If you were given the opportunity to try two things at the same time to see which one would give you the most benefits for the least work, would you take the opportunity? Of course you’d do it!

Think about this. What if whenever you walked up to a girl, you could try a couple different pick-up lines at the same time (and without the girl knowing), to see which line would get her attention? You’d exploit your unfair advantage, I’m sure.

Split testing = An unfair corner on the market

Think about your email campaigns. Whenever you work to compose and send one, you’re pretty much taking a guess each time, hoping that all the hours and effort you put into shaping the most grabbing subject line, the perfect offer, the best body copy and the most motivational call-to-action will make them open it and react. And then, that amazing promotional graphic you creatively designed. You hope your subscribers will not be able to resist that!

Here’s an idea! Why not take the chance element out of it and be certain next time?

When you split test your email campaigns, all you do is copy the original email, change any part (one or multiple), schedule the split test delivery and then sit back and watch the magic happen! Split testing offers a fast way to optimize email marketing campaigns. If you use split testing, you’ll be able to try out a couple versions of your message on a few subscribers, see which one performs better, and then use the better message for the rest of the subscribers.

For your next campaign, you can use the superior message as a foundation. You can then keep testing more elements, improving your email campaigns with each test. What’s the best thing about this? It’s amazingly easy! In fact, it’s so easy I don’t know why you don’t split test EVERY campaign! And think about it: Could you even try to do split testing with a newspaper ad or print campaign?

An easy example

Let’s imagine I’m a restaurant sending out an offer to my clientele to come in and eat on slow Wednesday evenings. Usually your resources (ad agency, in-house, etc.) are pretty much guessing at what offer is going to motivate customers to come into the restaurant. And you pay them for the guessing. The offer seems great. There’s a big enough, bold enough call-to-action. Hey, let’s try it. You press the send button. While you obtain okay open rates, you don’t think you did quite as well as you could have.

Using split testing, you are able to experiment with some variations such as:

* Sender/Envelope Info
* Subject lines
* Calls-to-action
* Images
* Body Copy
* Testimonials
* Personalization
* Message layout/design
* And more…

And with those options guess what you can do? You can get these results:

* Increase Open rates
* Increase Requests for more information
* Increase Click-thrus
* Increase Visits
* Increase Calls
* Increase your knowledge of what works and what doesn’t

Could be that a two-for-one offer isn’t as effective as free apps. How could you have known?

Do you have enough to think about now? Are you willing to give it a try for the next email campaign you send? If you’re an eConnect Email customer, we’re always here to help you! Contact your account manager for a few ideas and help you get started with split testing.

Good luck!

Our development team is always working to update and make our email application the most robust in the industry, it amazes me what they are capable of.  We are always introducing new features or helping our clients improve their inbox results, it’s pretty amazing.  So, I figured I’d take a few minutes to outline some pretty cool things about our system that you may not know about. Take advantage of them – they’ll make you a better email marketer. It’s why we exist!

1. Snippets: Save yourself some time by reusing key elements to your emails like a header, footer, or side bar.  Snippets are small pieces of HTML that you can create and save and use over and over when you need them.
2. Social Share: Did you hear Twitter is going out of busienss? Me neither. Social media is here to stay and so is email. Insert a simple tag and boom: your subscribers can share your emails with their networks on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Buzz.
3. Cart Abandonment: 7 out of 10 online shopping carts are abandoned.  70%! Wow.  eConnect Email can help you recover those lost sales by firing off triggered emails to each person that abandons your cart with an offer, incentives or reminders to complete the purchase.  Studies show nearly 50% of abandoned shop carts can be recovered and turned into cold hard cash!
4. RSS-to-Email: Why work harder than you have to. With this feature you can update a blog and then reuse your content for your newsletter too, automatically!  Some of our customers do this and use the next item to schedule the deployment and deliver while they sleep. It’s hands-free email marketing, baby.
5. Scheduled, Automatic Mailings: Want your emails to be working for you while you play? Just set it and forget it. The eConnect Email advanced scheduler deploys your emails on time, every time. So while you’re grilling on a Sunday afternoon with Sam Adams, we’ll be delivering your messages whenever and wherever you need ‘em.
6. Inbox Preview & Spam Report: Want to know how your email will render in all the top email providers including the Blackberry and iPhone? With one-click, Inbox Preview will provide a detailed screenshot report ensuring emails appear as intended. In addition, we’ll run it through all of the most popular spam filters (gateway, desktop and server-side) to see if your stuff might be mistaken as spam before you send.
7. Advanced Triggers: eConnect Email can communicate with your CRM. While we provide stock Salesforce.com integration, you may want to integrate with some other system. With a standard SOAP API, you can have us “talk back” to any system you’d like.
8. Dynamic Content: Readers will want to keep reading your stuff if it’s relative to them.  So tailor your emails to your client’s specific interests and you’ll keep them hooked a whole lot longer.  It just takes a little set up but the results will be well worth your time.  It’s no longer a one-size fits all world.
9. Browser Image Editing: We have a simple way to edit your photos or images inside our program.  Photoshop can be overkill and sometimes we just need to make a simple edit.  We have included the most common image editing functions inside of eConnect Email through our integration with Google-owned Picnik. Pretty neat.
10. Auto-responders & Triggered Mailings: Let our system go to work for you once again.  Set up your welcome emails and targeted mailings based on subscriber interactions with an auto-response or triggered mailing series, and relax.
11. API/Integration: For you developers out there, here’s one for you…with our API tools you can integrate your stuff with ours like never before. Want to build a custom reports interface for a client? Want to have your CRM and ours talk to one another? Well now you can.
12. The Free Plan…Forever!: Want something that will really entice you …You can have a free account with us for up to 150 emails per month as long as you wish.  That’s a good one…free emails!  Woo hoo!  Here’s what you get: 150 email/month, store an unlimited number of subscribers, access to all account features, no contract or credit card required!  So give it a spin, activate your free account today and see why eConnect Email is simply, email done better.
13. Email Marketing Services: Need some help with your email design and delivery, or maybe your just too busy doing what you do best? Put us to work for you whether it’s one really important campaign or all of your email marketing efforts. Our professional services team helps marketers design, develop and deploy better email marketing campaigns everyday.
14. The most flexible pricing of any ESP: When it comes to pricing, we’ve learned that flexibility is a cool, refreshing approach. We want you to feel comfortable with how you are billed, whether it be monthly or on a pay as you send basis. You give us an idea of your volume, we’ll show you where you fall. And the greatest part? You’re only charged for the emails you send not the number of contacts you have within your account. Simple.
15. You can talk to us: This one is usually the most pleasant surprise to folks checking us out as a potential solution. Many self-service email service providers even refuse to publish a phone number. That’s ok, but that’s not us. We love to talk to you and want you to feel like we’re in this together. Give us a ring we’re here to help – 888.596.9997.

Breaking news: Twitter is going out of business.

Just kidding.

In case you’ve had your head buried in paperwork, social media is only getting more popular.   In an effort to foster the growing relationship between email marketing and the world of status updates, eConnect Email has integrated Social Sharing into our application and now it can easily be added into your emails with the addition of a tiny little tag, Welcome to Social Email 1.0.

Any emails sent through eConnect Email that include the social sharing tag can now be shared with the following social networks with ease:

Email (of course)
Twitter
Facebook
LinkedIn
Google Buzz

Our system simply grabs your email’s subject line and creates a tiny URL using bit.ly to share a copy of your email to your social media world.  We have also integrated the Forward-To-A-Friend functionality in the Social Sharing center, making it easier to send your email to another inbox, although that is so last year.

So now that you’ve done the work to create your campaign you can leverage it to another audience with the click of a button.  Easy right?

Awesome. How easy is it?

Super, duper easy. If you are coding your emails by hand, you’ll simply include the following tags where you want a share prompt.  If your using the editor, simply click Custom Fields and you can insert either a text link or share  image automatically.

%%socialshare-icon%% will give you this:

%%socialshare-link%% will give you this: Share this

Below you will find a screen shot of what the Social Sharing landing page looks like once the “Share This” link or image is clicked.

So, can I tell how often it was shared?

Of course! When you log into your Reports area, you will see a Share Statistics tab.  Every time someone shares with a specific network, that number will be displayed in the reports, broken down by network.

What else should I know?

We started with the most popular social networks to share to, but may add more down the road depending on user feedback (so send us your feedback!).

Loren McDonald at Email Insider has an interesting post up that talks about “render rate.” In a nutshell, EEC is looking at getting support to make the “render rate” an industry standard.

The “render rate” is a new industry-wide metric created to measure the initial level of email engagement more accurately and consistently than the open rate.

On the surface, “render rate” may seem like just a terminology change to replace the often ambiguous “open rate,” but it goes slightly deeper than that.  While “open rate” is commonly in use now, it is often times far from accurate, especially with the prevalence of image blocker these days, which will prevent tracking images from being downloaded even though the email has been opened.

“Render rate” will serve to clarify the true meaning of “open rate”.  It also introduces another metric, called the “email action” that can more accurately measure email engagement instead of solely relying on “opens”.  This metric takes into account “opens” and “clicks” to track if a recipient can be considered as having been engaged by your email.

This is definitely a step in the right direction.  In fact, from the outset, eConnect Email has already been designed to take into account “clicks” when calculating “opens”. To illustrate, say you have a recipient who’s using Microsoft Outlook, and chooses not to download images in your email.  This means we will not be able to track this “open”.  However, if he clicks on one of the links in this email, we will track this as a “click” as an “open”.  This is much like the proposed “unique action” metric.  If the recipient clicks on yet another link, we will then just track it as another “click”, but will not track the “open” a second time.  In other words, as long as a link is clicked on, and no opens have ever been tracked for this recipient for this email, we will count it as an open as well.  Therefore, no more orphan clicks!

The “render rate” proposal is a welcome suggestion. Not only will it promote a more standardized measurement, it will make the metrics less ambiguous and far more intuitive to understand.

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.

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