Our reports and statistics are one of our favourite advanced power features.  Some of our clients have signed up with us specially for our free comprehensive reports, because they help you track and optimize your email campaigns.

Yet we don’t only offer email marketing solutions - we also provide you with the tools you need to send bulk SMS/Text campaigns.  Surely you want to monitor the performance of your SMS campaigns too? Well, that was what our development thought, anyway.  So they took some time to put together another new feature:  SMS delivery statistics.

It’s very similar to our email reports and statistics.  Every time you send out a mass SMS/mobile text message, you’ll have access to a report that shows you how many of your SMS’es were delivered, how many are pending, how many were sent and how many bounced; as well as giving you a reason as to why the SMS didn’t go through.

It's just another service we offer to ensure your communication campaigns bear fruit.

We’ve come up with a brand new feature, and this one is focused solely on improving your statistics.  It’s called the A/B split test feature.  “Huh?” we hear you saying.  Well, let’s get that confused look off your face and listen up, because this one’s here to maximize your email marketing campaign!

As an enthusiastic email marketer, you’ve been checking all the reports and statistics of your sends.  Notice how they’re never quite the same?  Open and click through rates always vary – and you’ve probably been wondering why that is.  After all, your newsletters are all designed in the same template and style…  Sound familiar?

A/B split testing was developed to help you assess what strategy and techniques work best for your email marketing campaign, which of course just means that it tests what your subscribers like most.

This feature allows you to draw up different variations of your newsletter, and then send these different newsletters to only a percentage of your contacts.  This way, you get to test how a small percentage of your subscribers reacted to the different newsletters, so you can pick the one that worked best and send that winning newsletter to all your subscribers.  Here’s how:

With A/B split testing you have two options:  The first option allows you to select 5 newsletters to compare - perhaps all with the same content, but each with a different images, or even slight changes in the design or content.  (You don’t have to have 5 different newsletters, you can even just do 2 if you’d prefer.)  Alternatively, you can test up to 5 different subject lines for the same newsletter; say, for instance, varying in length or tone.
Once you’ve decided what is you’d like to test, you can then decide on a percentage of your mailing list to test it on.  So, if you choose to send the test to 10 % of your mailing list and you want to compare 2 newsletters, then 5 % will receive Newsletter A and 5 % will receive Newsletter B.  Once you’ve figured out which one was more successful, you then send the best newsletter to the remaining 90% of your mailing list.  And don’t worry:  The system keeps track of who received the test, and who received which version – so none of your subscribers will receive your newsletter twice!

How do you assess which one worked best though? 

It’s easy, and again, it’s your choice!  You can decide what’s most important to you and your business:  How many readers opened your newsletter, or how many clicked through to your website.  The A/B split test will then assess accordingly and you’ll receive a table (kind of like our reports) depicting the statistics and status of your send.

You can use this feature as much as you’d like, in fact, the more you test and improve, the better for your campaign.  After all, continuous tests will help you stay on top of subscriber trends.  Experiment to your heart’s content!
So on your next send, use our A/B split test feature to get a feel of what works for your subscribers and send them only the most popular newsletters.  Can you feel your campaign statistics booming already?

True to our game of constantly improving our product we’ve made another tweak!
 
We’ve added two new options to our Subscriber Segmentation feature.  When managing your segments you can now also select either the “greater than” or “less than” options – as you can probably guess these would only apply to numerical values. 
So what does it do?  Well, it lets you capture, say for instance, all your subscribers who are older than 21 (or 90, or 3, or 33, or 52 – you get the idea).

It may not be a brand new, full-blown power feature, but we reckon you’ll find it'll come in handy.

You signed up for our advanced email marketing services because you want to be ahead of the pack, with an email marketing campaign that achieves outstanding results and email newsletters that’ll knock the socks off ‘em.
But designing is harder than it looks - at least, it used to be…

In an effort to simplify the process of creating a html email newsletters, we’ve released a brand new drag-and-drop editor!  It’s been live in a few test accounts for a few weeks, but today we launched it internationally on all our English GraphicMail sites.

The new drag-and-drop editor is targeted specifically at those clients who do not have HTML knowledge or aren’t familiar with design tools.  This wizard editor will make your life a whole lot easier.  Simply choose one of the drag-and-drop templates which have all been designed in neat blocks, and edit each block as you like.  You can insert images, move it around, or keep it simple.

You’ll find it in your account under Neswsletters > Create– play around with it and let us know what you think!

Video 7


Subscriber segmentation - you know what this is.  Or you think…  Well, it’s when you - okay, you take a segment and…  No, no that’s not it, wait…
Still not quite sure yet, hey?  That’s okay, we find many of our clients, particularly novice email marketers, think they understand all our features, but when it comes to it they’re not sure how to implement them.  They loose out on all the amazing power tools we offer!

The videos you’ve been watching this past week were all produced with the aim of making our services even more accessible to you.  And so, as you’ve probably guessed, the latest of our GraphicMail videos is about Subscriber Segmentation.  Segmenting your mailing list means you group various contacts together according to specific criteria.  The video gives you a more detailed explanation of how to do it and what it means for your marketing campaign.  It’s targeted email marketing at its best.

This may be the last in our series of video blogs, but don’t for a moment think the fun stops here!  The six videos we’ve blogged about this past week are but the first - we’ll have more for you in April.  Happy viewing!

Video6

You’ve heard the buzz around our FeedMail service – you even think it sounds impressive, this RSS to email thing.  However, it sounds like more time and effort spent on email marketing and you really have other business to get back to…  Don’t despair!  Give us a few minutes and we’ll have that ball rolling for you.

Our renowned FeedMail service let’s you send RSS feeds (that’s a live newsfeed on the latest activity in your blog or website) straight to email.  It’s like a mini-headline that is sent to your subscribers’ inboxes and they can then click on the link to your blog or website if they want the full story. 
Your readers can be constantly up to date on your latest happenings, services or promotions, while you’ll have broader more targeted contact with your subscribers over a wider range of communication channels.  It really is a win-win situation.

Of course, we’ve very conveniently put together a video showing you how to operate FeedMail!  It explains the service and you can see where to find it all in your account.  Who could ask for more?  It’s the couch potato’s way of learning how to keep subscribers up to date.

Video 5

Watch the Oscars last night?  We’re picking up where we left off last week and continuing our own celebration of film with our GraphicMail videos!

As part of our new series of email marketing videos we’ve included one specifically on TriggerMail.  We told you all about the new TriggerMail feature we launched last month, but now you can actually see how these advanced autoresponders work.

TriggerMail was developed to save you time, right? So instead of trying to figure it out on your own, why not watch this brief TriggerMail introductory video to see exactly how it works and what you can do with it? It shows you where to find TriggerMail in your account, how to set it up and what it can do for you. 


Like it?  The new buzz around email marketing is all about incorporating video into your emails.  Did you know that you can also include a still shot of a YouTube video in your emails?  Hop on the bandwagon and see how your subscribers respond.

Video 4

You’ve created a newsletter, sent it out, and did your best to ensure optimal deliverability rates.  You pat yourself on the back, think “I’ve got the hang of this” and merrily continue to send monthly newsletters, impressed by your new-found   email marketing skills.  This is when we tap you on the back to say “Not quite done yet, tiger”.

Of all the value-added services our email marketing platform provides you with, our comprehensive reports and statistics are possibly the most important.  Each time you send an email newsletter we give you a full statistical report on how your emails were received, for instance how many of your subscribers received, opened, or followed a link in your email (plus much, much more).  Reading these reports is one of the most important things you can do for your email marketing campaign, because it tells you where you went wrong so you can tweak your approach and improve in future campaigns.

This video shows you exactly how to do just that!  It shows you where you can view the reports and where to find all the different email metrics, and gives you some tips on how you can improve on them. 

If there’s one thing we know about our clients it’s that they want results – so have a look at this one and learn how to read yours.

Video 3

Deliverability - what a mouth full. Yet, it’s just the process of getting your emails into your subscribers’ inboxes. Well, maybe not “just”. Deliverability has always been a concern for email marketers, but the constantly changing landscape makes it even harder to ensure great delivery of your email campaigns.

We'll be honest, no email marketing platform can guarantee 100% inbox delivery.  Your reputation, and by that we mean the quality of your message and your readers interest in it, is the best antidote to delivery.  Every time someone opens your email or clicks on a link in your emails it improves your reputation.  Every time they complain it harms your reputation.

So how do you keep current on changes to ISPs, ESPs, legislation, opt-in, open rates, click rates and opt-out? What are the latest best practices? Do you know fact vs. fiction when it comes to email deliverability? Do you know your own deliverability rate?

Spend a worthwhile 3 minutes with email deliverability guru GraphicMail, who will give you an overview of Yahoo, Comcast,  Roadrunner and other major feedback loops, the CAN-SPAM Act, permission methods and sender authentication.

Did you know?

GraphicMail is a member of ReturnPath, the EEC and Truste. 

You can also read more about deliverability in this white paper by the Direct Marketing Association.

Video 2

How did you like yesterday’s video, our new email marketing tour?  Makes for some fun, informative entertainment behind your desk, doesn’t it?  Well, we think the next one in our series of video tutorials should be very useful for all aspirant and accustomed email marketers.

This one’s all about newsletter templates.  Say you’ve signed up, you’ve set up a mailing list, you know what you want to say… and then you hit blank.  Great, you want to send out email newsletters, but how do you make one of those?  And how is it going to look?

Newsletter templates have to convey so many things!  Sure, content is important, you have to get the right message out after all, but the frame it’s presented in is equally important.  The look and feel of your emails has to be consistent with your brand image so you don’t only attract once-off sales, but a loyal customer base.  It needs to simultaneously be visually exciting and easy on the eye, so your subscribers will actually read it.

Our latest GraphicMail video, Free newsletter templates, gives you a quick glance at how you can get a template; whether it’s importing or creating a template, to using one of our free templates; and what you can do with it once you have one.  It takes less than two minutes of your time and should set you on the next step in creating your campaign.

We’re hoping these email marketing videos will save you time and make life a whole lot easier – and it’s so much more exciting than reading a brochure, isn’t it?