Our Email Marketing software allows you to send subscriber date-based email campaigns, which send before or after a system (or custom field) date/time offset has arrived. For example, you could send a follow-up email asking for feedback a week after a subscriber signs up for your newsletter, or an early email expressing best wishes a week before their birthday!

An automated birthday email is a perfect way to connect with your subscribers on a more personal level.

To set this up, you’ll need our Subscriber Date-Based Emails add-on, and a custom field that stores each subscribers’ birthday.

First, create a subscriber custom field for birthday:

Next, manage subscribers and add individual birthdays for each:

Subscribers can also enter their own birthdays when signing up, or by modifying their account:

Next, create a new campaign, and choose the “Subscriber Date Based” type:

When you get to the final step, where it asks when to send the campaign, choose the custom field “Birthdate,” the correct date format, match “Month and Day,” and choose plus 7 days, since the system will look for subscriber birthdays that are 7 days from now (whenever the process runs for the current day).

To make sure your automated date-based emails send, make sure the Auto-Reminder scheduled task is running daily. Go to Settings > Cron Jobs/Scheduled Tasks:

You should not need to adjust anything here as long as the “Auto-Reminder” process is enabled.

Also, make sure each subscriber has “Do not send any future autoresponders” unchecked, if you want automated emails sent to them:

You can monitor your subscriber date-based campaign activity by viewing the Campaign Reports section, just like any other campaign.

Email you send using our Email Marketing software should be validated with an SPF record (or DKIM – “DomainKeys”) by the email service provider, to ensure it is not automatically treated as spam, thereby skipping your list recipients’ inbox altogether.

In the case that your emails are marked as spam by the email recipient, there is an effective approach to being notified of such occurrences, called Feedback Loops, or FBL for short.

Feedback Loops is a system of notifying the domain owner when a user of certain email clients, such as Yahoo or AOL, marks a message as spam. The intent is to provide domain owners notification of such occurrences so they can better manage their subscriber retention and email marketing techniques.

Using our Email Marketing software, you can manage Feedback Loop occurrences, giving you more control and precision when sending campaigns.

First, you’ll need to set up a feedback loop through the appropriate email provider. Please see our documentation and links for how to do this.

Note: For our software to detect and record spam complaints from feedback loops, it is required that you use the same email address that is used for bounces within the email marketing software.

When a spam complaint occurs for one of the email service providers that you have a feedback loop established, an email will be sent to the same email address used for bounces in the email marketing software, with a unique content type that tells our software to treat it as a feedback loop email.

Once it’s in the email marketing software, it will be treated as abuse, meaning the subscriber is removed from the list, and this occurrence logged in abuse reports.

Note: Make sure you have Abuse Management turned on, under Settings > Mail Sending:

To view abuse reports, click on the “Manage & Take Action” link along the top of the admin section (which will inform you of any groups that are suspended due to abuse complaints). You can then view each individual abuse (email address):

Please note: This interface will show you all abuse occurrences, including those recipients who manually report email abuse by clicking the link within campaigns.

If Abuse Management is not turned on, there is no interface (yet) for viewing feedback loop occurrences, unless you examine the database itself. Feedback loop occurrences are saved in the em_feedbackloop database table with the entire body of the message, and timestamp of the occurrence.

With our Email Marketing software, you can create custom list segments to filter subscribers based on conditions. Then, when creating a new campaign, you can choose that segment to send to:

If you supply conditions for your list segment based on subscriber custom fields, one of the options is to match a custom field value amongst a set of values.

Here we are looking for any of the following custom field values for the field “field1-global”:

• a
• b
• c

If a subscriber has any of the above values for custom field “field1-global,” they will be included in the list segment.

The syntax is simple – just separate each unique value with a comma:

a,b,c

A real-world example could be a custom field value for “City”:

chicago,new york,denver

You can leave off quotes around each value, as well as spaces before or after the commas (those will be interpreted literally).

This approach is a very powerful and efficient way to send campaigns only to subscribers that match a set of different custom field values.

If you use Feedburner to manage email subscriptions for RSS content, you can easily migrate your subscribers to our Email Marketing Software, and take advantage of more robust features and support.

Advanced features include:

• Powerful subscriber and list management
• Campaign tracking and reporting
• Full integration and API
• Customize the format of the email sent (HTML or Text)

Import subscribers

To get started, log into your Feedburner account and go to Publicize > Email Subscriptions.

Scroll to the bottom and click “View Subscriber Details.”

Click “CSV” to export your subscribers as a CSV file.

In the Email Marketing software, import your subscribers to a new list – for this example, we’ll call the list “RSS subscribers.”

Choose “Import from a file,” and pick your CSV file.

Map the fields appropriately:

Click Import, and your subscribers will then be subscribed to list “RSS subscribers.”

Create RSS campaign

Create a new “RSS Updates” campaign, using our ActiveRSS add-on.

Choose your “RSS subscribers” list, and create a new message to send. Your message will contain RSS feed tags that get replaced when the campaign is sent with actual content from your RSS feed.

When creating a new message, choose “Insert RSS” in the editor toolbar:

Type or paste the RSS feed URL, and choose what items should be included in the campaign:

Click “Insert,” and you should see some text appear in the editor:

These are system tags that will get replaced with actual RSS content when the campaign sends.

Fill in the rest of the form fields, and save your message:

Continue through the rest of the “Create Campaign” process, and when you get to the page that asks when you want the campaign to be sent, choose the start date and time, and how often it should recur:

Please note: The campaign will only send when new items are found in the RSS feed – the recurrence setting is only telling the system how often to check for new items within the feed.

Continue through the rest of the “Create Campaign” process and click “Finish” when you’re ready.

Your RSS campaign is now saved and ready to be sent. You can continue updating your feed and the Email Marketing system will take care of sending – no other involvement is required of you, unless you want to change the settings or layout of the email.

Update your subscription form

The last step is to update your subscription form HTML so new subscribers are not stored in the Feedburner system, but in the Email Marketing system.

Go to Integration > Subscription Forms, and create a new form.

Copy the HTML and replace your old Feedburner subscription form HTML with this.

Our Inbox Preview tool is incredibly useful for checking your email marketing campaign CSS against support in major email clients. It tells you if what you have should be removed, and references the exact code that could cause a problem.

Recently we were alerted to a new Gmail issue that requires certain CSS be applied to <img> elements in your message body.

The issue only seems to occur through the Gmail web interface in Firefox, Safari, Opera and Chrome (not Internet Explorer). When you have images in table cells, an extra horizontal gap appears between table rows:

Here is how the HTML appears for the above screenshot:

It looks right in desktop email clients, as well as Gmail’s web interface in Internet Explorer:

As you can see, there is no horizontal gap between table rows.

It is suggested to add style="display: block;" to each individual <img> element, and with our own testing, this seems to work.

To aid in reminding you of this requirement, we’ve updated our Inbox Preview tool to check for all <img> elements in your message body that do not have style="display: block;" included.

This will be included as part of Gmail’s alerts:

(Due to the nature of this inconsistency, it’s possible this fix may not need to be applied to every <img> element in your message body. For example, images floating inside paragraphs probably do not need this fix.)

We are open to improving the logic of our Inbox Preview tool to most accurately reflect how different email clients treat CSS, so if there are other ways to resolve this issue, or if you notice unrelated issues that could be reflected in the preview, please let us know.

You can’t surprise anyone with running an email campaign nowadays, but it’s those, who try new things and test them, who get the most results.

To have a flawless campaign and get the most results from your efforts, read this guide to learn how to:

• get more opt-in subscribers
• write great e-mail messages
• design effective emails
• make sure your emails reach your audience
• increase open rates and click-throughs
• improve your landing page conversion rate

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s important to pay attention to the length of the copy that you use in your newsletter. If your email becomes too “heavy” in content then the purpose of your email becomes confusing to the subscriber. For email to succeed as a form of communication it needs to be clear what you want your subscriber to do. Your subscriber needs to know why you are sending them an email. This reason should lead them to a clear call to action. The call to action defines the action your subscriber is to take after they open up your email. Most email marketers do not pay enough attention to the call for action. They painstakingly pay attention to every detail of their email template and creating engaging content only to leave the call to action as almost an afterthought. As a result “Click Here!” is the most frequently used call to action. Click Here is concise and there is no doubt what you want your subscriber to do but it doesn’t tell the subscriber why they would want to.

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