StrongMail Systems, Inc., the leading provider of on-premise solutions for marketing and transactional email, today announced that Fire Mountain Gems and Beads, a leading online and catalog supplier of jewelry making supplies, is centralizing its marketing and transactional email on the StrongMail platform. Fire Mountain Gems and Beads chose StrongMail to replace an existing implementation.

Fire Mountain Gems and Beads is the largest US provider of jewelry-making supplies to wholesalers, retailers and designers. In business since 1973, Fire Mountain Gems and Beads sells more than 75,000 products via its direct mail catalog and retail website. The company relies heavily on email to drive its online sales, delivering a substantial volume of marketing emails each month to customers who have opted in to receive the company's latest offers and promotions.

In order to improve the reliability and management of its customer email, Fire Mountain Gems and Beads began looking at several commercial in-house and outsourced email solutions to replace its existing system. Given its large email volumes, Fire Mountain Gems and Beads determined that an in-house commercial solution would be more cost effective than working with an outsourced provider. Fire Mountain Gems and Beads selected StrongMail because of its high-performance delivery, failover protection, comprehensive feature-set and centralized platform for managing marketing and transactional email.

"Given how important email is to serving our customers and driving revenue, we selected the most reliable and comprehensive in-house solution we could find -- and that's StrongMail," said Todd Bushman, assistant manager of web marketing at Fire Mountain Gems and Beads. "By selecting StrongMail, we can focus on driving the most value out of our marketing and transactional email, instead of worrying about whether or not it will get delivered."

In addition to added reliability, StrongMail will enable Fire Mountain Gems and Beads to upgrade its transactional email with fully branded HTML messages that incorporate personalized messages and offers. Fire Mountain Gems and Beads also selected StrongMail for its smart bounce management technology, which will allow the company to streamline resources by eliminating the need to process bounces manually. Easy and tight integration with its external databases was also a strong selling point, as this will allow Fire Mountain Gems and Beads to send directly to its marketing lists without replicating data.

"By centralizing its email on StrongMail's in-house platform, Fire Mountain Gems and Beads is taking control of its outbound email, which will allow it to optimize customer communication for maximum results," said Dave Cormier, director of product marketing at StrongMail Systems. "StrongMail gives Fire Mountain Gems and Beads the ability to keep its email technology in house, which puts them in a better position to scale with their business growth, personalize their customer communications and maximize data security."

About Fire Mountain Gems and Beads

Uniting the World One Bead at a Time®, Fire Mountain Gems and Beads® (www.firemountaingems.com) is the nation's leading beading and jewelry supply company. Located in Grants Pass, Oregon, they are noted for their exceptional customer service and product selection -- offering over 75,000 jewelry making supplies to wholesalers, retailers and designer/artists for the past 34 years.