We have really grown over the past six weeks. One of the best parts of having new team members at Blue Sky Factory is watching them learn and also learning from them. Read as one of our newest team members shares his list of the top three things he’s learned about email marketing since arriving at the Factory.

Blue Sky Factory has recently seen monumental growth in the staff. In the past two months we have welcomed four new members to the team: Scott Palubinsky and Jennifer Schuerholz in Sales, Ilija Stevcev in IT, and Noah Kim in the Creative Department.

On behalf of all of us (relative) vets at Blue Sky Factory, I would like to welcome and introduce our newest additions. They have all contributed a great deal to the team in such a short time!

Click here to read the bios for our newbies!

In September, we featured a post about three ways to improve email deliverability. The feedback from our users regarding this article has been great and we have been able to help many people with their setup over the past month. However, in many cases, interested clients have not been able to modify their DNS, because either they could not get past the barriers presented by their networking staff or because they didn’t have access to their DNS.

I’ve thought about this problem and tested a solution with a couple of clients with very positive results. This solution was to register the client a new domain and used the very inexpensive mail and DNS services provided by today’s top registrars. In this particular example, I will use godaddy.com, but you are free to use any domain registering company you wish. Some of the other good ones are register.com and dotster.com.

In this specific situation, our client, ABC Company, needed to register a domain name for use in their Friendly From Email Address for email marketing. ABC Company decided to register the name abcCompany-news.com. Basically they just appended “-news” to the end of the existing domain. This keeps the name recognition to your subscribers and is something more friendly than the typical ESP type of domain you see in many places. After registering this name and setting up the DNS and email, they switched their Friendly From Email Address on their next campaign to use donotreply@abcCompany-news.com. They were very happy with the overall improvement in deliverability and are happy to have easy access to the account to collect bounces and challenges.

One word of warning: when you agree to use one of the large registrars, you must be able to backup the source of your subscribers. If you use that domain to send questionable emails and someone complains, you will be shut down and possibly fined. Over several hundreds of thousands of emails that went out in this case, one person complained to the registrar. The registrar contacted the client and asked for clarification. Luckily, our client kept good records and was able to respond with the detail of exactly how and when the subscriber opted into their list.

Now I’m going to walk you through step by step of registering a new domain name and setting up email and DNS. In our example, we are going to register the domain name bsffactorydirect.com.

Step 1: Go to godaddy.com, search for your domain name and register it. During the checkout process, be sure to include Email Hosting during your check process. As you see below, for a whopping investment of $22.18, I now have a new domain name and email hosting ready to go.

Step 2: Once your account is setup, log into your account with the information that godaddy.com provides. You will see a link for “Host and Email” where you can configure your email. This will launch godaddy’s email setup. Click on the “Add” email button and fill out the simple form they give you. I created an account called “donotreply”. I left everything default except for creating an auto-responder, as this is an unmonitored email account. You can use your favorite email client to send and receive email form this account. Refer to the godaddy documentation on the how-to.

Step 3: Setup your DNS with a SPF record and an A record. First step is to make your new domain name point to your corporate website. The first record in your DNS is called an A (Host). This is what controls where your name points. Click the Edit button and type in the IP address of your corporate site (this is the hardest part, I promise).

You are almost there! At this point, you’ll need to contact Blue Sky Factory support if you haven’t already to have us create a SPF record and Domain Key for you. Once you get that information from us, set up your SPF record first. Godaddy offers a “SPF Wizard” but that is actually more complicated than it needs to be. Instead, simply click on “Add New TXT Record” and in the TXT Name field enter a “@” character. Then in the TXT Value field, enter the SPF record we supplied you with, which will look something like: v=spf1 a mx ip4:69.63.151.0/24 ~all. Step 4: With the information from Blue Sky Factory, you are also now ready to set up your Domain Key. This step looks a little scary, but just follow the step-by-step instructions here and you will be fine. In the email you receive from Blue Sky Factory, you will be given the entries you need to add as TXT entries just as you did in the step above. Below are some examples of what these TXT entries will look like:

TXT Name	TXT Value
_domainkey.bsffactorydirect.com	“t=y; o=~;”
factorydirect._domainkey.bsffactorydirect.com	“k=rsa\; p=MIGfMA0GCSqGSIb….”

Click on “Add New TXT Record” again. For the TXT Name, enter “_domainkey” and for the value type in “o=~”.

Then, click to add another TXT record. For the value field, take the entry from your email (example from above is “factorydirect._domainkey.bsffactorydirect.com”) and copy all the text up to the “.” after “_domainkey” (factorydirect._domainkey) and use that for your TXT Name. Your TXT Value is the big long funny looking string without the “\”. Godaddy’s DNS doesn’t like the “\” so just leave it out – other ISP’s may allow its use.

And that’s it! I can now use donotreply@bsffactorydirect.com as the Friendly From in my Publicaster campaigns, and I’ve set up three new TXT entries - one for the SPF record and two for Domain Keys. Trust me, after you do this one time it will be much quicker to do the next time.

Does this sound a little daunting to you or are you having trouble finding your IP address? Feel free to contact bsfsupport@blueskyfactory.com with any questions you have about this and we will be happy to walk you through this process.

Running a growing tech company just isn’t busy enough for our CEO, Greg Cangialosi, so he decides he’s going to carve out time to become an author. Five months later, he’s set to officially announce the release of The Business Podcasting Book, a must-read for everyone interested in learning and applying the fundamentals of Podcasting.

Over the past several years Greg has become a respected Thought Leader and industry expert on everything podcast related. In addition to producing podcasts for a handful of Fortune 500 companies, he produces his own podcast at http://www.roiradio.com/, and regularly contributes and speaks at a variety of events.

We’re psyched that his hard work and energy have paid off with this sweet book, and can’t wait to see what’s around the corner!

Check out a press release on his book release here

And go get a copy ‘everywhere books are sold’ as they say, or make it real easy and just click here.

Congrats Greg!

In our continuing efforts to provide our clients with the best email marketing tools in the industry, Blue Sky Factory has partnered with Return Path to offer the Sender Score Monitor Program. This invaluable service allows you to identify and minimize deliverability trouble before ever hitting the “send” button, helping to ensure maximum performance from your email lists. Interested in what this new program can do for you and your emails? Read more here.

Want to be the first to know about future Blue Sky Factory annoucements? Sign up to receive Factory Direct, our monthly company e-newsletter.

We are pleased to announce that Blue Sky Factory has achieved Safe Harbor status and, as a result, has been added to the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Safe Harbor List. This significant achievement demonstrates Blue Sky Factory’s commitment to adjust its practices to adhere to the Safe Harbor framework developed by the U.S. Department of Commerce and the European Commission regarding the protection of personal data from Europe as required by the European Union’s Directive on Data Protection. Safe Harbor certification recognizes Blue Sky Factory as one of the very few trusted companies that demonstrates a commitment to security and the protection of protected data.

To read more about Safe Harbor and to view a list of other compliant organizations, go here.

On June 1st, we officially moved into our new office space in the renovated McHenry Theatre located in historic Federal Hill in Baltimore.

The McHenry Theatre originally opened its doors in 1917 and was in operation until 1971. During this time, it served as a vaudeville theatre and later as a movie house, seating over 1,100 people. In the years since 1971, the theatre has been used as a Goodwill thrift store and a sports center with batting cages and video games. The theatre was finally renovated into office spaces in 2002. Many of the original architechural features of the theatre remain, including a 30-foot rotunda ceiling and intricate moldings and columns.

Click here to see photos of our new home!

Yesterday we announced our acquisition of RSSFWD. RSSFWD is a free web based service that allows users to subscribe to any content that is syndicated via an RSS feed, and receive updates directly to their inbox.

We are excited to bring the RSSFWD application into our offerings, and will operate as an autonomous, independent service of Blue Sky Factory. Currently, RSSFWD services over 30,000 unique users, polls over 32,000 unique RSS feeds and sends roughly 4mm emails per month.

To learn more about our acquisition - the press release can be found here.

I also wrote a brief article on RSS to Email and how applications like RSSFWD help bridge the gap between email and RSS and assist with user adoption of RSS based content. You can find the article on our website here.

I am excited to announce that we have just became a silver sponsor of the Email Experience Council.

“The eec is a global professional organization that strives to enhance the image of email marketing and communications, while celebrating and actively advocating its critical importance in business, and its ROI value.”

I originally met Jeanniey Mullen and Ali Swerdlow at the ClickZ Specifics: Email Marketing event in NYC last October, and most recently at the Marketing Sherpa summit in Miami. They are doing an incredible job with the rest of the team in fostering industry support and creating awareness of the important impact that email marketing has on any organizations marketing mix. If you check out the news page, you will see just some of the work the eec has been up to, publishing research, surveys, white papers, etc. Lots of good stuff.The eec also has many roundtables going to address industry issues and best practices. And one of my favorite initiatives is the recently launched EmailStatCenter, a site dedicated to nothing but stats around email marketing.

If your involved in email or online marketing in general the eec is a great industry organization to join. They are making things happen and making us all smarter marketers. You can register here, and if your not ready to join today I would at least sign up for their weekly email newsletter that never disappoints.

We look forward to getting actively involved with the initiatives that the eec is working on.

If you are on the west coast, or are planning to be in the bay area this coming May, please join me at these two great industry events. I will be participating in both events as a speaker. If you are planning on attending please drop me an email so we can make sure to link up. I can be reached at greg [at] blueskyfactory [dot] com.

May 16th, 2007 - Click Z Specifics: Email Marketing
San Francisco, CA - San Francisco Marriott
Presentation: “Cutting Through the Clutter Creatively”

May 31-June 1 - INBOX: The Messaging Industry Event
San Jose, CA - San Jose Marriott
Panel: “The Future of Viral Email and User Generated Media”