Ni Hao!

For those of you who do not know Chinese, that means “Hello!”. Well, even I do not know Chinese, but Publicaster does! Publicaster just picked a whole bunch of languages and can now send emails in those languages. If you have recently set-up new emails in Publicaster, you must have noticed a new drop down list called “Email Encoding”. Some of you must have already figured out the purpose of that email encoding field.

Publicaster now supports double byte unicode characters in emails, along with 34 different kinds of encoding formats. The default selection is “iso-8859-1″, which is the encoding format for western alphabet set, i.e. the one used by American English. You have to select a particular encoding because the email reader of the recipient needs to know how to interpret and display the text in the email. Using an incorrect encoding can mangle the text and it may appear all garbled up.

Please note that in order to use a particular language you need to install the corresponding language packs on your computer. A good way to test it is to visit a website which uses the language you plan to send an email in. If you can read the text correctly, chances are that you already have that language pack installed. To figure out how to install language packs on Windows XP, click here.

In the screenshot above, you can see how Japanese language content can be sent using the “iso-2202-jp” encoding.

Keep checking the Blue Sky Factory blog “The Thinking Inbox” for more Publicaster feature updates and useful e-marketing tips!

Use Publicaster and talk to the world!

The holidays are upon us, and that means our inboxes are flooded with the typical “Last Chance to Save/Get Free Shipping/Have your Gift Shipped by [date]” holiday emails. With everyone competing for the same inbox space, it is crucial now more than ever to have your holiday wishes stand out.

In his article “Winning Holiday Email Tactics,” published by iMediaConnection, Spencer Kollas outlines his “10 Secrets of Savvy Holiday Marketers.” Below are these ten tips, as well as how Publicaster can help you implement them:

1. Get Permission - Build your email list by using an opt-in mechanism, like the one offered in Publicaster under Account Manger. Once subscribers do opt-in, be sure to tell them what they can expect to receive from you, how often and why they will be receiving it. And, of course, to stay off the “naughty” list, always provide recipients with an easy and obvious way to unsubscribe.

2. Stick to the Subject - Use subject lines that break through the clutter and clearly state who the email is from. Include a recognizable company name or identity in the subject line and Friendly From name. Keep the subject line short, relevant and use it to create urgency.

3. Don’t Follow the Crowd - Test your emails! Don’t assume that because everyone else sends on a Monday and uses a “Sale! Sale! Sale!” subject line that you should too. Every customer is different and will react to different offers. Publicaster allows you to test your emails and deliverability options by using the Random feature in Manage Segmentations. Send your email with Variable X to a random 50 recipients and your email with Variable Y to another random 50 recipients and see which performs best. Use this information when launching to the remainder of your list.

4. Make it Personal - Use the information you have to customize your holiday greetings. You can easily customize greetings using our Personalization feature in the Email Set Up> Add New Email module. A very simple personalization is using the recipients first name within the body of the email, which you can easily do in Publicaster when setting up your email. If you don’t have enough information about your recipients to do this successfully, make information gathering one of your New Year’s Resolutions. You will thank yourself come next year’s holiday season.

5. Be Responsive - Everyone seems to be in a rush around the holidays, and customers expect their online inquires to be answered quickly. Make sure you and your team are prepared for the increased holiday traffic. If you aren’t, customers will simply move on to the next email in their inbox to get the response.

6. Keep it Short and Simple - In between decorating, buying gifts and planning parties, people have little time to waste during the holidays, so be sure your email is clear and concise. Put your email to the Five Second test: Can a recipient name your call to action within five seconds of reading the email? And just as important, can the recipient easily click through to find what you are promoting?

7. Make a Suggestion - Use the information on past purchases or actions to tailor your message. If you know the customer recently purchased one of your products or services, why not send them an email marketing an product accessory or follow-up visit? Or, if you know the recipient clicked through your email to view Product A, but never purchased, why not send them an email that highlights this product and gives them more information, or perhaps a exclusive offer for this product? Again, this can be achieved using our Segmentation tool within Publicaster.

8. Remember to be Relevant - Consider sending some purely goodwill emails instead of always sending a sales-related one. Such goodwill emails can help to make recipients more receptive to your promotional emails. Send tips on how to relax during the holidays, ideas on saving time while doing your holiday shopping or share some holiday recipes.

9. Enhance Relationships - The holidays aren’t just all about sales and business. Take this opportunity to connect with your customers to spread some goodwill. A simple holiday greeting to thank them for their business will go a long way, and will keep you in the forefront of their minds when they are making holiday purchases. And don’t forget to also reach out to your prospects, suppliers and partners - everyone appreciates some holiday cheer! If you would like Blue Sky Factory to design a holiday greeting for you, please contact us at 1-866-216-BLUE.

10. Tie it all Together - Start planning now to integrate all your marketing efforts by using a common theme. This will help to pull all your channels together and make your brand more recognizable to your recipients.

With these ten tips in mind, it’s now time to begin designing and testing your holiday emails to ensure a successful holiday season.

Some of the best email marketing advice often comes from the watchdogs of the industry. The most recent edition of the Return Path newsletter focuses on how marketers and publishers can simultaneously improve the transparency and effectiveness of their lead generation.

While I encourage you to read the full article, here is how you can implement a few of their ideas in Publicaster:

Tell your subscribers what they’re signing up for: On your optin page, be very specific about the various types and frequencies of your messages. Use the Publicaster-generated optin code as a starting point for your optin page and, to avoid aggravating your recipients and breaking their trust, set up Publicaster segmentation to be able to send a subscriber only those messages for which they are interested.

Follow-up within 60 minutes: The sooner that your subscribers receive a communication from you, the better the chance that they will remember that they subscribed and will welcome your future messages. Set up an Auto-Response campaign in Publicaster so that, within the hour, new subscribers receive a welcome email that thanks them, summarizes the value you offer, and gives the new subscriber an opportunity to verify their Subscriber Preferences (using the Publicaster code snippet).

Set realistic goals and then measure performance: Some companies, in a desperate attempt to reach unrealistic goals, become callous in their list hygiene or in their optin process. This will damage any trust that you’ve established with your recipients. Set realistic goals. Performance levels vary dramatically by industry, email use, and by company. Sit down to calculate what ROI you require from your own email marketing program and then monitor your actual performance using the detailed reporting available in Publicaster. At a minimum, target the number and percentage of opens. As you tune your email marketing efforts, you should also drive towards a number of clicks and conversions (also tracked in Publicaster reporting).

Don’t be caught up in a shortsighted attempt to, at all costs, send to the maximum number of recipients. Instead, use the tools in Publicaster, to maintain smaller, healthier, and more targeted lists. Not only will you build trust with your customers, you will probably also generate higher quality leads and improve your ROI.

This post was derived from my recent speaking engagement at Click Z’s Specific: Email Marketing conference in NYC. I gave a talk titled “Cutting Through the Clutter Creatively” which focused on why marketers should be strategic when considering the creative variables that make up their email marketing campaigns.

More than ever the inbox is a challenging place to capture the attention of your recipients. Some of the stats that I referenced at my talk include the Nielsen Norman research whichs states that the average recipient of marketing or promotional email has an attention span of your email of five seconds or less. And those monthly newsletters we all work so hard on producing typically only capture the attention of users for 40-50 seconds max. This information reinforces the fact that creative elements can sometimes make or break your email marketing efforts.

The key creative variables in email that marketers must embrace are the following:

From: Build the trust of your recipients by making your identity obvious. Be consistent with your From line, make sure its branded with your company name or an individual from your organization.

Subject Line: Jupiter Research found that 35% of email users open email based on what is contained within the subject line. Be sure to include your company name or brand name within the subject line, as recent research shows this can have a dramatic effect on open rates.

Copy: Personalized, targeted and relevant are three words that should define the copy in your email marketing campaigns. Write clear and concise copy, putting your main message and identifiers above the fold, and make sure you use fonts and a font size that makes reading your email easy on the eye.

Imagery: Always include your company logo at the top right or somewhere on the header. This helps with establishing the brand recognition. Always have your audience in mind and use relevant imagery that is targeted towards your recipent and tailored around your message. Be sure to hyperlink all imagery to your main call to action.

Call to Action: Place your key call to action above the fold as often as possible. During your testing phase, conduct your own internal “5 second test” to a small group of individuals to make sure your call to action is clear and to the point.

During my talk I also mentioned the importance of keeping your landing page consistent with your email creative. If you do manage to get a recipient to open and then act on your email, don’t lead them astray. Targeted landing pages with consistent creative elements can go a long way in increasing your conversion rate.

Finally, we all know that one of the best attributes of the email medium is that its easy to test and tweak your initiative. Every audience is different, so learn as much as you can about your list of recipients by testing a variety of creative elements before drawing any hard conclusions on what works and what doesn’t.

If you are interested in receiving a copy of my power point presentation from Click Z Specifics, feel free to email me at greg [at] blueskyfactory [dot] com.

Happy emailing!

The most important thing after freedom of speech, according to us, is the freedom for one to choose/change one’s own password. Well, not quite, but it sure is important. We realized that this basic functionality was something that was missing in Publicaster, but that is not the case anymore. Just like many other features we have built in the past several months, this was a result of requests from Publicaster users.

This simple feature can be accessed on Publicaster’s home page right after you log in. Simply click on the “Change my password” button in the middle of your screen right below the account selection drop-down menu, highlighted in green in the screenshot above. Simply follow the instructions to modify your password.

Please remember to email us you feedback/comments/feature requests to bsfsupport at blueskyfactory . com. We love hearing from you!

To track or not to track is the question, and we say you decide what should be the answer. We have just finished implementing the ability to track links within text version of emails sent using Publicaster. While tracking links in text version is now possible, there is a caveat. Text versions of emails do not have hyperlinks per se, like their HTML counterparts. e.g. you cannot use click here in a text version of an email message. Therefore after addind the link tracking code to the text version, the link will look like: http://tk.publicaster.com/DC/ctr.aspx?dlv=1234&sbr=23&f=0 which might be unacceptable to some of Publicaster’s wide range of users.

So we thought it might be best for the users to decide whether they want to track links in text version or not. And while we were at it, we thought why don’t we empower them with a little more control over their link tracking options. So now, as can be seen on the screenshot above, you will be able to select one of the three link tracking options for your mailings:

1. Tracking links in all versions: Links will now be tracked in every version of the email. i.e. HTML, Text, or Video
2. Track links in all versions except text: Links will not be tracked for the Text version of the email. Links in all other versions will be tracked.
3. Do not track links in any version: No link tracking will be used for this mailing and the reporting will not display any link click activity.

Note: Links will not be tracked in text version of creative even if you had selected to “Track links in all versions” if the link is missing either http:// or https://

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e.g. Custom forward to a friend page

When the custom forward to a friend page uses the template above, a forward to a friend page like the one in the screenshot below shows up when a recipient clicks on the forward to a friend page in an email that was sent from the particular account.

Time for yet another feature update. Every once in a while, for some reason, you have to go back to an old email that you sent using Publicaster. It used to be that in order to get to that email you would have to browse through all your emails to find it. To make this task quick and easy, we just introduced the email search feature.

The email seach feature can be found on the “email library page” as can be seen in the screenshot above. Just enter some text and hit the search button and the list will get updated with the results that match. To get the entire list again, hit the search button with an empty search box.

Happy searching!

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.

Publicaster supports several key web service methods, also known as XML APIs. Using these methods you can program your own application to extend the publicaster functionality. e.g. your own optout page, inserting data into Publicaster as well as your own database from your site using your own interface.

Methods related to list management can be found at:
http://app.publicaster.com/sdk/listmgmt/lists.asmx

Methods related to subscriber (List Data) management can be found at:
http://app.publicaster.com/sdk/subscribermgmt/subscribers.asmx

If you think there is a web service method that will be beneficial to you as well as other Publicaster users, please send an email to support @ publicaster . com and we will be more than happy to accomodate that request.

Happy programming!