As we near the general beta release of 5.0 we are have setup a 1-2-All Beta blog.  You can view screenshots, read about the new features, and let us know what you think.  The download will be available shortly as internal and alpha testing is nearly complete.

Click here to view the 1-2-All Beta Blog (Current 1-2-All clients only)

Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of Marketing 101 is familiar with the 4 P’s of Mixed Marketing.  Marketing decisions being made using a recipe was posited by James Culliton in 1948.  ‘Marketing-Mix’ was coined by Neil Borton in 1953.  Move ahead to 1960 where E Jerome McCarthy first proposes the 4 P classification system and it later finds its current mainstream acceptance in Philip Kotler’s Principles of Marketing in 1967.

Considered the traditional elements of marketing the 4 Ps are:

• Product -  Goods or services.
• Price-  What the customer pays for your product.
• Placement – The distribution channel for the product
• Promotion -  All Communications such as advertising with the customer

Collectively these ingredients represent a company centric worldview where the company establishes the terms upon which the client is acted on.   This was establishment thinking at a time when products were mass produced, prices set on profitability,  distribution limited to one way channels, and clients targeted by one way promotions.   Promoting products required having mass appeal and often grabbed people’s attention in ways that were disruptive.  People were interrupted from programs on television with commercials. They listened to commercials on the radio because that was the only place to go for new music.

Its been estimated that there are 162 million web sites and 1.4 billion users on the web and this has fundamentally shifted the marketplace.  Along with the changing times have come changing attitudes.  Mixing ingredients and spoon feeding your clients with whatever you are selling is no longer a realistic approach to marketing. People receive information at a dizzying pace these days.  Technology has allowed the spread of ideas to flow to audiences faster than can be assimilated.  People have competing messages coming from all directions whether they come from blogs, user reviews, commenting, and forums.   They also have more options for tuning you out.  DVR,  On Demand, Podcasts, YouTube, and downloads are ways for people to tune in to what they want when they want it.

In order to compete with all these options marketers must win over the hearts and minds of their clients.  A client oriented culture is necessary in order to reach today’s audiences.  A new model of marketing that focuses on interactivity, building relationships, and keeping clients actively engaged is emerging as marketing’s new forward thinking. This new thinking acknowledges that audiences are more resistant to marketing speak and tend to be less impressionable to traditional forms of advertising.   In order to keep audience’s interest marketers must respond with more interactive forms of communication.

Newspapers are currently facing a yearly profit loss with a decline in circulation and an accompanying decline in dollars from advertising.  The Chicago Tribune recently declared bankruptcy and the economic picture for the New York Times is looking bleak.  Its been reported that they have a $400 million debt payment due in five months and a negative current net worth.

Yet it isn’t as if people have suddenly quit following the news.  Thanks to YouTube,  rssfeeds, and the popularity of blogs people have more options when it comes to where they want to get their news from.   Traditional media has been forced to adapt as a result.  Their focus has shifted toward giving people what they want and when they want it.  Streaming video, slide shows, rssfeeds, forums, and blogs are now standards on mainstream news sites.   This approach has lessened the bleeding.    Even as their newspapers continue to decrease in circulation The New York Times has emerged as one of the top ranked web sites.   The online domain nytimes.com attracts 180 million site visitors annually. The challenge now for newspapers is in inventing a model around this that can draw in more revenue.  Revenues from online advertising has given newspapers some hope but this still hasn’t been able to replace the profits they lost from print advertising.

Marketing is currently an evolving field in which the old rules no longer apply and fresh thinking is currently in demand.  Moving forward requires getting people’s attention by giving them what they want and when they want it.

We are now including a set of Spanish language files for Knowledge Management.   A special thanks to Ramon for contributing this.

You can get the language files by downloading the latest version of Knowledge Management.

Let us know if you have any questions!

We just released a couple of new & free email templates that you can download.  The download includes the HTML/Images along with the Email Marketing importer file.  With the Email Marketing import file you can import the template and images all with a single click!

Click Here To Download The Free Email Templates

We just released a couple of new free email templates for download.   These templates can be used in 1-2-All (or any email marketing application) to help you with your email marketing campaigns.

If you are looking for a more advanced email template be sure to checkout our email templates or our email template bundle.

We also have a selection of free email templates

The Mambo foundation is a volunteer, non-profit organization charged with the governance of the Mambo open source content management system.  Mambo is free software released under the GNU/General Public license and like all such projects, dealing with emails and organizational issues takes valuable time away from software development.   They use Help Desk to manage both time and resources more effectively.

Mambo developers must work in collaboration from many different locations which makes email key to their communication.   “Email is the key communication tool. The Mambo development team and the members of the Board of the Mambo Foundation are geographically distributed and work in a virtual, online environment.  All email that is not addressed to individuals is managed through the help desk.”  Directing email traffic through a central ticketing system allows multiple members to work together on the same issue if it is not specifically addressed to a particular individual.

Mambo foundation uses the knowledgebase in ActiveCampaign’s Help Desk Software to provide a central location for corporate documents that require routine turn over.  “For the management of Board affairs Help Desk has proven to be an ideal solution.  Previously, corporate documents were kept by officers of the Foundation and handed over to new officers following our annual elections of the Board. This meant that record keeping relied on the diligence of the individuals who handled those documents. Help Desk is used as a central repository and archive. By keeping all documents in the knowledgebase and keeping emails we now have accurate corporate records that are available to future Board members. This gives us confidence that we can not only meet our statutory obligations but also that institutional knowledge is retained for the future – two things that are extremely important and sometimes difficult to achieve in a volunteer environment.”     This improves efficiency and allows accountability that would otherwise be difficult to maintain.

“Volunteer, free software projects tend to have a reasonably high turnover in personnel. People work when they can, in their spare time, and often find it hard to commit their time in advance. By having a central document repository and by handling all email through the ticketing system it does not matter who is around and when. People can come into new roles and read what has happened previously and people can take leave for a few months while knowing that others can step in and take over handling of the enquiries.

“In the past, individuals took responsibility for one or more email accounts. There was no way the rest of the team could be certain that emails were being responded to in a timely manner and no way the team or Board could be certain it was receiving all information. By collecting all emails within the help desk the groups collectively have access to each email and the responses. This has made us more accountable and has improved our responsiveness to enquiries.

“Prior to installing Help Desk we also had issues due to the distributed, virtual team environment we work in. Team and Board members are located all over the world and not everyone has reliable internet connections. Some countries have high fees for bandwidth. This resulted in some Board members being reluctant to take on responsibility for handling email enquiries due to costs – especially as a lot of the email is spam. By using the helpdesk nobody needs to worry about the costs because email goes into the ticket system and is not downloaded to individual’s computers. If someone’s internet connection is down for awhile this is not a problem – responding is a collective responsibility and no longer a burden put on individuals.

“The Mambo Foundation has used SupportTrio for nine months now. The improvements in our responsiveness and productivity have been significant. Best of all, we now have more time to devote to developing the software.”

SupportTrio provides a central framework to allow Mambo Foundation address the challenge of working in an environment that requires the collaboration of volunteers working in different locations.  It also provides a means for maintaining efficiency and accountability in an environment that necessitates a high turnover rate.

Click here for more information about ActiveCampaign Help Desk Software.

Update: 1 Reason Not To Install Zend Optimizer

Since this article was published in May of 2008, ActiveCampaign has discontinued use of Zend Optimizer and Ioncube in favor of our own solutions to enhance the speed and security of our applications. Consequently, there is no longer any additional software that you need to install in order to use our products, and you now have full access to the source code of all of our software.

We believe our software can help your business to succeed. We believe this so much that we want  to give you the opportunity to try it out for free for 30 days and make your own decision:

• Click here for a free trial of Email Marketing
• Click here for a free trial of Survey Software
• Click here for a free trial of Help Desk
• Click here for a free trial of Knowledge Management
• Click here for a free trial of Live Chat

Original Instructions for Installing Zend Optimizer on Your Web Server

One of the ways that we increase the overall speed and security of our web-based software is by pre-compiling the PHP code. The tools that we use to do this are called Zend Optimizer and Ioncube. You actually only need one or the other in order to encode PHP scripts, and I’m not aware of any performance benefit that either one enjoys over the other. The only reason that we use both of these products is to provide maximum compatibility with all the different types of web hosts and servers that are out there. That’s why, when you visit the downloads page in our online help desk, you’re always asked which version of the software you’d like to download: Zend or Ioncube.

Most people who don’t produce or use a lot of web-based software have never heard of either of these products and get a little flustered when confronted with the question of which they should download. If you’re using a shared web hosting account or have an in-house server admin running your web server, then you have a simple one-step solution: pick up the phone, call the admin, and ask which one you can use

If you’re running your own server, it’s still very simple. The first thing to do is to find out if your server can already run Ioncube scripts, since if it can there are no additional steps for you. The way to find this out is to:

• download our test script
• unzip and upload it to your web directory
• and then open it up in a web browser

You’ll see something like this:

As you can see, my own local test server is not able to run Ioncube-encoded scripts without additional setup, because I’m using the latest version of PHP, which has broken dynamic loading. That’s no big deal, because I went ahead and installed the free Zend Optimizer with just a couple of clicks, and now I’ll show you how to do the same.

Download Zend Optimizer

If you find this part challenging, you probably shouldn’t be trying to run your own web server! 

What you need to do is to download the Zend Optimizer package onto your web server. You can get it from http://www.zend.com/en/products/guard/downloads, where you’ll need to select the appropriate package for your server. So first select the radio button labeled “Zend Optimizer” (not the one labeled “Zend Guard,”) and then you’ll find that the dropdown box becomes populated with a list of server types that Zend Optimizer is available for. The chances are very good that the type of server you are using is supported by Zend Optimizer. Remember, folks, you’re installing this on your web server, not on your own local computer (unless your web site is served from your local machine), so you want to be doing all this from the server, and to select the option that corresponds to the operating system running on the web server.

Before you are allowed to download, you’ll have to register for an account on zend.com on the next page. Once you’ve downloaded the software, all that is left is to install it on the server. The instructions for doing this will vary depending on the type of server that you use. If it is a Windows IIS server, just double-click on the installer .exe file and follow the instructions that appear on the screen. On any other type of system, including Mac OS X and any Linux or Unix variant, you’ll find that the installation package is compressed, so you first need to extract it.

On Linux or Unix servers

• Open up a terminal window or get yourself out to the command line. You can decompress the package by entering the following at the command line prompt:
  • gunzip -c <package name> | tar xf -
• Then, from inside the installer package directory that is created when the package is unzipped, type:
  • ./install.
• Now you’ll see a nice pretty graphical installation wizard that will walk you through setting up Zend Optimizer on your server.

On servers running Mac OS X

Installation on a server running OS X is a little more complicated that you might like it to be, but is still very doable. The most complicated part is basically just that you have to use the command line, which many OS X users are not very familiar with. However, you can find a very good tutorial for going through this process here [link removed since the article disappeared!).

Now put it to good use!

Once you’ve got Zend Optimizer installed on your server, you should be able to run Zend-encoded PHP scripts right away. So now just grab a copy of the Zend version of whichever ActiveCampaign software product you’ve purchased, and follow the installation instructions in the docs/install.txt file (you can also find the instructions in our knowledge base.)

If you run into any problems with the Zend Optimizer installation or if you get an error message saying that Zend Optimizer is not installed on your server, check the Zend website for troubleshooting tips.

The first big change is that all of your ActiveCampaign web software products and licenses are available under a single, centralized login. That includes free trials and free versions of our web software products, as well as any hosted accounts, downloadable software licenses, and even reseller accounts. It’s all in one convenient place, organized, and easy to find.

Everything you need to navigate the support center is all on the left sidebar. Manage Your Products, for example, is where you can go to view all of your serial numbers, to upgrade your licenses, to renew your upgrade/support contract or to add phone support. You can also purchase any add-ons that are available for your product right there under Manage Your Products.

A couple of really useful new features can be found under Download Your Products. Aside for the nifty new tabbed interface (pictured above) that lets you easily sort through the different types of licenses you own, take a look at the top right corner of that image. You’ll see a link for an RSS feed that you can subscribe to to be notified of updates to the products that you own.

You’ll find another great time-saver here when you’re ready to upgrade to the latest version. Between the links for full product downloads and the links to download your add-ons, you’ll find Upgrade Patches. Our system will ask you which version of Email Marketing, Survey Software, Help Desk Software, etc you’re currently using and automatically generate a simple patch that you can upgrade with. The upgrade process is then as simple as uploading the patch files right over top of your existing install and running the updater.php script from your browser. Delicious!

There are couple new things to see and explore in your support center account, which of course we believe are self-explanatory (since we made them.) But we’ll be rolling out additional touch-ups over the next few weeks, so post here if there is anything about the new support center interface that you don’t understand or would like to see work differently.

In my previous post, I talked about some of the reasons to start doing web surveys. Of course, for someone who has no experience with this way of gathering information, starting to run surveys can be a little daunting. As always, you’ll want to make the user’s experience your first priority. This means taking a little extra care in crafting the surveys themselves and the ways that you promote them.

Survey early, Survey often

Don’t go back through the last 5 years of business data and figure out everything you’ve ever wished you knew about your clients and their habits and dump it all into one survey. It would be great if all of your customers were willing to spend 30 or even 60 minutes answering your questions, but they are not. In fact, if you ask them to do this, they’ll probably lose a lot of respect for you and be less likely to do business with you again. You’ll probably have better results doing a short 5-6 question survey every few months.

Mix it up a little

Since you’re adding frequent, short surveys, why not hook them into different actions that your site’s visitors are usually taking anyway? If you have a membership area, you could add in a quick survey between the login page and the member’s area. If you offer something for download, you could stick one in before the download is served. Make it feel like a quick, relatively unobtrusive extra step in the middle of an action that your clients are used to performing anyway. If you play this right, you can actually gain an extra layer of data that might tell you about the different types of answers you get from users engaged in different types of activity on your site.

Explain yourself

You have to be classy about these types of things. Remember that you’re asking for your clients to take time out of their busy days, and explain to them why you think it’s important for them that they help you out. Will the results of this survey be used to make your site nicer for them to use? Will it help to improve your products or services in some specific way? Let your clients know that you care about their experience with you and are offering this survey in order to make sure that you keep improving. Make them love you.

Offer some incentives

They don’t have to be major incentives, just a little something commensurate with the effort you’re asking for. If you offer an information product and are using your surveys to improve it, offer clients a free or discounted copy of the new version for helping you improve it. It’s only fair. If it’s a membership site you’re asking questions about, consider giving a free week of membership for completing your survey. The other day I saw a bank offering free blankets for opening a checking account. I can’t possibly imagine whose banking decisions they’re trying to sway with this offer, but I’m sure they must have put some kind of market research into it. People like to feel rewarded.

With a little bit of brainstorming about the types of information you could use from your clients, a little planning about how you intend to extract the information and put it to use, and some basic common sense about the way that you ask people for their help, you might just open up your business to some surprising potentials that have been right under your nose for years. Or you might strike gold with one client’s dead-on analysis or fond wish. A good web-based survey software or survey service package could change your life.

If you’re just getting started with survey design, you’ll find that it can be a little tricky to write questions that get the information you’re looking for without biasing the response. I highly recommend looking over these basic guides to evaluation pamphlets provided by applied sociologist Gene Shackman.

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!