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.

Often there are good reasons to exclude subscribers from a campaign. For example, you may want to send an email update that’s only relevant to people who haven’t registered for a specific event. Or alternately, you may want to avoid sending your monthly newsletter to people who are already on your weekly mailing list. Well, it’s now possible to exclude lists and segments with a single click – here’s a quick look at what you’ll see when you next send a campaign.

As with much of the app, we’ve really aimed at making the exclusion of lists and segments as simple and self-explanatory as possible. When creating a new campaign in your eConnect Email account, you’ll now see an “Exclude list” or “Exclude segment” button when you hover over either a list or segment on the “Who will receive this campaign” screen. Clicking this button will ensure that subscribers in the list or segment are not only removed, but excluded, or “washed” (as it’s sometimes called) from other lists that have been included in the send.

What’s also worth mentioning is that excluded lists and segments are subtracted from the unique subscriber count in our updated Campaign Snapshot.

This has been an actively requested addition to the app, so we really hope that you find it to be helpful when sending targeted campaigns. Just to give you an insider tip, we’re going to be unveiling a few updates to how you manage your lists in the weeks ahead, so stay tuned by subscribing to our blog updates below, or at least checking back often. In the interim, if you have any questions or feedback, either let us know in the comments below, or get in touch directly – naturally, we’d love to hear from you.

So far this year we’ve rolled out a couple of big changes to help you organically build your email lists. Following the introduction of our subscribe form app for the iPad, the subscribe button and the subscribe page, we’ve turned our attention back to the original website subscription form builder.

After we spruced up the “Grow your audience” pages in “Lists & Subscribers,” it became quite evident that the trusty option to generate your own subscription form code within “Copy/paste a form to your site” was well due for an update. While the old website subscription form builder did the job, it was well, looking a bit tired and not at all consistent with the rest of the eConnect Email platform.

After a large amount of work, we’re happy to announce that we’ve overhauled the “Add a subscribe form to our site” section of your account, to make it easier to create a form, get the code and preview the results. It’s also a lot more intuitive and user-friendly.

Flexible forms with and real-time previews

While many of our clients have no trouble customizing our website subscription form code to their heart’s delight, we’ve gone the next step with our form builder. For one, it’s now easy to re-order the display of form fields – for example, if you want the “Email address” field to display before “Name”, you can now drag-and-drop it into place. As you make changes to the forms, the preview alongside it will update automatically.

An improved workflow

Once you’ve tailored your website subscription form to taste, you can simply copy the code, or move on to other popular tasks, like customizing your subscribe confirmation page, confirmation email or setting up an auto-responder. All it takes is a few minutes to build a form, and then customize what your subscribers see, before and after signing up for your lists.

While these changes are all fairly subtle, we hope that they make the process of creating subscription forms for your website a touch easier. Of course, if there’s anything we can improve to make it even easier to build your website subscription forms, please sound off by posting a comment below.

Hot on the heels of the new Subscribe Button, today we’re happy to announce another simple tool that makes it easy to grow your audience with eConnect Email. As of today, every list in your account now has its very own Subscribe Page, a simple, customizable page that lets anyone join your list – no coding required.

Unlike the Subscribe button, or our copy/paste forms, which you need to integrate into your site and touch code, the Subscribe Page is just a simple, webpage/URL that you can easily share with anyone. Check out a real-world example of it in action.

Customize everything

We’ve made it easy to tweak everything on this page so you can keep it consistent with your own brand. Change the background color, choose from a range of font styles, or add your own logo.

Just like the subscribe button, you can also choose which fields you’d like to show, in what order, and even set certain fields as required. You can also customize the confirmation message when a new person joins your list.

Looks great on mobile

Just like our Subscribe Buttons, we made sure every Subscribe Page looks great on any mobile device but still stays true to any customizations you’ve made.

Easily track signups

Just like we do for the Subscribe Button, we’ll keep track of how many subscribers have joined your list via the subscribe page so you can see at a glance how it’s been working for you.

Subscribe Pages are live and available in all accounts now. You can find them in the Grow your audience section in the sidebar for each of your lists. We can’t wait to see how you guys start using them.

A couple of hours ago we launched Subscribe Me, an app that turns your iPad into a beautiful subscription form. It’s perfect for the counter at your store, an event you might be hosting, or anywhere else where people might like to join your list when they’re not in front of their computer. It’s totally free and available now.

Customize everything

When we built Subscribe Me, the most important thing was that it could be completely customized to match your own look and feel. When it’s sitting at the counter in your store, it should look like it was built just for you.

We’ve included 10 great looking themes to make it easy to get started, but you can throw in your own logo and background image, change the copy to suit, the button label, the fonts, text sizes and plenty more. To make this easy, we’ve gone for a live preview approach so you can see exactly how your form will look as you make changes.

Once you’ve designed your form, you can easily secure it by setting a passcode, ready for people to start subscribing. This means anyone can join your list, but they can’t make any changes to the form or your settings. If you want to make any tweaks, just enter your passcode and you’re good to go.

Works offline

Let’s say you sell handmade goods each weekend at the local fair. Now you can take your Wifi only iPad with Subscribe Me installed, set it up on the tabletop and hundreds of people can sign up to your weekly newsletter, all without an Internet connection.

After a successful day of selling, Subscribe Me will automatically sync all your new subscribers straight into your eConnect Email account the moment it’s connected to the web. This all happens seamlessly behind the scenes without you lifting a finger.

Beautiful, flexible forms

As well as looking great, we made sure Subscribe Me was as easy to use as possible for your subscribers. We designed stunning custom form controls that looks awesome on a retina display. We also give you control over which fields to show, and what order they should be displayed.

You can also set certain fields as required, and we’ll handle error checking for your subscribers to let them know if they missed something.

Available now, for free

Subscribe Me launched in the App Store a few hours ago. It’s free to download, all you need is a eConnect Email account. When you first run the app you can choose which list you’d like to connect it to, but you can easily change this to any other list at a later date.

We’re really excited about getting our first dedicated app out there. We’ve got plans for more improvements down the line, so please give it a try and let us know what you think.

Hot on the heels of Subscriber Notifications, we’re excited to announce the all new Subscribe Button. The easiest way to add an elegant, unobtrusive subscribe form to any page on your site.

The Subscribe Button is perfect for your sidebar, footer or any page with limited screen real-estate. Slot the button in where you like, and once it’s pressed a simple subscribe form instantly appears through a modal window.

Customize Everything

The button itself is available in two colors and sizes. You can use your own button text, and also choose to show or hide the number of subscribers in that list.

We’ve also given you lots of control over the subscribe form. Choose which fields you’d like to show and in what order, set the important stuff as required and add your own intro copy.

You’ll find the feature under a simplified sidebar for each subscriber list in your account. Just click on Grow your audience option to get started.

This update is one of a number of nice improvements we have planned around making it easy as possible for people to join your lists. As always, feel free to give us a call if you have any questions!