The industry sure has been atwitter lately with talk of the subscriber experience.  I recently blogged about one company that had impressed me with their subscription process.  Today, I’d like to start a two-part blog series about how you can improve your own process.  We’ll start with your opt-in page, and will continue with your welcome email next week.

Not to toot our own horn, but for both subjects, I’m going to refer to Blue Sky Factory’s new process.  We’ve just redesigned our website, and with that came an improved subscription process.  The opt-in form and welcome email were both set up through Publicaster, so Publicaster users will be able to mimic our process very easily.  You can check out our new subscription form here.  Notice that we’ve kept it simple, only requiring First Name, Last Name and Email.  Also, we’ve given four different email types in the subscription offerings, which cover the various content options available to subscribers.

To give your own opt-in page a revamp, you’ll first need to create a new opt-in form.  We’ve created a “how to” document for the Publicaster opt-in form builder.  This feature is found under the Account Manager section in Publicaster and is a simple three-step process.  The “how to” document will lead you through these three steps.  Once complete, Publicaster will give you HTML code for your new opt-in form, which you can simply paste onto your subscription page within your website.  Then, anyone that subscribes to your emails via this form will be automatically added to your specified mailing list within your Publicaster account.  How easy is that?!?  If you need help with the opt-in form builder, email us.

While integral, the form itself is just one part of the subscription page.  You’ll also need to include information about your emails and process on this page and throughout your site.  Here’s a list of best practices you should follow when creating your new subscription page:

• Put the form or a link to the form on every page of your website for maximum email capture.  Notice we have a link to our subscription page in the upper right-hand corner of every page throughout our website.

• Keep the form short and sweet.  Only ask for the information that you will really use in your email program.  Think of what information you might use later down the line to segment with.  Some choose to only ask for basics up front (email, first name, last name, zip), and then follow up later with an email asking for more information.  You can test different form lengths, but general opinion is to keep the initial form short and easy so you don’t get drop-offs.

• On the opt-in page, tell the subscriber what they can expect from your emails.  Include a content summary, promises of special offers and the frequency they can expect.  Setting expectations upfront and sticking to those will help keep your subscribers happy.  Also tell them the benefits of signing up for the email program … think “What’s in it for me (the subscriber)?”  You may also want to include a screenshot of a sample email so subscribers will know what to expect.  Check out the “What am I signing up for?” section to the left of our subscription form.  Subscribers can click on any of the four email screenshots to get an overview of the email content and frequency.

• When building the opt-in form in Publicaster, be sure to choose the Email Validation check so that the subscriber must enter an email address in the name@domain.com format.  This will prevent people from making a mistake or entering nonsense just to gain access to a sweepstakes, free whitepaper, etc.

• Set up your opt-in form to be a Notified opt-in form, whereby the subscriber will receive an automatic welcome email.  (This can also be set up through a Publicaster auto-response campaign, which is what we did.  More on this next week.)  This will also help to validate the email address, and will make your subscribers feel “welcomed” by your company.  In the welcome email, give them instructions on whitelisting your email address.  Feel free to link to our how-to whitelist page that we created for our clients to use. 

This should get you started on building your new opt-in form.  As always, feel free to contact us if you need help with anything.  Next week, we’ll go over the welcome email, and I’ll dive into the specifics of how we set ours up.  Check out the image to the right for a preview of our new welcome email.

Deliverability is always a concern for email marketers.  We do everything we can to get into our subscriber’s inboxes, including setting up authentication records, tweaking our creative and subject lines, and being diligent about maintaining a good reputation on our IP address.

Having your subscribers add your From Email Address to their whitelist is the most coveted of deliverability actions. However, it’s often the hardest to acheive. It’s become a best practice to include a request to your subscribers to whitelist your address in your emails.  However, are you sure your subscribers know how to do this? Many probably do not.

That’s why we developed our “How to Whitelist” page. You can now link to this page from your Publicaster emails and your recipients will have access to whitelisting instructions for the major ISPs.

Check out this new resource here, and feel free to use it in your Publicaster emails. Your subscribers will appreciate the help!

A few months ago we added the capability to use Google Analytics tracking with emails sent through Publicaster.  This allows you to click a check box to add a piece of Google Analytics tracking to the end of every link in the email to then track clicks to your website. 

It has recently come to our attention that some websites do not accept links that include Google Analytics tracking.  Several clients have reported that SurveyMonkey is one of these sites.  If you use Google Analytics tracking for a launch and the email includes a link to a SurveyMonkey survey, the website will re-direct the user to the homepage rather than sending them to your survey.

It is possible that other sites will do this as well.  For this reason we strongly urge that you test every email in its final form, including adding Google Analytics tracking if necessary.

If you have any questions about this recent development, please contact your Account Manager or email Customer Support.

As we tread deeper into the buzzword-infested waters of Web 2.0, we often hear terms that sound vaguely tech-related and desirable but we have no idea what they actually mean. One of these words is integration. There has been an industry-wide increase in web service integration as of late, making this the ideal time to jump on the boat.

By the time you are done reading this article, my aim is to help you understand what integration is, how it works, and why you should want it.

What is integration?

The term integration when used in the context of web applications is usually referring to the act of establishing a relationship between one application and another. The most widely used protocol for this kind of relationship is SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol). This protocol is based on its spiritual predecessor, XML-RPC (XML Remote Procedure Call), which uses the same kind of HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) connection that your favorite web browser makes to Google.com (for example) to send data back and forth.

SOAP was intentionally designed like this to enable it to bypass corporate firewall restrictions by fooling the corporate firewalls into thinking that it’s just web traffic. This is one of the main reasons that the protocol has become an industry standard today. SOAP messages are specified in XML (Extensible Markup Language) and contain both the data itself and information about how the data is structured (metadata).

How does it work?

The basic premise behind integration is that applications provide services. For example, Google offers web search services, Flickr offers photo sharing services, and Facebook offers social networking services.

The way we normally access these services is to get on the website and instruct the application what to do by clicking a bunch of buttons and/or filling out form fields. But did you know that the website you see is just a façade? It’s not the application itself. Rather it is an interface to the application, a visual representation of your interaction with the application.

The application doesn’t care whether it’s getting instructions from a website visitor or from another application. All that it cares about is getting instructions that it can understand so that it can provide the services that it offers.

That sounds great, but how does that help me?

Have you ever wondered if it’s possible to automate at least some of the interactions that you have with other web applications? Well I have news for you, the answer is most likely yes. To give a real example, there is a client of ours who has a weekly newsletter. Their weekly newsletter is templated so all that he has to do is fill in the content. He grabs the content manually from another source and copy/pastes it into the email creative. However, there is a lot of content. This process takes him about an hour.

With the power of web services, this client can now automate the entire process so that all he has to do is glance over the final email before sending it out. That’s a fairly significant gain in productivity, reducing a 1 hour task to a 1 minute task.

So how do you know what kind of things you can automate this way? To answer this question, think about the things you do daily that are tedious and repetitive. Most likely, an application could be doing those things for you. Do you have a bi-weekly subscriber list upload, a weekly opt-out report, or something similar? These are all examples of things that can be automated using web services.

One thing to note with doing this kind of integration is that it requires a small amount of work from your tech team. They will need some information about the web services that the target application offers. Typically they need the API (Application Programming Interface) documentation and information about the security method employed(if any) for the application. Usually, secure SOAP transactions employ TLS (Transport Layer Security) and some kind of credentials in the SOAP message itself.

For the Publicaster API documentation, click here.

This article has only scratched the surface of what integration and service-oriented architecture are capable of. We predict that this trend will continue to grow and allow us to build web applications that are seamlessly interconnected and provide us with feature-rich content and services.

We’d like to hear people’s perspectives and viewpoints on the issue. Contact us with any questions or to share your thoughts.

Last month, we announced the addition of our Email Folders feature to the Publicaster Email Library.  After receiving valuable feedback from our clients, we will be moving this feature to be an option under the Account Preferences section in Publicaster.  As of this morning, under Account Preferences, you will be able to choose whether or not you’d like the Email Folders option to appear in your Email Library.  By default, this option will be turned “off”.

Another improvement we have made is that your Email Folders, should you choose to use them, will be listed in alphabetical order. 

To see a sample of how the Email Folders feature would look in your account, please click on the image to the right.

If you have any questions about this updated feature, please contact your Account Manager or email Customer Support.

Do you ever find yourself struggling to find an email that you have saved in your Email Library? Do you have pages and pages of saved emails, creating a hassle when you need to find one? Do you thrive on organization and order?

Many of our clients have answered with a resounded “yes!” for these questions, so we have created a new feature for the Email Library: folders. You can now sort every email that is saved in the library into its own folder, just like in your Outlook or on your computer. This handy tool will allow you to keep similar emails together in an unlimited number of folders.

The days of endless searching in the sea of saved correspondences are behind us!

If you have any questions about this feature, please contact your Account Manager or email Customer Support.

If you are not a current client and you would like more information about this or any feature of Publicaster, please contact us at bsfinfo@blueskyfactory.com or call 866.216.BLUE (2583).

Publicaster’s Google Analytics Integration

Greater power to measure your email campaign’s Return On Investment is in your hands. Publicaster now incorporates the power of Google Analytics, allowing you to track clicks from your email campaign to activity on your website in even greater detail! Google Analytics is a free web site analytics tool that quantifies the success of your web site by measuring page views, landing pages, exit pages, funnel paths, and conversions. Publicaster has always provided web-page tracking – but if you use Google Analytics on your website, we put more analytic tools to work for you, without additional cost. All you need to do is enable the Google Analytics add-on, further enhancing Publicaster’s ability to measure your campaign’s ROI by generating comprehensive reports illustrating your campaign’s impact on your website activity and organizational bottom-line—all done with minimal coding to boot! Our interface minimizes the need for complicated coding— simplifying the often cumbersome task associated with email campaign analysis. Bottom line, Publicaster continues to make it easier, more effective and less time consuming to track what people do after they receive your email.
Bolster Your Campaign with Publicaster Google Analytics Integration

• Get the best of both worlds – leverage the combined advanced analytics tools powered by Publicaster AND Google
• Increase campaign reporting capabilities
• Boost relevancy and response
• Compare the value of your email campaign to other online advertising programs

How to Integrate Google Analytics with Publicaster

If you use Publicaster, there is a high probability that you use our Opt-Out link to manage your opt-outs. But did you know that you can also put a link into your emails to allow your subscribers to update their own information? The Subscriber Preferences link does just that. Simply put the code snippet into your email and your subscribers can update their email address, name, or any other information you give them access to. They can also use this page to manage their subscriptions, including opting-out.

To read more about the Subscriber Preferences page and to learn how to use it, click the link below to download the document.

SubscriberPreferences.doc

If you are not a current client and you would like more information about this or any feature of Publicaster, please contact us at bsfinfo@blueskyfactory.com or call 866.216.BLUE (2583).

Auto response campaigns are used to automatically trigger an email to a segmentation of people at various intervals. This is primarily used to launch emails in a succession to new subscribers based on when they opt in, but it can be used for other purposes as well. Another good use for this is to automatically trigger a follow-up email to people who click on a link in a previous email.
If you would like to learn more about the uses of auto response campaigns and learn how to set them up in Publicaster, check out this document: Auto_Response_Campaigns.doc

If you are not a current client and you would like more information about this or any feature of Publicaster, please contact us at bsfinfo@blueskyfactory.com or call 866.216.BLUE (2583).

We would like to officially announce that development of the next version of Publicaster is underway. Since its development, we have received a lot of great feedback on Publicaster 6.0 from our users. We have incorporated that feedback into what we think will be the pinnacle of online marketing tools.

Publicaster 7.0 will not just be about email. This new version will also offer various other distribution channels to our clients, such as RSS, blog, TXT and podcasts. In addition to this, we are redesigning our existing infrastructure to allow for tremendous scalability and personalization. We are also tightly integrating with delivery assurance tools to help maximize our clients’ inbox placement.

There is much more to come that we know will be of remarkable value to our clients. Keep an eye out as we are planning a beta launch of Publicaster 7.0 at the beginning of 2008. If you would like to be considered to become a beta tester, please email bsfsupport@blueskyfactory.com.