The year 2010 brought huge changes in the way consumers interact with companies online. As social media opened the door for increased interaction between businesses and their customers, marketing efforts were often left scrambling to keep up with the changing demands of the new marketing landscape. As we head into 2011, the lessons we learned in 2010 can point us in the right direction and keep us on the right track.

• Customer expectations constantly change.

Because customers can now interact in real time with businesses, they expect faster responses to their concerns and requests. For your email marketing campaigns, this means staying on top of customer interests and providing real-time value. eConnect Email can help you achieve these goals through email automation by the implementation of email triggers and auto-responders.

• Social media is here to stay.

While no one knows what the next big “thing” in social media will be, we do know that social media as a technology is not going anywhere anytime soon. While that idea can be intimidating to some businesses, social media actually provides excellent opportunities to grow both your email marketing list and also engage your social media followers online.  This being said, we have embraced social media and have actually integrated with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Buzz.  Click here for information about the integration of social media with eConnect Email.

• Customers expect stellar service.

While customer service has always been a top priority for successful businesses, customers now expect even greater attention to be paid to their needs due to increased interaction online. This means staying on top of subscriber’s preferences and making sure each email arrives at its intended destination.   eConnect Email ensures that your mailing lists stay up to date by using list cleansing, suppression lists, list segmentation as well as giving your subscribers the ability to manage their mailing list subscriptions through the online preference center.

• What works for someone else may not work for you.

It’s easy to put together a list of best practices and slap them up on a website for others to emulate, but building a truly successful email marketing program takes a little more planning and insight. The truth is that what works for one company may not work for another, so it’s vital that you incorporate testing into your email marketing strategy. That’s why I would recommend that you A/B Split Test each and every email campaign.  Split Testing will help ensure that you deliver only the most effective messages to your audience.

With 2010 in the past, businesses will need to take the lessons learned over the past twelve months and build on them to create a strategy that will effectively meet the challenges of 2011. eConnect Email stands ready to help you accomplish this goal with a vast array of tools and features that will help keep your email marketing strategy on the cutting edge.  If you have any questions about the capabilities of our application we’d love to hear from you!

First impressions make up a huge percentage of the overall impact you will have on any given reader of your marketing emails. Experts estimate that in a face-to-face first contact, you have seven seconds to make your first impression and that 93% of that impression will be based on non-verbal factors. In the email world, this translates into how your presentation makes the reader feel as a he looks at your email, even if he doesn’t read a word. If you want to develop an email marketing campaign that compels readers to find out more, you’ve got to pay attention to details of presentation and appearance.

Let The Preview Pane Work for You

Many email programs provide readers with a preview pane that shows them a snippet of the email before they open it. The good news is that this gives you a chance to reach people that might not actually click on your message if you know how to use that snippet of space effectively. The preview pane is the most important piece of real estate within your campaign so design accordingly.  eConnect Email provides templates to help you design an effective email as well as inbox previews so you can see how your message will look in a variety of different email programs.

Keep Important Information as Text, Not Graphics

Another quirk of many email applications is that they often block images by default. To make sure the largest percentage of readers see your message, put your most important information in text format rather than incorporating it into a graphic image. Then use eConnect Email’s image manager to upload images that support the information you’ve already communicated through text.

Make Your Messages Mobile Friendly

As more and more people check email on their mobile devices rather than from their computers, the need for mobile friendly formatting has become essential. If subscribers can’t clearly read your email, they’ll likely delete it before you have a chance to make that vital first impression. Start by using succinct subject lines with the most important information first and make sure your sending name is recognizable. Incorporate alt tags for your images so viewers can still see text even if images are blocked. You can also include a link to a mobile version of your email.

Choose Your Colors Wisely

Choose colors that work together and that promote the emotions you want to convey. In addition, use dark text on a light background to make your messages more readable. Take advantage of eConnect’s custom design services to help you choose colors and a format that will best convey your intended message.

Let Us Help You

While eConnect Email provides you with a great selection of email templates to choose from, you may want to think about a custom template that will incorporate your brand more professionally and seamlessly.  We can help you design a custom template for your monthly newsletters or design a campaign for a specific event or promotion.  For more information on our custom email template design services click on the link provided or call us at (866) 596-9997.

Mobile Previews have arrived, along with a long-awaited adjustment in the unsubscribe process.

Now see your email rendering in five popular devices in addition to 29 email clients

An exciting addition to eConnect Email launched over the weekend: Mobile Previews! This is an addition to our already awesome Inbox Previews, an add-on service inside eConnect Email’s core email marketing application.

As you send off your email to see how it renders across 29 different email clients, you also will see that same email rendering in five different devices: the iPhone 3GS, Blackberry Curve, Symbian S60, Windows Mobile 6.5 and the iPad.

Highlights

• See email renders in five different mobile devices
• Inbox Previews now features 29 different email clients

Try for yourself by running an Inbox Preview on your next email campaign! Not currently using Inbox/ Mobile Previews? Contact our sales team for more information, (866) 596-9997.

Unsubscribe by mistake? With a single click, re-subscribe!

With the single-click unsubscribe in eConnect Email, we understand that sometimes you or your clients accidentally unsubscribe and it’s somewhat of a process to re-subscribe them. No more!

Now anyone that unsubcribes will have the option to immediately re-subscribe with a single click. They won’t have to leave the page or go through any lengthy hassle. One click and they’re back on the list…just like that.

If you have any questions let us know!

Since the release of eConnect Email 3.0 we have received an overwhelming amount of positive feedback.  We’ve also received some great suggestions on how we could enhance the overall user experience.  Over the past several months our development team has been hard at work simplifying and streamlining the user interface of our application.

The redesigned user interface is in the final stages of beta testing and is slated to roll out on October 22nd! Below is a list of a few of the enhancements.

Features

• New sidebar with collapsible navigation
• Re-organized navigation for better user experience
• Revamped reporting
• New hover menu actions
• Updated look-and-feel across all application elements

Our goal of the interface redesign was to take what we had already built and just make it better.  You will notice that the feel is similar… Now just much more user friendly and intuitive!  Things will be more dynamic and the overall user experience should be more innate and enjoyable.

Going into the user interface redesign we knew that it could potentially get some of our customers stirred up (after all, we are creatures of habit).  While any interface rework is going to cause some change, we feel that in the end it will lead to an overall better user experience.

Sneak Peek:

Example of the new collapsible navigation

Example of the new hover menu

Example of the new reports interface

We will be hosting a webinar Tuesday, Oct 26th @ 1:00pm (PST) to show off the new interface. Please follow the link below to register and attend.

We have been in business now for a good 6 years and we can honestly attribute our success to great clients and friends who have used our service themselves or referred business to us.  Most of our good fortune comes not from advertising, but from word-of-mouth.

That being said, we are excited to launch our new affiliate program and start rewarding those that refer business our way.  We wanted to make this whole referral business easy.  Our affiliates (you) simply display one of our pre-designed banner ads on their (your) website and our affiliate software tracks the activated accounts and automatically sends you a check in the mail for every new client, every month that they are active.

Now that’s easy!!

The best part of this affiliate program is their is very little work involved.  15% of every eConnect Email account + $3 for every lead-in (free account) plan activated will be mailed to you each month just by displaying one of our ads on your website.  That sounds like a win-win to me!

The eConnect Email Team is excited to announce the release of our Private Label Email Marketing Solution.   With eConnect Email, you can launch a fully branded email marketing service without the hassle and cost of developing and maintaining an in-house solution.  We manage the technology and ISP relationships so that you can focus on building your business and servicing your clients.

We provide you with all the tools of our email marketing platform, the ability to brand our software as your own and establish your own pricing while providing your customers with one of the most sophisticated applications available.

Private Label Features Include:

• Complete Interface rebranding (control of CSS markup and HTML content for maximum control)
• Private Label Sub-domain or custom URL
• Unlimited accounts, sub-accounts  with granular permissions
• All current version features & upgrades
• Discounted volume pricing (wholesale rates) – starts as low as $250/mo.
• Fully automated billing manager
• Deliverability Monitoring
  • ISP Delivery Monitoring
  • Black List Monitoring & Resolution
  • Spam Complaint Monitoring & Resolution
• Email Authentication setup
• Dedicated Account Manager with priority support
• Unlimited render & spam testing available

For more information or to schedule a demo of our Private Label Email Marketing Solution, click here!

Are you tired of mediocre open rates from your email campaigns? What if you could eliminate the frustration of guessing at subject lines and content that will gain the attention of your subscribers? Imagine getting great results the first time you send out an email. When it comes to email marketing split testing is a no brainer.  Using this powerful tool, you can put your marketing strategies in overdrive.

Split testing sounds like a complicated procedure, but it is really quite simple to understand. The first step is taking a look at the information you are seeking to convey to your subscribers. You take that information and create two similar emails that are almost (but not quite) identical. Perhaps you slightly change the subject heading or alter the phrasing of a campaign slogan. The split comes when you send the two different versions of the email to a small sampling of your mailing list to see which campaign performs the best. Once you know which email receives the most favorable response you send the best performing campaign out to the remaining recipients.

The novelty of split testing is that you can take the results from your tests and evaluate which strategies were the most effective.  Let’s say you varied your two emails by including a graphic in one that you did not include in the other. If the email including the graphic receives the most favorable results then you know that your readers respond to the graphic. You can then go on to include more graphic elements in future emails.

The more you split test, the more effective your email marketing will be. Don’t stop with just one test. Once you receive the results of the first one, immediately begin a new test that builds on the information you gathered. The more you learn about your subscribers’ tastes, the more your marketing will reflect the strategies that cater to them. This will increase traffic and encourage more effective marketing.

Today, split testing is being used in more ways than just email marketing. It is so effective that now people use it in website design and online advertising, as well. The usefulness of being able to test out different strategies before fully launching a campaign is invaluable.  Don’t be left behind, eConnect Email has built split testing into our application so make use of it.

How do you go about split testing within eConnect Email 3.0?

1)    First create the two variations of your email campaign which you would like to test

2)    Now select “Create Split Test” from the “Email Campaigns” tab

3)    Give you Split Test a name

4)    Choose the two versions of the emails campaigns to use for testing

5)    Select how a winner is chosen

6)    Finally, select what kind of test to run

7)    Now sit back, kick your feet up and let technology work for you.

Questions?  Give us a call, we’re here to help!

Recently, we posted an article revealing eConnect Email’s newest innovation: Advanced Triggers. Allowing eConnect to communicate with external SOAP APIs, these triggers inaugurated our company’s Salesforce integration.

The original Triggers were far from convenient to use, however. Setting up the program was complicated, and if users had previously never worked with SOAP APIs the frustrations of trying to get everything going seemed to far outweigh the benefits. Looking back, eConnect Email recognizes the bugs in the original Triggers, and we have been working hard to up the ante on our Salesforce Integration program.

Want to check out the newest innovations? After logging into eConnect Email, click on the “My Account” button. There is now a new tab at the top called “Salesforce Settings.” Here you can add your Salesforce credentials. After checking the box to activate, all users included in the lists you imported will be saved in the system. If a subscriber interacts with the sent email Salesforce will then report it.

All user information is now catalogued and sent back to eConnect Email. When a subscriber from your list opens one of your emails, clicks on one of the included links, hard bounces or unsubscribes, the information gets queued up by the system. It is then sent to the company during one of the 20 minute integration intervals.

While 20 minutes may seem like an inconvenient length of time when the system used to be live, there are reasons for the change. Let me explain the procedure:

On any given day each Salesforce account has a designated allowance of API connections. Previously, any activity within the system would be logged as an API connection. Consequently, if you sent an email campaign to a lengthy list of subscribers you would near your daily limit and potentially lose important information. If you were utilizing multiple applications using Salesforce’s API you would be particularly in danger of information loss.

We have now eliminated this problem by storing all of your connections in secret. We then send the information in groups of 200 or less in order to reduce the number of connections to a mere 72 a day (as opposed to the previous hundreds – or even thousands – of connections).

The Salesforce Integration experience just keeps getting better and better. If you need any help getting accustomed to all of the new technology, feel free to contact us.

At eConnect Email, we want to help make our customers look smart and save time with their email marketing. We have put together a list of some of our sweet features that will help you with short cuts and tricks to making you a better email marketer…your subscribers will be impressed!

To view our August Newsletter – Tips & Tricks – CLICK HERE!

We haven’t tried to cover up that we strongly believe in integration. One of our product developers recently talked about how we’ve been working to boost our integration efforts. Now I’d like to mention a few of the reasons we believe so much in integration and how you can get the ball rolling yourself.

Why Integrate with Salesforce.com

Integrating with Salesforce.com is one of the best ways to go, since it has almost 70,000 customers. Customer relationship management and email marketing are certainly some of the strong points for Salesforce.com. There’s a new form of importing and exporting – and it doesn’t involve the outdated form of export/import. Nowadays, you can move data back and forth through the use of application programming interface, or API.

There are several ways you can integrate, and Salesforce.com usually leads the way in this type of activity. Some businesses often start their own user interface inside of Salesforce.com’s user interface. So we had to decide how we could get this type of setup to work as efficiently as possible, and how the different user interfaces could function together.

Keep it simple

We didn’t just look to ourselves for the answers. Our customers’ thoughts are always important to us, so we went to them and to the marketplace to get answers. One of the key questions boiled down to whether we should have an application experience within Salesforce.com when we already had something within eConnect Email.

After thoroughly researching the subject, we got the answers from customers and people who are in the know. We found that many customers wanted to be able to bring in their list of custom subscriber data into a new list with eConnect Email. Regardless of what type of campaign they had, they wanted it to be with eConnect Email. They also wanted information such as clicks and bounce rates to be in the contact record so they could find out that information quickly.

In other words, keep it simple.

What you need to do

1.      Your part should only take a couple of minutes. First, log into your account and go to “My Account” in the top right-hand corner.

2.      You should see a tab that says “Salesforce.com.” Click on that.

3.      Enter your username and password and other security detail. You can ask your administrator if you don’t have that information immediately.

Using it is also pretty simple.

1.      Make a new contact report within Salesforce.com and save it under “Personal Custom Reports.”

2.      Under the “Contact” tab, click “Import” and select “Import From My Salesforce Account.” Choose from the list whichever one you’d like.

3.      Send your campaign.

4.      You’ll always have access to all of your statistics. You’ll also be sending the information to the individual lead.

For more information

Like we said, keep it simple. If you still need help, go to the Help Center, which is inside your account.

Enjoy,

eConnect Email Team