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.

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!

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.

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

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!

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!).

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!

We have just rolled out a number of new features to eConnect Email, and we are very excited to share them with you here.  As always, we want to make eConnect Email better, stronger and more fun to use, so this new batch of updates is geared towards making subscriber management and campaign building easier for you.  So, what do we have in store for you? Check these out:

• Free templates for you
• Subscriber Preference Center
• Inline CSS
• API (Application Programming Interface)

Free Templates For You

You have experienced the ease and fun of designing and sending your campaigns using eConnect Email.  Now, we top it off with some glossy new templates that we provide to you absolutely free. You can use these templates for your own campaigns.  Now, your campaigns can have a great professional look without breaking the bank.  See them in their full glory now!

Subscriber Preference Center

We all know it’s crucial to be able to hold our subscriber’s attention, and high unsubscribe rates are truly depressing for most marketers.  Yet, more often than not, when a subscriber unsubscribes, it may not necessarily be that he/she does not want to hear from you anymore.  There could be times when a subscriber changes email addresses when he/she graduates from school, changes jobs or changes email providers, and so will not be able to receive your campaigns at the same email address anymore.  Most of them will simply unsubscribe and may never return to resubscribe themselves.  So what can marketers like you do in these cases?  Enter the subscriber preference center.  With a preference center, we can give your subscribers a way to update their email addresses, instead of totally opting out of your lists.  Not only that, the preference center also gives them the means to update their own information themselves.

Our brand new preference center is easy to use. Each list that you create in your account will have a default preference center created for you.  From now on, you just need to insert the preference center link in your campaigns, and voila!  Your subscribers get to update their email addresses without having to first unsubscribe and then resubscribe to your lists.  Note, though, that an unsubscribe link in your campaign is still mandatory so that you stay compliant.  Even in the preference center, your subscribers can also choose to unsubscribe from all of your lists, if they so desire.

Need to customize the preference center to include more fields and your own custom fields?  Just go to the Preference Center tab under your list, and click on Customize and use the easy-to-use form builder to add fields and tweak the appearance of the form.  The form builder is the same one as you have used for setting up your subscription forms, so you know how cool and fun it will be to design your preference center.

Inline CSS

Making your campaigns play well with the myriad of email clients out there can be a hard nut to crack.  There are specific workarounds that you must consider if you want your campaigns to render correctly in most of the mainstream email clients.  Among them is the use of inline CSS so that your campaigns can survive “rendering hell” in such email clients as Gmail and Outlook 2007 which either strips out and replaces the <HEAD> and <BODY> tags in your markup, or just isn’t very good in its support for HTML emails.  But oh, inline CSS is such a nightmare to code up and maintain. Well, we understand that, and we have included a quick and easy way to help you get around that.

Our new inline CSS conversion feature can help convert your embedded style blocks in your markup to inline CSS.  This saves you the hassle of having to code them up by hand.  Simply check on the “Convert to inline CSS” box in the design view and we will do the rest.  You can even preview the conversion and do a side-by-side comparison against your original email before you confirm that you want the conversion to take place.  Now, there are no more excuses not to look pretty in Gmail anymore, are there?

API (Application Programming Interface)

Do you already have a blog, a shopping cart or a custom web application that can just use some sweet tools to integrate them to eConnect Email?  Then, you will be pleased to know that we have launched our first version of the eConnect Email API.  In this version, we focus on giving you the functions to manage your subscribers from your external applications.  Over time, we will enhance and include even more functions into the API, so stay tuned.  In the meantime, check out the new API page to find out more.

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.