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.