Our offices will be closed on Monday, September 6th, 2010.

We’ll be back on Tuesday, September 7th at 9:00AM (PST).

Need help in the meantime?  Find answers to commonly asked questions by visiting our Help Center and Resource Guide.

The eConnect Email Team wishes you and your family a safe and happy Labor Day Weekend!

Are you tired of mediocre open rates from your email campaigns? What if you could eliminate the frustration of guessing at subject lines and content that will gain the attention of your subscribers? Imagine getting great results the first time you send out an email. When it comes to email marketing split testing is a no brainer.  Using this powerful tool, you can put your marketing strategies in overdrive.

Split testing sounds like a complicated procedure, but it is really quite simple to understand. The first step is taking a look at the information you are seeking to convey to your subscribers. You take that information and create two similar emails that are almost (but not quite) identical. Perhaps you slightly change the subject heading or alter the phrasing of a campaign slogan. The split comes when you send the two different versions of the email to a small sampling of your mailing list to see which campaign performs the best. Once you know which email receives the most favorable response you send the best performing campaign out to the remaining recipients.

The novelty of split testing is that you can take the results from your tests and evaluate which strategies were the most effective.  Let’s say you varied your two emails by including a graphic in one that you did not include in the other. If the email including the graphic receives the most favorable results then you know that your readers respond to the graphic. You can then go on to include more graphic elements in future emails.

The more you split test, the more effective your email marketing will be. Don’t stop with just one test. Once you receive the results of the first one, immediately begin a new test that builds on the information you gathered. The more you learn about your subscribers’ tastes, the more your marketing will reflect the strategies that cater to them. This will increase traffic and encourage more effective marketing.

Today, split testing is being used in more ways than just email marketing. It is so effective that now people use it in website design and online advertising, as well. The usefulness of being able to test out different strategies before fully launching a campaign is invaluable.  Don’t be left behind, eConnect Email has built split testing into our application so make use of it.

How do you go about split testing within eConnect Email 3.0?

1)    First create the two variations of your email campaign which you would like to test

2)    Now select “Create Split Test” from the “Email Campaigns” tab

3)    Give you Split Test a name

4)    Choose the two versions of the emails campaigns to use for testing

5)    Select how a winner is chosen

6)    Finally, select what kind of test to run

7)    Now sit back, kick your feet up and let technology work for you.

Questions?  Give us a call, we’re here to help!

Recently, we posted an article revealing eConnect Email’s newest innovation: Advanced Triggers. Allowing eConnect to communicate with external SOAP APIs, these triggers inaugurated our company’s Salesforce integration.

The original Triggers were far from convenient to use, however. Setting up the program was complicated, and if users had previously never worked with SOAP APIs the frustrations of trying to get everything going seemed to far outweigh the benefits. Looking back, eConnect Email recognizes the bugs in the original Triggers, and we have been working hard to up the ante on our Salesforce Integration program.

Want to check out the newest innovations? After logging into eConnect Email, click on the “My Account” button. There is now a new tab at the top called “Salesforce Settings.” Here you can add your Salesforce credentials. After checking the box to activate, all users included in the lists you imported will be saved in the system. If a subscriber interacts with the sent email Salesforce will then report it.

All user information is now catalogued and sent back to eConnect Email. When a subscriber from your list opens one of your emails, clicks on one of the included links, hard bounces or unsubscribes, the information gets queued up by the system. It is then sent to the company during one of the 20 minute integration intervals.

While 20 minutes may seem like an inconvenient length of time when the system used to be live, there are reasons for the change. Let me explain the procedure:

On any given day each Salesforce account has a designated allowance of API connections. Previously, any activity within the system would be logged as an API connection. Consequently, if you sent an email campaign to a lengthy list of subscribers you would near your daily limit and potentially lose important information. If you were utilizing multiple applications using Salesforce’s API you would be particularly in danger of information loss.

We have now eliminated this problem by storing all of your connections in secret. We then send the information in groups of 200 or less in order to reduce the number of connections to a mere 72 a day (as opposed to the previous hundreds – or even thousands – of connections).

The Salesforce Integration experience just keeps getting better and better. If you need any help getting accustomed to all of the new technology, feel free to contact us.

At eConnect Email, we want to help make our customers look smart and save time with their email marketing. We have put together a list of some of our sweet features that will help you with short cuts and tricks to making you a better email marketer…your subscribers will be impressed!

To view our August Newsletter – Tips & Tricks – CLICK HERE!

We haven’t tried to cover up that we strongly believe in integration. One of our product developers recently talked about how we’ve been working to boost our integration efforts. Now I’d like to mention a few of the reasons we believe so much in integration and how you can get the ball rolling yourself.

Why Integrate with Salesforce.com

Integrating with Salesforce.com is one of the best ways to go, since it has almost 70,000 customers. Customer relationship management and email marketing are certainly some of the strong points for Salesforce.com. There’s a new form of importing and exporting – and it doesn’t involve the outdated form of export/import. Nowadays, you can move data back and forth through the use of application programming interface, or API.

There are several ways you can integrate, and Salesforce.com usually leads the way in this type of activity. Some businesses often start their own user interface inside of Salesforce.com’s user interface. So we had to decide how we could get this type of setup to work as efficiently as possible, and how the different user interfaces could function together.

Keep it simple

We didn’t just look to ourselves for the answers. Our customers’ thoughts are always important to us, so we went to them and to the marketplace to get answers. One of the key questions boiled down to whether we should have an application experience within Salesforce.com when we already had something within eConnect Email.

After thoroughly researching the subject, we got the answers from customers and people who are in the know. We found that many customers wanted to be able to bring in their list of custom subscriber data into a new list with eConnect Email. Regardless of what type of campaign they had, they wanted it to be with eConnect Email. They also wanted information such as clicks and bounce rates to be in the contact record so they could find out that information quickly.

In other words, keep it simple.

What you need to do

1.      Your part should only take a couple of minutes. First, log into your account and go to “My Account” in the top right-hand corner.

2.      You should see a tab that says “Salesforce.com.” Click on that.

3.      Enter your username and password and other security detail. You can ask your administrator if you don’t have that information immediately.

Using it is also pretty simple.

1.      Make a new contact report within Salesforce.com and save it under “Personal Custom Reports.”

2.      Under the “Contact” tab, click “Import” and select “Import From My Salesforce Account.” Choose from the list whichever one you’d like.

3.      Send your campaign.

4.      You’ll always have access to all of your statistics. You’ll also be sending the information to the individual lead.

For more information

Like we said, keep it simple. If you still need help, go to the Help Center, which is inside your account.

Enjoy,

eConnect Email Team