Our development team is always working to make our email marketing application the most robust in the industry.  We are always introducing new features or helping our clients improve their inbox results.  So, I wanted to take a few minutes to outline some pretty cool features about our system that you may not know about. Take advantage of them – they’ll make you a better email marketer.

1. Snippets: Save yourself some time by reusing key elements to your emails like a header, footer, or side bar.  Snippets are small pieces of HTML that you can create and save and use over and over when you need them.
2. Social Share: Did you hear Twitter is going out of business? Me neither. Social media is here to stay and so is email. Insert a simple tag and boom: your subscribers can share your emails with their networks on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Buzz.
3. Cart Abandonment: 7 out of 10 online shopping carts are abandoned.  70%! Wow.  eConnect Email can help you recover those lost sales by firing off triggered emails to each person that abandons your cart with an offer, incentives or reminders to complete the purchase.  Studies show nearly 50% of abandoned shop carts can be recovered and turned into cold hard cash!
4. RSS-to-Email: Why work harder than you have to. With this feature you can update a blog and then reuse your content for your newsletter too, automatically!  Some of our customers do this and use the next item to schedule the deployment and deliver while they sleep. It’s hands-free email marketing, baby.
5. Scheduled, Automatic Mailings: Want your emails to be working for you while you play? Just set it and forget it. The eConnect Email advanced scheduler deploys your emails on time, every time. So while you’re grilling on a Sunday afternoon with Sam Adams, we’ll be delivering your messages whenever and wherever you need ‘em.
6. Inbox Preview & Spam Report: Want to know how your email will render in all the top email providers including the Blackberry and iPhone? With one-click, Inbox Preview will provide a detailed screenshot report ensuring emails appear as intended. In addition, we’ll run it through all of the most popular spam filters (gateway, desktop and server-side) to see if your stuff might be mistaken as spam before you send.
7. Advanced Triggers: eConnect Email can communicate with your CRM. While we provide stock Salesforce.com integration, you may want to integrate with some other system. With a standard SOAP API, you can have us “talk back” to any system you’d like.
8. Dynamic Content: Readers will want to keep reading your stuff if it’s relative to them.  So tailor your emails to your client’s specific interests and you’ll keep them hooked a whole lot longer.  It just takes a little set up but the results will be well worth your time.  It’s no longer a one-size fits all world.
9. Browser Image Editing: We have a simple way to edit your photos or images inside our program.  Photoshop can be overkill and sometimes we just need to make a simple edit.  We have included the most common image editing functions inside of eConnect Email through our integration with Google-owned Picnik. Pretty neat.
10. Auto-responders & Triggered Mailings: Let our system go to work for you once again.  Set up your welcome emails and targeted mailings based on subscriber interactions with an auto-response or triggered mailing series, and relax.
11. API/Integration: For you developers out there, here’s one for you…with our API tools you can integrate your stuff with ours like never before. Want to build a custom reports interface for a client? Want to have your CRM and ours talk to one another? Well now you can.
12. The Free Plan…Forever!: Want something that will really entice you …You can have a free account with us for up to 150 emails per month as long as you wish.  That’s a good one…free emails!  Woo hoo!  Here’s what you get: 150 email/month, store an unlimited number of subscribers, access to all account features, no contract or credit card required!  So give it a spin, activate your free account today and see why eConnect Email is simply, email done better.
13. Email Marketing Services: Need some help with your email design and delivery, or maybe your just too busy doing what you do best? Put us to work for you whether it’s one really important campaign or all of your email marketing efforts. Our professional services team helps marketers design, develop and deploy better email marketing campaigns everyday.
14. The most flexible pricing of any ESP: When it comes to pricing, we’ve learned that flexibility is a cool, refreshing approach. We want you to feel comfortable with how you are billed, whether it be monthly or on a pay as you send basis. You give us an idea of your volume, we’ll show you where you fall. And the greatest part? You’re only charged for the emails you send not the number of contacts you have within your account. Simple.
15. You can talk to us: This one is usually the most pleasant surprise to folks checking us out as a potential solution. Many self-service email service providers even refuse to publish a phone number. That’s ok, but that’s not us. We love to talk to you and want you to feel like we’re in this together. Give us a ring we’re here to help – 888.596.9997.

In case you’ve had your head buried in paperwork, social media is only getting more popular.   In an effort to foster the growing relationship between email marketing and the world of status updates, eConnect Email has integrated Social Sharing into our application and now it can easily be added into your emails with the addition of a tiny little tag, Welcome to Social Email 1.0.

Any emails sent through eConnect Email that include the social sharing tag can now be shared with the following social networks with ease:

Email (of course)
Twitter
Facebook
LinkedIn
Google Buzz

Our email marketing application simply grabs your email’s subject line and creates a tiny URL using bit.ly to share a copy of your email to your social media world.  We have also integrated the Forward-To-A-Friend functionality in the Social Sharing center, making it easier to send your email to another inbox, although that is so last year.

So now that you’ve done the work to create your campaign you can leverage it to another audience with the click of a button.  Easy right?

Awesome. How easy is it?

Super, duper easy. If you are coding your emails by hand, you’ll simply include the following tags where you want a share prompt.  If your using the editor, simply click Custom Fields and you can insert either a text link or share  image automatically.

%%socialshare-icon%% will give you this:

%%socialshare-link%% will give you this: Share this

Below you will find a screen shot of what the Social Sharing landing page looks like once the “Share This” link or image is clicked.

So, can I tell how often it was shared?

Of course! When you log into your Reports area, you will see a Share Statistics tab.  Every time someone shares with a specific network, that number will be displayed in the reports, broken down by network.

What else should I know?

We started with the most popular social networks to share to, but may add more down the road depending on user feedback (so send us your feedback!).

While running through the campaigns sent by our customers, I notice one obvious missing link.  No, not the unsubscribe link, because, after all, you will not be able to send any campaigns without it. I’m referring to a simple link that will help you spread your campaigns and the opportunity to get a few new subscribers.

Most of the campaigns that go out do not add the “Forward This Email” function in their email campaign.  This would be one wasted opportunity for you to be able to capture new subscribers or at least to create some form of viral marketing for your campaign.

We have made adding this link process as simple as possible and you should consider using it.  After all, whether or not your subscribers actually forward to their friends, having that link will have provided them with the convenience to do so, if they want to.

To add your “Forward This Email”, simply click on the Personalize button and choose “Personalized Link” followed by “Forward This Email”, and the link will be added to your campaign.  That is simple right?

So next time you want to send your campaign, do remember to include a “Forward This Email” link and open up the opportunity to spread your campaign and get more subscribers.

Would you like to track your email campaign beyond your subscriber click-throughs?  If you do, our integration with Google Analytics (GA) will be your new best friend, next to eConnect Email itself.  Currently, email marketing reporting can only follow subscribers up to the point where they click on the links in your email campaign after which, the tracking ends there.  But if you are using Google Analytics to track your website, you can extend your email campaign tracking right to your website.

First, before you can do this, you have to ensure 2 things:

1. Set up Google Analytics to start tracking on your website.  We are not going into details on this but since we are nice guys, we will give you a link to Google Analytics tutorials.  The tutorials were done in 2007 but good enough to get you started.
2. Enable Google Analytics in your eConnect Email account.

To enable Google Analytics in eConnect Email, simply do the following:

1. Log in to your eConnect Email account and click on Account tab.
2. Next, click on My Account tab follow by Campaign Settings.
3. You will see an item called Google Analytics.
   
4. Click on the checkbox labeled Turn on Google Analytics for my campaigns to activate Google Analytics for your campaign.  Then, click on the Save Changes button and you are done!

Now, when you start your new campaign, you will see one additional step, that is Google Analytics.

Proceed with setting up your campaign as normal until you reach Step 3, which is Google Analytics?.  We understand that not all campaigns require tracking with Google Analytics. That is the reason why we give you the option to enable it individually when you need it.  To enable Google Analytics for your campaign, click on the checkbox labeled  Enable Google Analytics for this campaign.

Upon clicking on the checkbox, you will see the following screen.

By default, we will take the campaign name you entered previously, but you are free to change it, simply enter the new campaign name in the Campaign name field.  Do take note that changing this field will not affect your actual campaign name set previously.

On top of that, we added the following information:

1. Source: startedm – This will allow you to know that the traffic source is coming from startedm
2. Medium: Email – This tell you that your traffic is coming from email
3. Keywords: Links title or Alt text – If you put title tags in your links or alternate texts in your image links it will be captured by Google Analytics for more detailed reporting.

Once you have set all this up, proceed with your campaign setup as normal.  eConnect Email will now know that you would like to extend your tracking to Google Analytics and will automatically add additional codes to all your links in your campaign.

That’s it and you are done!

In my next posting, we will be looking at Google Analytics and where you can view your reports.  For now, happy email marketing and don’t spam!

Loren McDonald at Email Insider has an interesting post up that talks about “render rate.” In a nutshell, EEC is looking at getting support to make the “render rate” an industry standard.

The “render rate” is a new industry-wide metric created to measure the initial level of email engagement more accurately and consistently than the open rate.

On the surface, “render rate” may seem like just a terminology change to replace the often ambiguous “open rate,” but it goes slightly deeper than that.  While “open rate” is commonly in use now, it is often times far from accurate, especially with the prevalence of image blocker these days, which will prevent tracking images from being downloaded even though the email has been opened.

“Render rate” will serve to clarify the true meaning of “open rate”.  It also introduces another metric, called the “email action” that can more accurately measure email engagement instead of solely relying on “opens”.  This metric takes into account “opens” and “clicks” to track if a recipient can be considered as having been engaged by your email.

This is definitely a step in the right direction.  In fact, from the outset, eConnect Email has already been designed to take into account “clicks” when calculating “opens”. To illustrate, say you have a recipient who’s using Microsoft Outlook, and chooses not to download images in your email.  This means we will not be able to track this “open”.  However, if he clicks on one of the links in this email, we will track this as a “click” as an “open”.  This is much like the proposed “unique action” metric.  If the recipient clicks on yet another link, we will then just track it as another “click”, but will not track the “open” a second time.  In other words, as long as a link is clicked on, and no opens have ever been tracked for this recipient for this email, we will count it as an open as well.  Therefore, no more orphan clicks!

The “render rate” proposal is a welcome suggestion. Not only will it promote a more standardized measurement, it will make the metrics less ambiguous and far more intuitive to understand.

What is this “preference center” thing about?

Simply put, the preference center is a kind of membership page where your subscribers can update their information and subscription preferences.  This gives them the convenience of making changes to their subscription when they want.  For example, one of your subscribers (let’s call him John) is switching to a new email provider and would like your newsletter to be sent to his new address.  Without the preference center, what he has to do is to unsubscribe his old email address and then resubscribe using his new one.  If John is like most subscribers out there, he will most probably not bother jumping through these hoops.  When this happens, you lose out.

With a preference center, you make it less tedious for John to change his email address.  He can simply access his preference center and make the update, and voila!  Your next newsletter will reach him in his new inbox.  No more unnecessary unsubscribes!  Of course, we can’t promise that all your subscribers will do this, but having the convenience of the preference center means that you can dramatically cut down the loss of these subscribers to unsubscribes.

Want more? Here’s more.

With some creative thinking, preference centers can be put to other uses.  It is conventional wisdom that nobody likes to fill in long forms, so we always say “keep your subscription form short and simple” and leave the rest of the questions for later.  The rationale behind this is that the actual act of signing up to your list is good indication that this subscriber is interested to know more and is more likely to give more.  That’s when you can ask them to fill out a longer questionnaire about themselves.

OK, so just how can preference centers be used to do this? Here’s how:

First, you need to customize your preference center.  Log in to your account and choose the list that you want and click on the Preference Center tab.  If this is your first time accessing your preference center, you will see some information that tells you that you are currently using a default preference center.  (Every list that you create gets a default preference center automatically set up.) Click on the Customize Now button to start customizing your preference center.

You can see that by default your preference center only requests for Email Address and Name.  The form builder here works the same way as your form builder for Subscription Form, so if you have tried your hand at building your subscription form, you already know how to customize your preference center.  That’s what we always do here at eConnect Email – trying to reduce the learning curve for our customers as much as possible.

You can add more information if you like by clicking on the Add Field button.  Say, you might want to add a field asking for their preferred email format or their gender.  If there is information that you would like to ask for but is not available in the list (like what are their interests, or what is their favorite coffee brand), just go and create a new custom field and come back to the preference center and it will appear in the list for you to choose.

Once you are done setting up your preference center, you can save it and preview what the actual page looks like.

OK, with the preference center now customized, you need to let your subscribers know where to go to update their details.  Click on the Messages tab under your list and choose Welcome Message.  If you have opted not to send your new subscribers any welcome messages, now’s a good time to change that.  Select the option to send a welcome message, and in the visual editor that appears, choose an area where you want the preference center link to appear (tip: you may want to pick a spot that can make the link pretty prominent).  Then click on the Personalize drop down menu, choose Personalized Links and select the Preference Center Link option.  A link will be inserted for you, and you can customize the text of the link to your heart’s desire.  Remember to save your changes once you are all done.

So, what happens now?  Well, each time a new subscriber signs up and confirm his/her subscription, he/she will receive this welcome message which invites him/her to visit the preference center and provide additional information.  You can also create interest groups from the preference center, but I will talk about this in another post.

Go ahead, start exploring your preference center.  If you find any other cool ways of doing something with your preference center, share it with us here.

I want to talk about the host of new email templates that we have just rolled out that you can immediately use for your own email campaigns, for free.

If you have an eConnect Email account, these templates have been pre-installed for you.  To use them for your campaigns, simply start a new campaign and select the Start From A Template option, and you will see a list of templates to choose from.

For those of you still without an eConnect Email account, don’t fret!  We still want to give you our love.  You can still get your hands on these glossy new templates one of these two ways:

1. Sign up an account with us and start building your campaigns using the new templates, or
2. Download the templates and use them on your existing email marketing system

No, you didn’t read that wrong.  We are absolutely giving the templates away free, even to you folks who are not using eConnect Email.  These templates not only work within eConnect Email, but also in other email marketing systems.  But of course, we sincerely hope you will give eConnect Email a try and see for yourself why you should use eConnect Email for your campaigns.

Most of the templates come in three versions (left-column, right-column and one-column) and there are a few ’special’ templates which only come in one version.  They have been tested to display correctly on email clients like Outlook, Lotus Notes 8, Apple Mail and web mail clients like Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail and more.

Without further ado, I present to you (cue drum roll) eConnect Email templates!

Olive, comes in 3 versions, left-column, right-column and one-column.

Novel, comes in 3 versions, left-column, right-column and one-column.  I love this template as the content area is not constrained by borders, therefore giving you the feel of freedom.  I wanted to call this Freedom but Johnny thought Novel (for the literary mood) would be a better name.

Bliss, comes in 3 versions, left-column, right-column and one-column.  Refreshing color and the team at eConnect Email believes this could be a favorite for those looking for a feminine touch to the design.

Aqua, only 1 version, wonderful template for those selling products online.

Newscast, comes in 3 versions, left-column, right-column and one-column.  The cool thing about this template is that you can use the “icandy” area as some sort of table of contents which your recipients can click on to jump to different parts of the newsletter.

Darknight, comes in 3 versions, left-column, right-column and one-column.

Earthly, comes in 3 versions, left-column, right-column and one-column.  Nice background (and it will appear in Gmail too) with nice rounded borders.  The “icandy” area can be some text or an image.

Ribbon, comes in 3 versions, left-column, right-column and one-column.  One of my favorites with a nice gradient background and the ribbon on the left, with a slight drop shadow gives a unique feeling to this template.  By the way, there’s another version of this template for weekly newsletters too.

Arty, comes in one version but you can choose the Monthly or Weekly version.

Finally, ModernGreen, comes in 3 versions, left-column, right-column and one-column.

That’s it.  I hope you will like using these templates.  You can download them and work offline or see the full versions by visiting our templates page.

If you’ve been checking out our website, you’d know that we’ve been talking a lot about tagging and how it can help you generate better campaign reports, understand your subscribers better, and produce better campaigns.

Just so you can share in our excitement, we’d like to walk you through the process and show you a few simple tricks to harness the power of tagging.  If you’ve ever tagged a blog post or a photo, you’d already know how tagging works.  Essentially, you attach a keyword or category name to similar posts or photos, so visitors to your blog or photo site can click on topics that they’re interested in.  And if you’re hooked up to a web statistics service (or if one is provided by your host), you can find out how many people clicked on a particular tag and get a sense of what your visitors like.

Now imagine having that capability integrated into your email marketing.  We hate to use a cliché, but the possibilities are simply mind-boggling.  When you can tag links within your emails, you’ll be able to find out what’s grabbing your subscriber’s attention.  It’s the next best thing to getting inside their heads.  (By the way, these tags won’t mess with your newsletter in the least; they can’t be viewed by anyone but you.)

It’s a spanking new concept at this point, but once you get the hang of tagging your emails – trust us, it’s easy – you’ll be an expert at making this feature work for you.  In the meantime, here are some ideas to get you started:

Text Vs. Image
Try assigning tags to your text and image links (e.g. “Text Links Columbia Coffee” and “Image Links Columbia Coffee”) to find out how your links are faring.  Wait, you say. Don’t many email programs block images automatically?  Yes they do, and we could probably assume that text links would be more popular as a result, although it would be great to get the actual numbers so you’re not wasting time on fancy graphics that no-one sees.  Also, we’ve heard experts tell us time and again to specify alternative text for images to encourage downloads.  Now you can test this theory when you run a new email campaign, by including ALT text with your images, tagging your image links, and comparing them with a previously tagged campaign that has images without ALT text.

Above Or Below The Fold?
Too often, we hear experts telling us that links “above the fold” get better results than those “below the fold,” which begs the question, “Is anyone paying attention beyond the preview pane?”  Sure, surveys have been done, but wouldn’t it be great to test this theory on the people who really matter to you?  Now you can, without breaking a sweat.  Simply assign a tag to content that falls within the preview pane and another to the rest of your content (e.g. “Above The Fold Columbian Coffee” and “Below The Fold Brazilian Coffee”).  Be sure to tag all your campaigns the same way, even campaigns that are six months old and beyond.  You’ll get the answer you want, instantly.

Product Offers Vs. Information
What’s the best way to your customer’s hearts – a good bargain, or some plain ol’ advice (with a dose of product information)?  Assign a tag to direct product offers and another to informative articles with product mentions (just like this article).  This way, you can start to learn which approach you should take with your subscribers.  Not everyone will jump at your FREE! or 50% discount offers.  But here’s what we like to say at eConnect Email: You won’t know it until you tag it.

Brands & Sponsors
If your email contains links to several in-house brands or product categories, you can tag them to find out which brands or products are winning in the popularity stakes.  And if your email contains links to partner or advertiser sites, tag these links to find out if your campaign is working hard for its money by driving traffic to other sites.

Here’s where we can almost hear some of you thinking, “Great! I can’t wait to run out and tag my next campaign”.  But get this: Tags are not restricted to single campaigns; you can put similar tags across as many campaigns as you like and view stats for a series of campaigns.  What this means is that the reports you generate are based on information and trends over a period of time, and not just a single occurrence.  Think of it as repeating a survey over and over again with the same target audience – you’ll get results so accurate you can practically predict their next move.

We’d like to leave you with a couple more tips before we set you loose on a tag attack. First,  you can add any number of new tags to any campaign, any time you wish.  Just return to the campaign (or campaigns) of your choice and tag away; you’ll be able to access new data across all the campaigns containing your new tags.

Second, we’ve included tag stats in your reports so you can view them easily, and we’ve gone further by including them under each subscriber’s individual report.  By looking at each subscriber’s Top 5 tags, you’ll know at a glance what topics, products or services your subscribers are interested in.

And finally, we’ve integrated tagging into our Smart Lists, allowing you to easily generate lists of subscribers who are interested in certain tags.  Say you’re a coffee marketer – you could enter “Brazilian Coffee” into a search field and get a list of subscribers who’ve displayed interest in Brazilian coffee by clicking on related links.  Life as an e-marketer doesn’t get much better than this.

Well, this is where we get off our soapbox.  What we’ve talked about is just the tip of the iceberg, and we’re sure you’ll think of tagging ideas that have never even crossed our minds.  If you’d like to share them with us and other eConnect Email users, post your comment below.  We’d love to hear from you.