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.

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.