growth path over the last 20 years, growing from a solely Christchurch based company with six cars in 1992, to a nationwide company with over 4000 cars.
On Saturday our email sending service SMTP.com decided to disable our account. The reason was that someone had reported our emails as SPAM. The account was disabled immediately and without warning.
No emails from Transfercar last weekend
We didn’t see the email until Sunday after some of you called us about not receiving emails. And from there on it took another 18 hours before we were able to get hold of someone at SMTP.com and convinced them that we are not in the business of sending SPAM.
Transfercar practices a strict opt-in only policy and otherwise try to adhere to industry standards for good email ethics so we were very surprised that we were shut down without any prior warning.
Our web service Transfercar ( www.transfercar.co.nz ) is a facilitator between the parties of drivers and rental car operators, and two thirds of all our business is conducted by emails through smtp.com. We serve 60% of the rental car industry in New Zealand and many of them rely solely on emails generated and sent out from us.
The email list that generates the most emails (about 85% of emails are notifications of new listings in our database sent out to drivers) is probably the one that some poeple would report as spam. The reason for this is the nature of the list, generating a new email for every new car listed. That means that on some days subscribers will receive as many as 30 emails. We warn users about this but still we see many complaints about it to our support system.
We have gone through our email templates today and added more information in them on why the recipient is receiving the email together with unsubscribe links. We hope that this this will remove any claims of spam in the future.
[network:StartUP] is a global community designed to assist online Start-UPs. Every week they will be sending their entire group of thousands of visitors to one lucky Start-UP (Transfercar) and provide a major traffic spike and hopefully a lot of new users.
You can help Transfercar by voting for them at Start-UP with on their Kick-Start my Start-UP Facebook App.
Two weeks ago we had a fun day (more fun than usual) here at Transfercar when [business:Made From New Zealand] came up from Wellington and did a video shoot of us.
We started out filming outside the University of Auckland Business School (where the idea to Transfercar first was developed). Then we moved down to the car yard at Jucy Rental Cars (they happened to be close, sorry to all the other rental companies that didn’t get the same exposure!). And Tim Alpe, CEO at Jucy gave us a raving endorsement!
All in all the whole shoot lasted the afternoon and it was a lot of fun to do. We shot 3 short movies. The first one came out today:
