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).

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.

This week we have fielded a high volume of questions about the process of building opt-in forms in Publicaster, and we couldn’t be happier! Using an opt-in form on your website is a great way to build your subscriber list organically. Current clients can use this cool tool to create a form to use on your website by following the instructions here: Opt-In Forms.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 received several feature request emails at support @ blueskyfactory .com requesting a tool that will generate mailing activity from a particular account and its sub accounts and is date filterable, so we rolled out a feature called “Mailing Activity” which does exactly that! This tool will let you figure out how many emails have been sent from your account in a given timespan. Using this tool you can also figure out how many emails you have sent out in the current month and how far or over you are from your monthly plan.

To access “Mailing Activity” tool you need to be the “Account Manager” for a given account. We thought the Account Manager tab in the navigation bar was the most appropriate place for this tool. To generate a mailing activity report, please enter the start and the end dates (screenshot above) and the tool will generate the report (screenshot below).

As can be seen in the screenshot above, this report conists of a few basic details viz. Account Name, Subject Line, Data Soure (Mailing List/Segmentation), Type of Email (e.g. HTML Only, Multipart, etc), Date of Mailing and the number of recipients for that mailing. It also provides the total count for each sub accounts as well as a grand total for the master account.

Watch out for more feature updates! And remember you can always subscribe to our RSS feed in your favorite aggregator!

Today we welcome “Subscriber History” reporting to Publicaster. This feature does exactly what the name suggests. It gives you a particular subscriber’s reporting history in Publicaster. As can be seen in the screenshot below, the Subscriber History reporting can be accessed from the “Report Viewer” tab in the navigation bar. Once you click on it, you will see a text box to enter an email address to search. The tool will search all databases, all mailing lists in those databases, and all mailing reports for activity for the subscriber you are trying to search.

The tool generates a report as shown in the screenshot below. It shows all the mailing lists as well as databases that the subscriber is a part of and it also shows all the mailings that were sent to the subscriber along with the main activity for those mailings. It also shows aggregate mailing metrics for the subscriber.

As always, please let us know your feedback and/or any additonal features that you think might might make your as well as other users’ lives easier.

Great news! In an effort to improve Publicaster usability for our clients, we are currently authoring a comprehensive user guide for the program. In order to get things rolling, we began the process by writing a “Quick Start Guide,” which outlines the basics for setting up mailing lists, creating emails, and sending from Publicaster. The Quick Start Guide is now posted on the Help link in the top right corner of your Publicaster homepage.

We hope that this guide will benefit all, new users and veterans alike.

As always, if you have any questions about using the program please do not hesitate to contact the support line by calling 866.216.BLUE or emailing bsfsupport@blueskyfactory.com.

Blue Sky Factory is pleased to announce the availability of a new API that clients can leverage to provide a seamless experience for their users. The new API is called ‘Forward to a Friend’. As you can imagine, this expands upon Publicaster’s already popular Forward to Friend feature. Now you can create and host your own customized Forward to a Friend landing page and simply pass the data along to Publicaster for inclusion in a Publicaster defined email that gets sent to the Forward to a Friend targets.

What makes the API so special is that you have total control of the form you want the users to fill out and you have the ability to work with the data. The general flow of things using our API is this: (1)You create and host your forward to a friend form on your own site (users never leave the comfort of your environment). (2)When the form is submitted, you call our API to activate our Forward To Friend code. (3)Then you can take that data (since you have never left control of your site) and put it into an internal sales leads database or shoot it into your SalesForce database – the choice is yours.

Ok, now let’s talk about how to get this set up and working from within Publicaster. The Forward to Friend API will use an existing email content you have already defined in Publicaster. You will notice when you are in the email editor a new field called ‘Campaign ID.’ Make a note of this ID – you will need it for the API.

Lets take a look at the API argument signature. It’s really pretty straight forward.

SendtoFriend(ByVal CampaignID As String, _
ByVal AccountID As String, _
ByVal FromName As String, _
ByVal FromAddress As String, _
ByVal SubjectLine As String, _
ByVal MailContent As String, _
ByVal StringOemails As String) As emailStats

Campaign ID – This is the ID (remember I told you to keep track of it) of the email template you want to send to the potential subscribers.

AccountID – This is your encrypted account id. Existing API users are very familiar with this little nugget. If you are not, you can get your encrypted API from Account Manager -> Account Preferences (at the bottom).

FromName – This is a string that you pass that will display in the email that is being sent ad the Friendly From Name.

FromAddress – This is a string that will display in the email as the Reply-To address.

SubjectLine – Another, you guessed it, string that will display as the subject line in the email.

MainContent – A string where you can specify a custom message you want to append to the top body portion of the email you are sending. A very popular Forward to a Friend feature is a little blurb of text the person who using the form may want to pass on to their users. For example: “Hey All – thought you might find this interesting!” In addition to the exiting Publicaster content, we will put this text right after the closing body tag.

Hint: A heavy graphical based email may not work best for Forward To Friend. Make sure before you start using Forward To Friend that you test to make sure the format is like you want.

StringOEmails – Well we know it’s definitely a string. Actually, to be a little nerdy, it’s a pipe “” delimited string. So for the list of emails you want to send this message to, just create a pipe delimited string- well parse and validate and only send to valid emails. Eg ‘foobar@blah.com,jimmybuffett@margaritivalle.com,chomp@chew.com’

We also provide a return object so you can tell if your send was successful. The name of the object is ‘emailStats’ and it will return:

SendSuccess – A Boolean telling you if the emails were sent.
numSent – Tells you how many emails were actually sent.
errorDescription – In the event of a problem, we will tell you exactly what happened.

How to exactly use a web service really depends on what language you are using. But for some general 101 type of info check out.

http://www.15seconds.com/Issue/010530.htm
http://webservices.xml.com/pub/a/ws/2004/03/24/phpws.html
http://www.asp101.com/articles/colin/webservices/default.asp

Let’s talk about a few things that our Forward to a Friend feature will NOT do. First, we do not store the users email in our database. We require any subscriber that is entered into our database be opted in. If a user fills out a Forward To Friend form and click submit, the people getting the email never opted in to anything so they cannot be stored in Publicaster. Second, we don’t track any stats on who the mail was sent to and if they acted on the mail. Again, it’s because they are not Publicaster Opt-in user so we don’t store them in our database. Also, any Publicaster customizations you have in your Forward to a Friend Email will be stripped out and not sent to the user.

If you would like full documentation or example on this new API – please email bsfsupport@blueskyfactory.com.

A couple of other upcoming IT stuff here at the Factory. We are in the final testing phases of our new List Import tool that will allow you to import Excel files! Also, we are launching an API next month that will let you send an Publicaster email to an already defined list without ever logging into Publicaster. Stayed tuned for news and information!

You can completely preview your email creatives before sending out mailings. By completely, we mean you will also be able to preview and test your personalizations (a.k.a mail merging). Not only that, you will also be able to test any dynamic content portions in your email creative.

Send/Schedule Email Screen with Preview Option

Simply click on the same preview button (small viewing glass image button next to the Email drop down menu) on the “Send/Schedule Mailings” screen as you always have and you will be asked to set values for personalized fields, if found, for previewing purposes. Since it uses the same personalization engine as used by the Publicaster’s email sender, you can be sure that you will get what you see