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!

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.

It’s official, we’ve launched eConnect Email 3.0 and now we’re offering a Free Forever Plan!

Build, Send and Track successful campaigns with one of the industry’s most robust and powerful email marketing applications. Take a few minutes and learn how eConnect Email 3.0 can transform the way you do email marketing.

We are strong believers in the try it before you buy it method. Sign up for our Forever Free Plan and send up to 150 emails monthly, store an unlimited number of subscribers, and get access to all account features and support. The best part is you can have it all with no contract or credit card required!

Once you’re ready to activate your account, save 20% by using coupon code: offer

As always, if you have any questions along the way give us a ring (866) 596-9997, we’re here to help!

Cheers!

It’s here!  eConnect Email has just launched version 3.0, an email marketing system that has just about everything you could ever think of (we dare you) at competitive rates and an easy to use interface.  Talk about having your cake and eating it too!   This new platform will give our subscribers access to tons of new features that will make their email marketing experience more creative, more intuitive and more knowledgeable with our enhanced reporting.  Just what are these features you ask? Below is a sampling of the added features:

Expansive Email Template Library

Auto Responders & Triggers

Enhanced Reporting

Redesigned User Interface

Unlimited Custom User Fields

Advanced Features:

Split Testing

inbox Preview

HTML Snippets

Dynamic Content

Re-occurring email with Exclusions

We invite you to sign up for a free account and even request a personalized demo of the system to really get a good feel of how the system will work for your business.   We offer a personalized demonstration of the application and can address key features that will help you accomplish your goals. With your personalized demo we will highlight additional functionality that will help take your marketing to the next level. Raise a glass and celebrate the launch of 3.0 and Cinco de Mayo with the eConnect Email team, Cheers!

This month we will focus on some simple rules to follow for email marketing compliance, delivery, and the respect of your readers.  Also, make your emails pop with our Spring Fever Sale…details at the bottom of this email (ends April 1st)!

http://econnectemail.com/images/Newsletters/March/index.html

Our newsletter this month focuses on helpful tips to engage your reader, when to connect with them, and keeping your relationship clean with simple ethics reminders.   We know that you will think about email marketing in a fresh way after reading this month’s tips and you may see your relationship with your readers in a whole new way.  Also, check out our special offers this month at the bottom of this email!

http://econnectemail.com/images/Newsletters/Feb/index.html

For essential tips on creating interesting emails that will get your message delivered and keep readers subscribed, check out our January Newsletter:

http://econnectemail.com/images/Newsletters/Jan/index.html

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 “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” and 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.

The news on Lycos Europe shutting down is everywhere now.  So what does this mean to you?  How will this impact your subscribers?

Start checking your subscribers for possible Lycos Europe domains and start deleting them – you have until February 15th, 2009 to do it.  The earlier you do it, the better it will be.  Or start sending to these subscribers and encourage them to update their email addresses using the Preference Center.

Deliverability.com has a whole list of domains relating to Lycos Europe. Check them out.

We recently received an email invitation from BlueTie inviting us to test drive their Feedback Loop (FBL) managed by Return Path.  Some of you might be wondering: BlueTie who?  BlueTie is a provider of web-based email and collaboration solutions and recently Excite outsourced their users email service to them.  If you are interested to learn more about it, check out the blog post from Deliverability.com.

With the outsource, Excite no longer provides the FBL service, which is of course bad news for email marketers as we can no longer get feedback from Excite users.  But things should all change real soon.  With the launch (or beta test) of the BlueTie FBL we can now start receiving feedback from Excite users.  Well done BlueTie!

I believe Return Path has done a good job with the Feedback Loop service.  We are seeing more and more ISPs using their FBL service.  Let’s just hope all of them start providing FBL real soon.