We are in the process of starting work for 1-2-All 5.0.  This will be a major update to the 1-2-All Email Marketing product.

Many updates and new features have already been planned.  You can expect a great deal of improvement in managing the entire system (all users/lists), many usability updates, and many new features that will be announced at a later date.

While we have our plans for 1-2-All 5.0, we really want to know what YOU want.  Please take a couple of minutes to let us know what you think.  Let us know what you would want changed, what you wish could be added, general feedback/comments, etc..    Your feedback is greatly appreciated and will be taken into consideration for 1-2-All 5.0.

• Click here to let us know what you would like to see in 1-2-All 5.0

If you should have any general concerns or questions please let us know at info@activecampaign.com

Thanks for your continual support of ActiveCampaign!

Jason F. VandeBoom

It’s an accepted wisdom that maintaining an e-mail list and sending out regular e-mail updates is a good idea for your business. But let’s think about why this should be.

Of course, it’s a good idea to have an open channel of communication with your clients, because it keeps them from forgetting about you. A professional newsletter can also increase recipients’ perception that you are familiar and established, and so makes it easier for them to buy from you. But in the end, like everything else in business, it comes down to the payoff. What is the final objective of your e-mail campaign? Better yet, what is the objective of the very next e-mail you’re going to send out?

If the objective is to win a sale, then you’ll already be very clear on this. But often, maintaining a mailing list involves sending out a number of messages with less decisive agendas. You can improve your e-mail marketing campaigns immensely by doing three simple things:

1. Set a goal for every message you send out.

What would you like for this particular newsletter to accomplish for your business? Do you want to inspire your recipients to click through to your web site? Are you hoping to get them to forward your newsletter to their friends so you can grow your membership? Do you want them to fill out a survey? Do you simply want them to trust you more?

2. Think of a couple of different ways you might accomplish this.

If you’re trying to get your message recipients to trust you, then your job is very easy. All you have to do is give them information that is both authoritative and immediately useful to them, and ask for nothing in return. Of course, you’ll have to have this type of information first, so this type of goal is excellent if you are an authority on the topping of your newsletter.

If you’re aiming to induce a specific action, your strategy will be similarly rational: in most cases, you’ll just ask them to do what you want them to do. That isn’t really as simple as it seems, of course. Is it better to ask at the beginning of a message or at the end? In the middle? Should you give them a whole paragraph to pitch the action or just set it aside in a colored box apart from your content? These variables will be different for every newsletter based on the preferences of your demographic and the nature of the information you’re sending out. How do you determine which is best for your purposes?

3. Test them against each other.

Just set up your A/B Split test in 1-2-All and send out your mailing. Then pay attention to the results and note them for future mailings. See how easy that was? Now you know something about your client base that you never knew before–you’ve learned a little something about how to induce them to perform a specific action. In your next newsletters, you can keep right on putting that technique to work, or (and here’s the real secret) keep testing. Do a split test every single time you send out a message. It’s just a little more work, and the results can scale exponentially. Use the insights of all of your previous tests to design each of your next tests, so that your knowledge of your customers snowballs into… dare I say… absolute power. Or, at the very least, you can get more people to forward your messages to their friends

Don’t think small with these insights either. Everything you learn about getting someone to click through to your site is also an insight that can potentially be used to win a sale. Knowledge is money.

We’re excited and you will be too about the release of 1-2-All Email Marketing 4.80. This is a significant update that will enable you with multiple sending methods whereas as you were limited to a single sending method in the past. Now admins can add more SMTP servers and 1-2-All will loop through them. Sending orders can be changed, and every sending method / smtp server has its own limit of emails to send before moving on to the next sending method/smtp server. One obvious advantage to this is if your web host restricts you to a set number of emails that you are allowed to deliver per hour. Before this meant that you would have to slow the rate at which you send emails to be compliant with your sending limitation. Now that you can set up multiple SMTP servers you can move to another SMTP server or another sending method once your limitation has been met.

Other minor changes in 4.80 include bug fixes, updates to the subscription forms, and updates to sending filters.

Multiple SMTP Screenshots:

We are now offering our 10 Template bundle of email templates for only $97!

Click here to view the templates and order!

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.

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

A handful of 1-2-All users reported a slower archive with 1-2-All 4.7.  We tracked down the issue and 4.70.2 takes care of that along with a couple other issues.  The speed issue occured on certain systems and was often due to older installs that have been upgraded time and time again in the past.

We encourage all users to upgrade to 4.70.2 to increase the speed of the archive.  If you continue to have any issues please submit a ticket and we will assist you right away.