Having previously been a programmer myself, I can attest to very real and maddening phenomenon that affects nearly everyone in this line of work: the urge to rewrite. It comes on hard and fast, usually immediately after finishing a piece of software. Sometimes it even comes on smack in the middle of your efforts.

The reason is simple: as you go through the process of writing the code, you gain new perspectives on the shortcomings of your original approach to the problem. It’s the same thing that happens when we look back on the events of our past and think “if I only knew then what I know now…” In a way, the better the software that you’ve written turned out, the better your perspective becomes, and therefore the more pernicious the urge to rewrite it becomes.

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One of the recent changes we made with TrioLive’s desktop client in v1.18 is very subtle, but I really appreciate it. In the latest version, we added a small (very small!) bit of code that makes the window and its taskbar slot flash when a new message comes in.

We never had it before. It’s pretty common in an instant-messaging application, which TrioLive really isn’t, but it does happen that TrioLive is in the background at times while you’re off looking at something else; reading email, or news, or whatever else. And now when you have a message pop into one of your chat sessions, you’ll know.

In the last episode, I described in some depth the types of considerations that can help you maximize your chances that your messages will make it into your subscribers’ inboxes. The next question is how to maximize your chances that your content will make it into your subscribers’ brains.

The answer to this problem begins not with your e-mail messages, but on your web page. Your subscription form itself is the first step in ensuring targeted delivery. The form should make it clear exactly what your subscribers are signing up for: what type of content and how often. If there are several different types of content you want to send out that are not likely to interest the same people, consider splitting up the information into separate mailing lists and offering your visitors the option of subscribing to one or more of them.

Next, when you send out messages, make sure the From e-mail address, the sender name, and the subject line are all recognizable. Every message should make it completely clear to the recipient where the message is coming from and why before they open it. When we send out newsletters, for example, the sender name is “ActiveCampaign, Inc.” and the title always begins “ActiveCampaign News.” If your recipients don’t recognize where your message is coming from and why, they may not know they want to read it. Worse, they may flag it as spam, thereby preventing your future mailings from getting through to them.

It’s a good idea to personalize your messages to enhance this effect. The possibilities of message personalization range from simply opening the message with a personal greeting to much more effective techniques like splitting your subscribers up into groups based on their location or click-through activity. For example, imagine you’re running a mailing list about changes in local laws that affect business owners. If you’ve collected the zip code of each of your subscribers, you can target your messages directly at business owners within an affected area for a given policy change, and spare all of your other subscribers from having to scan through messages that don’t have any relevance for them. The perceived usefulness of your mailing list is likely to be far higher, the perceived annoyingness is likely to be far lower, and your overall retention rate and success will very probably be positively impacted.

Also, don’t forget to include an unsubscribe link in every message. You may also want to give them a link to update their account information, if you collect any special information or if you offer multiple lists, but always include an unsubscribe link. Why? Because if you don’t, people that want to unsubscribe probably won’t contact you, or e-mail you, or call you, or just delete every message that comes in: they’ll probably mark your messages as spam. If they use any of the popular e-mail providers, that could affect the likelihood that your messages will be delivered to other users of those e-mail hosts.

The next thing to think about is the content itself. Be honest with yourself now–is it boring? filled with editing errors? is it all whacked out? There’s only one way to know for sure: have a few people read it beforehand. In the previous article I mentioned some reasons why it is a good idea to set up a test mailing list including all of your own addresses and any colleagues who are willing to help you with your newsletter. Now I will tell you about a great big reason to do so. If you don’t, your dreams will be haunted by the mistakes you failed to catch in proofreading, the opportunities you lost by mistyping a link, or the subscriptions you lost by sending out substandard content.

Once you’ve got everything proofread and okayed by multiple readers, you can start thinking about how to maximize the effectiveness of what you’re sending. A/B Split testing your e-mails is an excellent way to do this. For those not familiar, A/B Split testing involves randomly assigning your site visitors or e-mail recipients into 2 group, and delivering different versions of your content to each of the two groups. You then compare the response rates (click-throughs, read/open, forward-to-friend, etc.) of the two different versions to determine which one worked better. If you’re using 1-2-All, then you have a convenient piece of software available to manage this process available to you in the form of the A/B Split addon. Otherwise, you can split your list into two smaller lists and try to do this by hand. Either way, it’s an incredibly smart way to leverage your existing audience and improve the content you’re providing. You can use this technique, for example, to test the effectiveness of different subject lines, to see what types of subject lines your subscribers are more likely to open and read. You can also try different layouts within the e-mail content itself in order to determine what format produces the highest click-through rate.

Finally, be sure to keep your recipients in mind with everything you do. Imagine what it will be like for them to receive your message. What time of day will it arrive in their inbox? If you send a message outside of business hours, it will be much more likely to get lost among the list of messages which accumulated overnight. Also, people feel much more pressured to get through their list of e-mails in the morning so they can begin their day; this means that if your e-mail does get opened, it’s less likely to be fully read. Also consider how their e-mail reader will respond to the attempt to open the message. If you’ve included multimedia elements like Flash or Javascript, at best they will simply be excluded from the opened message and at worst your recipient will have to see an error message. It will not benefit you to become associated with error messages.

It comes down to anticipating and managing the experience that you’re giving your subscribers, just like any other type of business activity. If you want people to enjoy their experience, become more involved in what you’re doing, and come back for more, you can. All it takes is a little extra time and consideration.

Let us know what you think about these ideas, what types of things you think about when you’re sending to mailing lists, and what you’ve had success with.

One of the most frequent questions we hear from people who are looking into or using 1-2-All for e-mail marketing is how to ensure that their e-mail reaches its intended audience and gets looked at.

The first thing to look at, obviously, is spam filtration. If your message is filtered as spam, it will probably never be read, so preventative measures are definitely in order. The single most important thing you can do to make sure your messages don’t get marked as spam is also the simplest and most logical: don’t send spam! Send quality content at reasonable intervals. If the message you’re sending contain a sufficient quantity and variety of original text, you’re not likely to have to worry about trying to do anything sneaky to get past the spam filters.

You can also improve the delivery rate of your messages by improving the ‘relationship’ between your own server and those of the receiving servers by setting up a Sender Policy Framework (SPF), which reduces the chances that spammers will be able to use your domain name by specifying which computers are allowed to send e-mail from your domain. Instructions for setting up an SPF for your domain can be found in our knowledge base article on the subject.

A second line of defense for avoiding spam filtration is to run your message through some spam filters before you send it out to your subscribers. If you’re using 1-2-All, you can use our EmailCheck addon to run your message through an up-to-date copy of SpamAssassin that we maintain on our servers. SpamAssassin is the most popular spam filter on privately maintained servers, and the addon willgive you a list of any specific problems it finds so that you can correct them before sending the message. You can also test your messages against the major webmail services’ spam filters by simply sending a copy of the message to your own accounts on those services. It’s a good idea to maintain a test mailing list consisting of all of your own e-mail addresses and those of colleagues working with you on your marketing efforts, and to send a copy of each message to this list prior to sending to your main list. That way you can anticipate and correct most problems before they happen.

The third way to prevent your messages from being filtered as spam is to prevent your subscribers from marking your messages as spam. This means always enabling double opt-in features in your mailing list management software. It may seem like you’ll be losing a few subscribers who can’t be bothered to confirm their subscription, but in the long run those subscribers probably weren’t that interested in your mailing list anyway, and likely wouldn’t have remembered signing up in the first place. That translates into more spam complaints.

In my next post on this topic, I’ll be discussing ways to keep your hard-won subscribers, and maximize the effectiveness of your mailings.

I love Chicago. On top of the fresh spring flowers that the city plants everywhere every spring (I think they’ll be here soon), it’s also one of the only cities in the US that still seems to be funding art installations. There’s something magical about a city that beautifies for no good reason.

ActiveCampaign lives in a building right in downtown Chicago, right across the street from the city’s famous Millenium Park. A few of the surrounding buildings have had giant sculptures for some time now, while we suffered–despite our building’s status as essentially a statue itself–a bare sidewalk.

No more! Now we have a great big colorful piece of something out front facing Michigan Avenue. I’m not sure what it is exactly, but I think I kind of like it.

Here is a short list of reasons why I would unsubscribe from a newsletter. No particular importance on the order…

1. You send me a mailing more often than needed.
   Rarely I stay subscribed to a weekly mailing list. It better be quite good to keep that frequency going.
2. Non-stop promotion.
   I like to know about your new products and services. But give me something other than a standard sales pitch.
3. Duplicates.
   I subscribed once. I only need one copy.
4. Your content is bad.
   Boring content will encourage me to find the unsubscribe link.
5. I lose interest.
   People will lose interest in your subject. Nothing you can do about this one.
6. Grammatical issues.
   Take some time to edit & review your newsletter and I will take some time to read it.
7. Ugly email design.
   Whether it is HTML or TEXT take some time to design a professional and easy to read layout.
8. Excessive advertising.
   Advertising is fine and is required for some business models. However, I subscribed for your content. Not a 600×300 ad that covers the majority of my message preview.
9. Paid “special” newsletters.
   There are a couple popular newsletters that send out “special” advertiser mailings in addition to their newsletter. So not only is their newsletter cluttered with ads - but subscribers also have the joy of receiving full email advertisements frequently.
10. Copied or low quality content.
    If I subscribed for informational content I want quality and useful content. A free republished article or generic piece of content will not encourage me to be a subscriber for much longer.

What makes you unsubscribe from newsletters?

Next time you visit the download page you should notice a new type of download available. Upgrade Patches. Now you can generate your own special download that is tailored for upgrading your install.

With the new upgrade patch options you can choose what version you are upgrading from and what type of encoding (zend or ioncube) you use. After making those selections simply click download! The resulting download will only include files that were changed and need to be uploaded.

This should make the process of upgrading much easier for many of our clients. There is no need to scan a changed file list or upload the whole distribution.

Please let us know if you have any comments or questions regarding this!

ActiveCampaign has a new partner to create newsletter, email and promotional writing content for your email marketing and web site.

Great newsletters utilize “highlights” consisting of 1-2 paragraphs that introduce new products, services, or general information about what’s going on in your organization. A well written newsletter can help you convert new prospects, motivate current customers to make additional sales, or simply attract new visitors to your website. Take advantage of a well written newsletter with your next campaign!

I encourage all users of 1-2-All (or any email marketing program) to devote some time for producing quality copy. Strong copy will assist with your conversions via email and will also encourage your subscribers to remain on your list. If you do not spend any time on the copy you will be stunting the success of your marketing efforts.

Click here for pricing and details

It always puzzles me when I find myself in a license situation that simply does not make any sense. Recently I was given two options with a fairly large software company:

• Upgrade my current license (it will cost over $2,000 and includes 12 mths support)
• Purchase a new license (it will cost just under $1,000 and includes 12 mths support)

Perhaps I fell into a crack in their licensing scheme, however it truly makes one wonder. Who actually purchases the upgrade??? I don’t believe there should be a situation where an upgrade is more than a new purchase (when both accomplish the exact same thing)

I have always been an advocate of how our licensing works. It is both simple and effective. Upgrades are time-based and do not have to be renewed if you do not wish to. Our clients would never be charged more for an upgrade compared to a new license price.

There’s been a lot of intra-office chatter just lately about how to best enjoy music here in the office without:

1. Having to worry about it too much (most people prefer random play, or at least play controlled by someone else)
2. Stepping on anyone’s toes by distracting them from their work or forcing them to hear music they don’t like
3. Sounding like a frat-house when you call us on the phone 

The natural solution was for one person to step into the role of “office DJ” and just keep the music coming. As our company grows, though, the situation becomes more complicated. Our beautiful new sun-drenched office high atop Chicago’s Michigan Avenue has a very open floorplan, meaning that sound travels far and wide. Plus, bringing in new people means different tastes and styles of work.

The immediate solution has been to just have everybody listen to what they want through headphones. This generally works well, but tends to reduce social contact and also to violate worry #1 (above): making people think about what they’re going to listen to next. Some folks have even been calling for an audio router of some sort (does such a thing even exist?) which many pairs of headphones could be plugged into so we could all listen to whatever was playing.

Another idea has been to pipe in some form of music throughout the whole office. Of course, the problem with this is that the music is going to have to tend to be pretty bland in order to sound okay when overheard by customers and also not disgust or enrage the intra-office listening public.

My latest hare-brained scheme has been to set up a copy of Ampache on my local machine. I figure this will add back in a little bit of sociality into music-listening as we all see what other people are listening to and rate songs and whatnot, while still keeping the office quiet and letting everybody hear what they want. Looks like a pretty good system so far.

I’m interested to hear how others out there are handling their office music situations. Democratically? Autocratically? Technocratically? CD-by-CD rotation? (what if someone selected Slipknot or something? ugh.) In-cubicle decibel readings?