It’s official, we’ve launched eConnect Email 3.0 and now we’re offering a Free Forever Plan!

Build, Send and Track successful campaigns with one of the industry’s most robust and powerful email marketing applications. Take a few minutes and learn how eConnect Email 3.0 can transform the way you do email marketing.

We are strong believers in the try it before you buy it method. Sign up for our Forever Free Plan and send up to 150 emails monthly, store an unlimited number of subscribers, and get access to all account features and support. The best part is you can have it all with no contract or credit card required!

Once you’re ready to activate your account, save 20% by using coupon code: offer

As always, if you have any questions along the way give us a ring (866) 596-9997, we’re here to help!

Cheers!

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!).

It’s here!  eConnect Email has just launched version 3.0, an email marketing system that has just about everything you could ever think of (we dare you) at competitive rates and an easy to use interface.  Talk about having your cake and eating it too!   This new platform will give our subscribers access to tons of new features that will make their email marketing experience more creative, more intuitive and more knowledgeable with our enhanced reporting.  Just what are these features you ask? Below is a sampling of the added features:

Expansive Email Template Library

Auto Responders & Triggers

Enhanced Reporting

Redesigned User Interface

Unlimited Custom User Fields

Advanced Features:

Split Testing

inbox Preview

HTML Snippets

Dynamic Content

Re-occurring email with Exclusions

We invite you to sign up for a free account and even request a personalized demo of the system to really get a good feel of how the system will work for your business.   We offer a personalized demonstration of the application and can address key features that will help you accomplish your goals. With your personalized demo we will highlight additional functionality that will help take your marketing to the next level. Raise a glass and celebrate the launch of 3.0 and Cinco de Mayo with the eConnect Email team, Cheers!

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