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”

We just returned from the MarketingSherpa Email Summit where we exhibited the new Blue Sky Factory trade show booth. The sold out event was incredible, a “must go” for anyone who is looking to learn about best practices and the state of the email industry.

Above is a picture of Tim Barton (right) and myself at our new display. Great job to Keith Nickoles and Jarrod Walpert for helping us bring this altogether. We look forward to next year!

They offer some of the best research in the industry, so when The Sherpa offer’s up some Free Tips from their research findings it’s worth a look.

Click Here to see the report.

This is their Annual Benchmark Guide, a popular year-end report they offer for a hefty fee.

This preview is a promotional tool to be sure, but does offer some excellent summary information at no cost….so take a look and learn:

1. Is Email Dead?
2. How to Optimize Opt-in Forms
3. Where to Focus your A/B testing
4. Design Tips for Designers.

…and much more that will help you have greater success in 2007!

Click Here for the report

Happy new year to everyone! We wish you a happy, healthy and prosperous 2007! We look forward to working with you and continuing to add value to your marketing efforts in the new year and beyond. In 2007 we will be releasing many new features in Publicaster so stay tuned, you will be hearing from us very soon! All the best in 2007.

ClickZ is producing its “Click Z Specifics: Email Marketing” conference on Oct 24 & 25th in NYC. I will be doing a talk titled “Cut Through the Clutter Creatively.” I am looking forward to it and am excited about the topic. As cluttered as the inbox can be these days its more important than ever to have a well balanced creative message that gets delivered, read and acted on. I will be presenting some examples of what works in the inbox, and what you should avoid altogether.

In addition, one of our clients Doug Broujos who is the SVP of Client Services at TIG Global will also be speaking on the 25th on “Switching ESP’s - Painlessly.” Doug will talk about his perspective on what considerations and steps to take when switching your email service provider.

We hope to see you up there, drop us a line or a comment if you will be in attendance.

Hi to all Thinking Inbox readers!

My name is Dipesh Mamtora, and I lead the development team at Blue Sky Factory. I have been with the company for over three years. I will be blogging about all the cool (yes cool!) development work we do here at Blue Sky Factory, but most of my posts will be about feature updates/upgrades to keep you up to date.

As most of you know, we recently launched version 6.0 of Publicaster and already released many minor/major feature updates. This will be where we post the latest and greatest information on the new features and point releases that we make. Publicaster is set to have many additional features roll out over the course of 2006. We look forward to your feedback!

Anyways, I hope this will help all of you Publicaster users discover the new features and encourage you non-Publicaster users to check out our product soon!

Dipesh

Next week, I will be speaking at the edu Web Conference at the Sheraton in downtown Baltimore. I will be speaking with Sean Carton on a subject dubbed “Effective eMarketing for Higher Ed.”

Sean and I will be discussing the justification for higher education to use the online medium as a primary way to generate prospective student leads and nuture them through the decision making process. We will be talking for an hour with some Q&A at the end.

We are also a gold sponsor of the event. If you are attending stop by our table and say hello. Both Tim Barton and Jeremy Dempsey from our team will be manning the booth.

At Blue Sky Factory, we have experimented with many forms of marketing over the years. Most of our attention has naturally been online, with a few exceptions. Our latest trial falls under the print medium. This will be the second “experiment” for us, as the first one, in BtoB Magazine, proved very effective for the promotion of a webinar we produced earlier in the year.

This month, we have written an educational / awareness article for marketers on the benefits of using permission based email in their marketing mix. The article can be found in this weeks mid-atlantic version of BusinessWeek Magazine. I am looking forward to seeing what kind of results this marketing effort yields us. One good thing we have found, is that the article is already being repurposed for other marketing avenues we are executing on. The piece will also be distributed as an educational tool to a few local and regional non-profit organizations who membership is made up exclusively of middle market businesses, a nice target for us.

We are happy to announce the launch of our new corporate website. Great job to Keith N. and Dipesh Mamtora from our team who worked together on the launch. We all love the site, Keith went out of the box on the design for a email service provider, and we love to differentiate ourselves from the rest of the pack.

The best news is that the site was submitted and chosen as a “Design Award Winner” on CoolHomePages.com. Great job and congrats again!