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.

We’re excited to announce the rollout of a new workflow for the campaign creation process. We’ve made it easier than ever to see what step you’re at, what you’re sending, who you’re sending to and when your campaign will go out.

The Create & Send section – the part of eConnect Email where you set up a campaign, select your recipients, test your email and schedule delivery – is one of the most important parts of our product.

As the heart of eConnect Email, the Create & Send pages do a great job of helping our users create amazing email campaigns. But as we added more and more features over time, we started worrying about overcrowding our original design. For example, when we added the option to personalize subject lines in the “Define the Campaign and Sender” screen, it was squeezed in on the far right in tiny font, while the subject line stayed on the left.

To make sure eConnect Email stayed as user-friendly as ever, we gave the whole workflow a new, cleaner look and feel – and also spent some time improving the usability of things like subject line personalization by making the feature in line with where you write your subject line:

We also wanted to make sure users knew where they were in the workflow at any given point, so we made the status bar more prominent. At any time, you’ll see what steps are left and all the options available to you at each stage.

We’ve also made use of icons in the new design to help make navigation easier than ever before, particularly for things like our A/B testing feature or RSS-to-email option:

Overall, we’re proud and excited to share this change to the campaign creation process with you — and we look forward to your feedback in the comments 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.

Introducing the new and improved eConnect Email, your go-to email marketing platform. Featuring enhanced usability, customization and security- the new eConnect Email will make building your email campaigns a breeze!

To begin, we restructured eConnect Email from the ground up with several new and exciting features. We now have a template builder where you can create custom rock-solid templates optimized for both desktop and mobile applications.

How about those clients of yours in different time zones? Yep, the new eConnect Email will automatically send your email campaign to your recipients in their specific time zone. In addition, we have beefed up security on both ends with back-end authentication and relationships with top ISPs and industry-leading mail servers.

Worldview

See who is opening and what they’re clicking on with real-time data, all beautifully displayed on Worldview (our gorgeous maps app). Don’t forget about the bread and butter, you know, ROI- the new eConnect Email boasts in-depth reports on your email campaign’s performance and deliverability.

Social Integration

Social. Yes I said it and yes we did it. You can now allow your Facebook friends and fans to subscribe to your newsletter directly from your fan page. We also report every “Like” and “Tweet” your campaign receives as part of our stunning reports. So now you can see not only which subscribers are sharing with their friends, but also what they’re saying about you.

So what are you waiting for? Dive in and set up a new eConnect Email account today for free!

Make sure to check out the new image editor which was released today. The image editor Picnik (which has been integrated into the app since the release of version 3) was purchased by Google and is no longer being supported as of April 19th so we made the switch to Aviary. The two (Aviary and Picnik) will be running side by side for the next week or so to give all of our customers a transition period.

Next on the list (and underway) is the newsletter editor… that release date will be coming soon!

This upcoming Saturday morning, December 10th eConnect Email will be experiencing some downtime due to a planned database server migration. To minimize disruption, the migration will begin at 11:00 PM (PST) and will run until complete – during this period the application will be unable to create or send emails. We’re expecting it to take 24 hours to complete and you will be able to resume sending as soon as it’s live again.

In preparation for the move we will be trying to minimize any campaigns in the sending queue by Friday evening. Please plan to send any large volume campaigns at the start of the the day Friday and plan to taper off by the end of that day.

During the migration, we will be implementing some new security enhancements. We’ve recently discovered some areas that we’d like to update and this database move will be a good opportunity to do so.

This migration is a milestone in bringing you all the greatly improved features we intend to offer our clients on eConnect Email and will be the only disruptive maintenance we require during the migration to our new infrastructure. We appreciate your understanding and co-operation!

Thanks!

We are happy to announce that we’ve rolled out a series of instructional video tutorials to help familiarize you with some of the basic functions offered within eConnect Email.  So if you’re a visual learner sit back, turn up your speakers and grab a cup of joe while we walk you through some of the basic functionality within your eConnect Email account.

Getting Started Video Tutorials

• Creating a contact/ mailing list overview
• Importing contacts into your account
• Building an email campaign overview
• Image Manager overview
• Sending email campaign overview
• Manually adding contacts

Over the coming months we will be adding to our video library as we walk you through some of the more advanced email marketing features offered by eConnect Email (ex. email auto responders, email triggers, customer segmentation and more).  Is there a specific feature you’d like us to cover?  If so, please respond to this post and let us know!   As always we welcome your feedback.

As we embark on an extend holiday weekend we wanted to wish you and your family a very Merry Christmas & Happy New Year.  We sincerely appreciate your business and friendship over the last year and are looking forward to what 2011 has in store!

Holiday Hours:

Will be closed from Friday, December 24th… until the start of the day Monday, December 27th… and again on Friday, December 31st… until the start of the day Monday, January 3rd 2011.