We’re excited to let you know that dynamic content will be available in our campaign builder in the next couple of weeks. Since launching the builder last year we’ve been hard at work on adding more power and this latest update will make sending relevant emails easier than ever.

While dynamic content already exists in the app, to date you’ve had to insert specific tags into your email code to use it. With this update everyone using the builder will be able to easily display different content for different subscribers, based on what’s known about them.

We’re really excited about sharing this update with our clients. We all know that relevant, engaging content is the key to getting great results, and we’ll continue to do everything we can to make doing that really easy. Keep an eye out for dynamic content in the campaign builder soon!

As we recently mentioned, our team has been hard at work adding more design flexibility to our email builder Canvas. We know how important this level of control is to so many of you, so we’re really excited to share that it’s now live.

You now have total control over the emails you create in Canvas. That means changing background colors, text colors, button colors and more so they perfectly match your brand. You’ll also be able to choose from a range of fonts for each text element in your campaign.

Customizing Colors

You can now quickly match a Canvas email to your brand using the color options in the customize tab. From this single spot you can change the color of headings, body text and header/footer text. You can also change the background color of your email, the color of links, button color, and button text color. Changing is as easy as entering the HEX color code directly, perfect for those with specific brand colors, or using our easy color picker to find one that suits.

Customizing Fonts

Changing your heading and text typeface is easy now too. Unlike other email builders, Canvas really pays attention to typography by worrying about details like line height and padding. It even supports web fonts with nice fallbacks. With the addition of customization, we made sure we gathered a bunch of typefaces that work well in any environment and can be paired together for some good combinations. That means fonts that look great at any size or weight, such as bold or italicized. So when it comes time for you to design your email, whatever font you choose in Canvas, it will look just right.

We know you’re going to love the new flexibility and control that customization provides, but to allow for it we did need to make a few template design tweaks. So if you’ve previously created a template using Canvas you may notice some small changes. We hope you’ll agree it was a small price to pay to get total control over colors and fonts in your email designs. If you do have any questions about that, just get in touch with our Support team who are always happy to help.

While this new flexibility and control has made Canvas more powerful, we’ve made sure it’s still just as easy to create unique emails quickly that will automatically look great everywhere. And our work doesn’t stop here. Look out for more Canvas updates soon.

Thanks again to everyone who let us know how important this flexibility was. We absolutely listen to everything you have to say and are so grateful you’re passionate enough to share your thoughts with us. This update is now available in your account and we hope you take a moment to check it out. We can’t wait to see the emails you start customizing!

We know how important segmentation is in allowing you to target your subscribers with the most relevant content. So in the last few months we’ve been doing a lot of work on our segments feature, including releasing our new segments builder and extending the way rules could be created.

We’re now excited to unveil one of our most popular feature-requests – segments in autoresponders. You can now use what you know about your subscribers to send them more relevant autoresponder emails and combine the power of the most relevant message with sending it at the best time.

Here are a few ways you might want to use segments in autoresponders:

Personalized welcome emails

Say you run an online clothing store and capture whether someone is male or female when they sign up. Now you can use that information to send gendered versions of your welcome email and make your communications highly targeted from the very beginning.

Targeted birthday emails

If you’re sending birthday emails to customers using the anniversary of a date autoresponder option, you could apply segments to make the campaign even more relevant. For example, you could identify VIP customers based on how much they’ve spent with you over the past year, and then target the VIP customer segment with an extra special birthday gift.

Subscription renewal series

Or finally, say you sell annual virus protection software subscriptions. Using the exact match of a date autoresponder option you could set up a series that sends a renewal notification out 30 days before the subscription expiration date. You can then use information on whether someone has paid or not paid, to target those who have not renewed at the 15 day mark and then again at the 7 day mark. Each email in the series would only be sent to those who fell into the segment ‘have not paid’, which would automatically refresh each time updated payment information was uploaded.

We know a lot of you were have been looking to see this feature so we’re really excited to share it with you. We look forward to seeing how you use it to improve how you communicate with subscribers and ultimately drive better results from your email marketing.

Location can be a powerful tool in driving relevance in email marketing. Whether it’s providing local information or personalizing your content to match local conditions, knowing where your subscribers are is the first step. Collecting this information isn’t always easy though, so we’re excited to introduce a new way to create mailing list segments based on the location of your subscribers: geolocation segments.

Whether you’re interested in targeting people from particular countries, or those living within a certain distance of specific locations, you can now do it with our geolocation feature. It automatically identifies the location of a subscriber and allows you to create a segment based on that information. That’s right, even if you haven’t collected the location of your subscribers you can use this feature to send geo-targeted campaigns.

We already calculate a subscriber’s location using their IP address to power features like Worldview and our subscriber notification emails. We do this by storing the IP address of subscribers that sign up from a form, or open or click a link in a campaign. We then look that up against an IP-to-location database. So basically, once we know the IP address used by a subscriber, we can tell roughly where they are located.

Now we’ve applied that information to segments so you can use it to target your email campaigns. You can search your subscribers and segment based on their location being known or unknown, their location being near somewhere, as well as them being specifically in, or not in, a location.

Here’s a few ways you might use the geolocation feature:

Targeting those in or near a location

Say you sell bathing suits globally. In the middle of January you could target customers living in Australia, where it’s summer, without bothering customers in the US, who could be living through a polar vortex.

Or, say you sell concert tickets for gigs across the US and there’s one coming up in San Francisco. You could use geolocation segments to only send an event announcement to people living near San Francisco.

Targeting those not in a specific location

Say you include banner ads in your emails. You have specific banners for US subscribers but then a generic one for everyone else. You could create a segment targeting everyone not in the US for the generic version.

Targeting those whose location is not known at all

Say you run a business events company and in your weekly emails you feature what’s happening in a subscriber’s city. You could target subscribers whose location is unknown, so you can send them a generic version that covers the top 5 events from across the country instead.

Location data is already being collected for everyone who’s ever sent a campaign. So you can jump in right now, check out where your subscribers are and start targeting by region today.

We’re excited to announce the rollout of a new workflow for the campaign creation process. We’ve made it easier than ever to see what step you’re at, what you’re sending, who you’re sending to and when your campaign will go out.

The Create & Send section – the part of eConnect Email where you set up a campaign, select your recipients, test your email and schedule delivery – is one of the most important parts of our product.

As the heart of eConnect Email, the Create & Send pages do a great job of helping our users create amazing email campaigns. But as we added more and more features over time, we started worrying about overcrowding our original design. For example, when we added the option to personalize subject lines in the “Define the Campaign and Sender” screen, it was squeezed in on the far right in tiny font, while the subject line stayed on the left.

To make sure eConnect Email stayed as user-friendly as ever, we gave the whole workflow a new, cleaner look and feel – and also spent some time improving the usability of things like subject line personalization by making the feature in line with where you write your subject line:

We also wanted to make sure users knew where they were in the workflow at any given point, so we made the status bar more prominent. At any time, you’ll see what steps are left and all the options available to you at each stage.

We’ve also made use of icons in the new design to help make navigation easier than ever before, particularly for things like our A/B testing feature or RSS-to-email option:

Overall, we’re proud and excited to share this change to the campaign creation process with you — and we look forward to your feedback in the comments below!

If you own a local business, you need exposure to the people who are most likely to buy from you: the people in your city and in your neighborhood. You also need to make the most of every marketing dollar. And that’s why I want to take a minute to introduce you to Every Door Direct Mail (EDDM), a new service being offered by the USPS. If you’re like me, you’re probably gaping in astonishment that the postal service has anything beneficial to offer to businesses. But stick with me, I think you’ll be impressed.

What Can EDDM Offer Your Business?

EDDM offers some awesome benefits to small businesses:

• It’s cost effective—Postage rates start at 14.5¢ per piece. That’s an unheard of price for direct mail. You can also avoid the costs of labeling each piece.
• It’s easy—No address lists or contact information. Just choose a target area and have your piece delivered to every single home on the route. You don’t even have to send to an entire zip code, just a complete mail carrier route.
• It’s flexible—You have a variety of size options to choose from, making it possible to create unique designs that include as little or as much information as you need to get your message across.

Once you start delving into the details, you’ll discover a few qualifications when it comes to item specs. For instance, each piece must be a standard mail flat weighing less than 3.3 oz. for EDDM—Retail and 15.994 oz. for EDDM—BMEU. Your mailing must be a saturation mailing for an entire mail carrier route and must include at least 200 pieces. Businesses that do not qualify for EDDM—Retail can still qualify for Business Mail Entry Unit options allowing larger mailings and requiring a postage permit.

Why Am I Plugging EDDM?

No, I’m not getting any perks from the USPS for promoting their service. But I do think it’s important for local businesses to take advantage of available cost saving measures in order to stay in the game against larger competitors. EDDM makes that possible by cutting costs to the bare minimum and making it as easy as possible to reach your potential customers. You can find out exact details, requirements, and specifications at the USPS Every Door Direct Mail page.

If you’re looking for a better way to send direct mail to the people who are most likely to use your products and services, the USPS just made your life a whole lot easier. Really.

We’re very excited to announce that we have released a beautiful, flexible new way to keep up with the people who are joining your subscriber lists.  We’ve given you complete control over what notifications you’d like to receive and when.

Instant Updates

If you’re interested in learning everything you can about each person that joins your list, you’re going to love our instant notifications. You can set them on a list-by-list basis, and every time someone signs up, we’ll send you something like this…

Each email will include all the data they might have supplied when subscribing. Plus, we’ll show you exactly where they subscribed from and if available, what they look like. It’s amazing how quickly this turns them into a real person instead of just another email address. These notifications can be set on a list-by-list basis, so you’re only updated instantly when you need to be.

Daily, Weekly or Monthly Summaries

As well as instant notifications, you can also choose a daily, weekly or monthly summary that gives an overview of all the new subscribers across every list for each client. We’ll show you where they’re from, which lists they’ve been added to and even pull out a few friendly faces.

Notifications

First things first, notifications will be turned off by default for you. But, if you would find these notifications useful, you can easily enable them from your account. These notifications are set on a per-person basis. As long as you have permission to manage your own subscribers, you can head into your notification preferences and choose the types of updates that suit you best.

How to turn notifications on
You’ll notice a new option in the sidebar of “Lists & Subscribers” like this…

From there you can select any lists you’d like instant updates for, and if you’d like to receive a daily, weekly or monthly summary across all the lists for that subscriber.

One final point worth mentioning, these notifications are all about organic subscribers joining your lists.  This means we won’t notify you about subscribers you manually import yourself, only those that join from your subscribe forms, an integration you might have set up or the API.

We’ve got another exciting subscriber related announcement coming up, so stay tuned for another heads up.

Introducing the new and improved eConnect Email, your go-to email marketing platform. Featuring enhanced usability, customization and security- the new eConnect Email will make building your email campaigns a breeze!

To begin, we restructured eConnect Email from the ground up with several new and exciting features. We now have a template builder where you can create custom rock-solid templates optimized for both desktop and mobile applications.

How about those clients of yours in different time zones? Yep, the new eConnect Email will automatically send your email campaign to your recipients in their specific time zone. In addition, we have beefed up security on both ends with back-end authentication and relationships with top ISPs and industry-leading mail servers.

Worldview

See who is opening and what they’re clicking on with real-time data, all beautifully displayed on Worldview (our gorgeous maps app). Don’t forget about the bread and butter, you know, ROI- the new eConnect Email boasts in-depth reports on your email campaign’s performance and deliverability.

Social Integration

Social. Yes I said it and yes we did it. You can now allow your Facebook friends and fans to subscribe to your newsletter directly from your fan page. We also report every “Like” and “Tweet” your campaign receives as part of our stunning reports. So now you can see not only which subscribers are sharing with their friends, but also what they’re saying about you.

So what are you waiting for? Dive in and set up a new eConnect Email account today for free!

Hyde Park Baptist Church, located deep in the heart of Austin, Texas, reached out to us with the need to create a stronger, more appealing way to communicate to its members.  With that in mind, we were able to assist HPBC by creating email templates that would allow them to send out customized weekly messages to a variety of groups.  The email templates provide a consistent and organized theme that allows for a variety of people to receive announcements and other information without the dread of reading, yet another, boring black and white email.

University Ministry Example

General Ministry Example

Do you want to improve your email strategy?  Just a simple change can bring great results.  Contact HMG Creative to get started.