Mailout Interactive Blog

I Want Your Email!

Thu, 16 May 2013 22:15:00 +0300

That's the goal of all email marketers, isn't it? To have your newsletter sought-after by subscribers. Here are my tips to make it happen.

Content is the Most Important Thing

According to a recent study by Bluehornet, "95% of people sign up for emails to receive discounts."

This is true of marketing emails, but there are also informational emails, where subscribers sign up to be entertained, to learn, or to keep themselves up-to-date on newsworthy items.

What can you offer that is of value to your audience? Make sure it's good, as this is the number one way to succeed in email marketing.

What Makes Content Good?

The type of value you create will vary greatly depending on who you are and most importantly, who your audience is. Spend time on developing a clear focus and content strategy. This is one of the most overlooked steps, but the one that will determine the success or failure of your email campaign.

It should reflect your subscribers' interests and passions. This is the key!
It should be easy to read, and easy to skim. Most people won't read an email word-for-word.
It should have a clear purpose (educate or entertain) or call-to-action ('Click here to buy now!")
It should be timely. I probably don't want to hear about your new ski gear coming out when I've only just set eyes on the summer sun.

Be Consistent

Again, make sure your content is consistently good. It only takes one irrelevant email for subscribers to unsubscribe, or worse yet, hit the SPAM button.
Have a consistent 'from email' address so that subscribers know what to look for.
Keep a consistent schedule. Tell your subscribers when and how often they will receive your mailout and stick o the schedule.
Provide a consistent look and layout so that I know it's you! If you change the look dramatically, draw attention and announce your new look so that I'm not confused.

If your content is good, your subscribers will be expecting your mailout and will make it a priority in their email inbox.

Group Accounts: Manage Your Organization's Email Communications

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 19:15:00 +0300

You may not be aware, but Industry Mailout and Advisor Mailout offer exciting tools to help you organize and manage your entire brand's email message arm. We have 3 distinct group account features to help you:

Promote a unified message from a central account
Approve mailouts through a central approver account
Create an organization-wide basic mailout that can be customized per area or region
Centrally billing through one billing account.

Group Accounts

Ideal for an organization that wants to centrally control the individual account subscriber lists, or simply bill all sub-accounts centrally. Adding a custom template will also ensure a consistent image across all arms of the organization.

Features:

Central account can: Access sub-accounts / create, send and track mailouts / Manage sub-account subscriber lists / Receive central invoices
Sub-accounts can: Create, send and track mailouts / manage subscriber lists / Receive individual invoices
Subscribers receive e-newsletters with a consistent look and feel, also including information pertinent to their particular region or division.

Approval Permissions

This type of group account is great for financial firms or other organizations looking to approve the final message. It allows the approver account - or accounts - to first see and approve a mailout before it can be delivered to the subscribers. The approver may also send the mailout back to the originating account for further edits, along with a note detailing the required changes. This ensures that no newsletter is sent from the sub-account without final approval.

Publishing

In addition to grouping an account, we offer further message control with the ability to create a mailout from the publishing account and then send it to the sub-accounts. Each sub-account can either send the mailout to their subscribers as-is, or further customize the mailout to include regional- or department-specific content for their audience.

Reporting is also available broken down to the individual sub-accounts or aggregated for an overall summary.

To discuss group account options, please contact us at 780-406-9003 or 877-260-6005.

We have a new person on the team!

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 01:05:00 +0300

We've added a new team member! Eric will be helping us improve the software you use to create, send, manage and track email newsletter campaigns.

Eric Hoff is a software developer with 13 years of experience. He specializes in web development in ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC.

An avid coffee drinker, Eric lives in Edmonton with his wife and daughter. You can also find him on LinkedIn.

Is your data hosted in Canada?

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 00:17:00 +0300

Yes! If you're looking for an email newsletter, or hosted mailing list, provider in Canada, please talk to us.

The US Patriot Act affects many organizations in Canada. We are Canadian owned and operated and have all of our database servers hosted here. Our company was founded in 2001, and has a long history of serving government agencies, financial institutions, non-profit organizations, and universities.

If privacy legislation affects you give us a call: 1-877-260-6005, or email us at info@industrymailout.com.

Why aren't people reading my emails?

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 21:58:00 +0300

What does it take to have an audience engage with something you've written? The video below explains Aristole's philosophy of persuasion. This is definitely applicable for content creators.

As a summary, Aristotle would ask content writers 3 questions:

Does the main idea makes sense to your audience? Your main point has to be relevant to your readers for them to pay attention.
Do you have authority to speak on the topic? You need to build a reputation as a credible source of information. Focus on building up credentials, real world proof and partnerships that will make you a trustworthy expert in your field.
Are you creating an emotional connection with the reader? Is the audience ready to hear the message? Context is important: if you email your subscribers on Monday morning when they may have high stress, they are less likely to be emotionally ready to receive your message.

View the video here:

How to create a CSS button for HTML emails

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 21:19:00 +0300

A button can radically improve your click-through-rate. Want people to RSVP online? Create a button. Looking for feedback on your article? Create a button. Want to encourage readers to shop now? Create a button.

The challenge with HTML email is that we don't have many ways to build a button. Traditionally, you might create an image, and then hyperlink it. Another tactic on the web is to use JavaScript, but that won't work in email. That leaves us with the lowly text link.

However, using CSS you can make any text link look like a button. Here's is some sample HTML code:

<p align="center"> <a href="http://www.industrymailout.com" style="background: #11356D; color: white; display: inline-block; width: auto; text-align: center;text-decoration:none;border:10px solid #11356D;">Visit our website</a></p>

That code will generate this button:

Visit our website

You can also create a button with rounded corners and a shadow; however, rounded corners will not display in all email software. Here is the code:

<p align="center"><a href="http://www.industrymailout.com" style="background:#11356D;color:white;display:inline-block;width:auto; text-align:center;-webkit-border-radius: 10px;-moz-border-radius: 10px;border-radius: 10px;text-decoration:none;border:10px solid #11356D;-moz-box-shadow: 3px 0 0 0 #ccc; -webkit-box-shadow: 3px 0 0 0 #ccc; box-shadow: 3px 0 0 0 #ccc; ">Visit our website</a></p>

This will render a button like this:

Visit our website

The biggest advantage to styling a text link with CSS: it will be viewable even when image blocking is turned on. This increases the likelihood of recipients clicking your button.

Why Plain-Text emails are important

Mon, 26 Nov 2012 21:27:00 +0300

Every template on our system creates an automatic plain-text version; certain templates allow you to customize this plain-text message.

What is a plain-text email?

A plain-text email has no formatting: it is simple, raw text. If you've ever created a text file in Microsoft's Notepad or Apple's TextEdit, then you've seen plain-text in action. You can't add emphasis, line-spacing, images, colors or font-family: it's just text.

Here is an example:

Why do my mailouts need a plain-text version?

When you send a mailout through our system, it's sent as a multi-part email: where there is an HTML version and a plain-text version bundled together. When the email is received, if the recipient's email software is configured to receive only plain-text, that's the version they will see. If they've configured their software to view HTML emails, they'll see that version.

This is why it's important to include a plain-text version: if you don't, any plain-text recipients viewing your email will see... nothing.

Tips for building custom plain-text emails

If you're using an email template that allows you to customize your plain-text emails, here are some factors to keep in mind:

Build the plain-text version online (in our editor). Otherwise use Microsoft's Notepad or Apple's TextEdit.
Basic ASCII characters are safest: this includes the regular alphabet, plus: " % & ' ( ) * + , - . / : ; < = > ? _
There is no need to manually "wrap" your text by creating line-breaks after 60 characters; most email clients will do this automatically now.
For bullet points, it's best to use the "*" character (or a dash)
You can emphasize titles or article breaks by using "==============="

How I read

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 23:55:00 +0300

I've had a few people ask how I get so much reading done; when do I have time to read all the articles I share on Twitter and LinkedIn?

I use Instapaper.

Whenever I come across an interesting article, I click the Read Later bookmarklet in my browser:

This queues the article in Instapaper. I do most of my reading at night after the kids are in bed (usually 8pm-11pm). I'll fire up Instapaper on my iPad, iPhone or my laptop. The app strips out ads and sidebars, allowing me to focus on the text.

I like this approach because it keeps me focused on work during the day, and gives me time to really digest a text at night or on the weekends. (It's also good for reading on the plane, because it downloads a copy of the text to your device.)

If I read something that I'd like to share on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn I use Buffer to automatically queue these posts to be published at set times during the day. Personally, my favorite type of software are apps that do work for me. I can essentially ignore Twitter all day (except for replies, which are emailed to me), and this app tweets for me.

At night, Instapaper allows me to browse links my friends have shared during the day, so I don't feel like I'm "missing out" on good reading material.

When I run out of things to read, I usually dive into an app called Zite; it creates a personalized magazine based on different interests, and my ongoing reading behaviour.

How do you guys read? What apps / tools do you use for reading articles on the web?

Instaper iPhone screenshots:

Organizing Your Subscribers: Lists, Sublists and Smart Sublists

Mon, 21 May 2012 18:53:00 +0300

How do I organize my subscribers? With such a powerful tool, this can be a hard question to answer. Here, in a nutshell, are some of the basics of deciding whether you need different lists, sublists or even smart sublists.

Time and time again, we hear that targeting your subscribers and personalizing your emails is a good idea. It ensures that your subscribers are receiving content they are interested in, helps to retain them as engaged subscribers, prevents you being marked as SPAM, and can also make your campaigns easier to track.

You can spend a lot of time thinking about this step and debating which way to sort your lists, or you can start out very simply. I suggest starting simply, while keeping a bigger picture in mind.

Basic Setup

Who's it for? The majority of communicators will fall into this category. This setup is for those who have one unified identity, meaning that all of the e-newsletters you send will have:

The same "from" name and "from email address"
The same look (header logo, colours and fonts, general layout)
The same objective (ie. your subscribers have opted-in to receive this newsletter, at this frequency, containing this type of information.)

How to:

In "Configure" tab, click "Mailing List Setup"
Name the list. This name is visible by your subscribers.
Add 'from name' and 'from address'
Add physical Mailing address or check the box indicating that all of your subscribers reside outside of the U.S. This is a CAN-SPAM requirement.

Options:

Fill out other info fields, as desired.
Insert a 'Subscribe Page" or "Unsubscribe Page" message.
Create sublists to further segregate your audience. (See Subscription Form Setup for important info.)

Method 1: If you only have a few subscribers and they are already in your Subscriber list

Click your "Subscribers" tab
Choose "Sublists"
Click "Add sublist" and give it a name. Click "OK".
You will see a list of all of your subscribers. Next to each name, click "Add" if you wish to add them to the sublist.
Scroll to the bottom and click "OK" to save.

Method 2: If you have too many subscribers to add one at a time, but no way to segregate them by Smart Sublist

Sort an Excel or CSV file into the sublist you would like to create. Save each sublist as a different file (not as separate sheets).
Click the "Subscribers" tab and choose "Import to Sublist"
Choose either a current sublist, or choose <Create new sublist for import> and name the sublist
Continue with the import, as directed
Note that during Step 3, you can decide whether to "keep" subscribers that are already in the sublist or "Delete" them and overwrite the sublist using the current file.

Method 3: Using subscriber information you have in your subscriber list, you can sort it into a Smart Sublist

Click the "Subscriber" tab
Choose "Smart Sublist"
Click "Add"
Name the Smart Sublist
Determine if you want to abide by ALL of the rules of this Smart Sublist or ANY of the rules
Add one or many rules to complete the Smart Sublist
Click "OK"

Smart Sublist Example:

Let's say you'd like to sort the people who live in a certain city. You would name the Smart Sublist, and then add that "City" field equals "Toronto".

You can also add multiple rules to catch more than one kind of subscriber. For instance, if you wanted a smart sublist to include all Canadian Capital cities, keep adding rules that equal the name of the city. Also, be sure to change "ALL" to "ANY" in the toggle for "Select subscribers that match ___ of the following rules" otherwise the system will attempt to find subscribers who live in Victoria, Edmonton and Regina, all at once!

Advanced Setup

Who's it for? Some communicators who require distinct campaigns, distinct contact lists or a distinct mailout appearance.

How to:

If you do not yet have multiple lists enabled on your account, please call us at (877) 260-6005 to discuss options. Please note that you will need to configure each mailing list with its own Mailing List Setup, header logo, colours, font and subscriber list.

Subscription Form Setup

Who's it for? Anyone looking to:

Personalize their mailout (ie. "Dear <First Name>,")
Allow a user to unsubscrible from one sublist but remain on other sublist(s). Note: The default setting on all mailing lists works such that when a subscriber unsubscribes themselves, they are automatically unsubscribed from all sublists within the mailing list. Call (877 260-6005) or email us to change this setting.
Allow subscribers to choose which sublist(s) they want to belong to.

How to change subscription fields:

Click the "Subscriber" tab
Choose "Subscriber Information"
Edit fields as desired.

Fields marked "Hidden" will not be seen on the subscription form.
Fields marked "Optional" will be seen but are optional.
Fields marker "Required" will be required. Note that adding too many required fields may discourage subscribers from subscribing.

There are three blank fields which can be used for other types of information, such as customer number.
Click "OK" to save changes

How to add sublists to subscription form:

Click the "Subscriber" tab
Choose "Sublists"
Click "Show" next to any sublists that you want to appear in the subscription form.

How to add a subscription page message:

Click "Configure"
Choose "Mailing List Setup"
Add content to "Subscription Page Message". Consider including:

The frequency of your mailout
The type of content
A request to add your 'from email address' to the subscriber's contact list

Definitions

Master lists are a way to keep separate and distinct mailing campaigns. Each master list is configured separately, meaning that it may have different settings under "Mailing list setup", different subscribers and (if the basic templates are used) a different look (header logo, fonts and colours). It's important to keep in mind that master lists cannot coordinate with other master lists, meaning that if a subscriber unsubscribes from one master list, they will still be subscribed to all other master lists to which they were subscribed. Also, if you send one mailout to two distinct master lists, anyone on both lists will receive the mailout twice.

Sublists allow you to further segregate your audience. You can either create a sublist from your existing list, import to sublist to create a new sublist from an excel file, or allow users to subscribe themselves to a sublist. Members of all sublists automatically become member of the master list. If you send a mailout to two sublists simultaneously, any duplication between sublists will be ignored and users will receive only one copy of the mailout.

Smart Sublist allow you to further segregate your audience based on the subscriber information fields (found in "Subscribers" tab under "Subscriber Information") you have saved in your subscriber list. For instance, you can create a smart sublist that will include everyone whose City equals "Toronto". A Smart Sublist will automatically update itself to include all users who match the rules of the smart sublist every time you add more subscribers. You can turn a Smart Sublist into a Sublist, but be aware that it will no longer auto-update.

Custom needs: we do, from time to time, handle extraordinary requests such as Dynamic Audience (a different mailout appears depending on who it's being sent to.) If you don't see a solution above, please call (877-260-6005) or email us for a more personalized approach.

Me and... Mike Bridge

Fri, 18 May 2012 01:32:00 +0300

Mike Bridge. You've probably never heard of Mike before. Most have never spoken on the phone with him. But as I've found with many of my previous jobs, the most important person in any company is the one who works alone, under the stairs, in relative obscurity.

He makes everything work. And he fixes everything. He's soft-spoken and carries a large stick, but in this case, his stick consists of a giant cerebellum full of computer knowledge and know-how.

Mike is one of the founders here at Mailout Interactive, and has the prestigious honour of being "definitely the smartest one here" (as quoted by everyone.) I'm not even going to try to explain what Mike does or how he does it, because as the resident non-geek, I'm sure I don't understand.

What people don't know about Mike is that he's a pretty funny, fun-loving guy. He's got a great sense of humour and is full of punny twists on words and phrases, which I suppose will happen when you've got as much knowledge as Mike has.

What Mike doesn't know - and there's shockingly little - is how deeply respected he is. I've heard a number of people talk about Mike's steady character and patience, his ability to listen and understand, and his total self-control. It takes a lot to get Mike angry. If there were a super-hero who was the opposite of the Incredible Hulk ( HULK SMASH!), Mike would be that superhero.

What also impresses me greatly in Mike is that he's not willing to be complacent. He's curious to learn new skills and keep on top of what's hip and happenin'. Mike could even be our resident hipster here at Industry Mailout!

Learning to program

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 10:31:00 +0300

As a Product Manager, I stand at the intersection of business, programming and design. It's my responsibility to decide how we're going to improve our product, and then partner with our customers, designers and programmers to make it happen.

I started with Industry Mailout as a customer, was hired as an employee on our business team, and have experience in web design. My weakest link is definitely programming.

My programming story

Oddly, I've always been interested in programming but have never fully pursued it. As a 10 year old, I asked for a copy of Turbo Pascal 6 for my birthday. Over the next 2 years I had some success building basic programs. In 1992 I stopped programming. I'd found it hard to teach myself. Plus: graphical user interfaces had just came out for dial-up bulletin boards, and I switched my focus to doing design. In high school I started focusing on entrepreneurship. Since then I've dabbled with code, but have never really dived in.

Now, I'm working with programmers every day. I need to speak their language, and have an understanding of basic development concepts. In January I started looking for an "introduction to programming" course I could take.

Learning to program

I found a group of programmers in Las Vegas who were putting on a 2-day introductory course, called Ruby Weekend. I signed up, and flew down at the end of January.

The idea behind the course was to give beginners a broad introduction to programming through the Ruby programming language. We covered everything from setting up a local development environment, to deploying a working application to the web. That's a lot of information and teaching to fit into two days! Each day ended up being almost 10 hours of learning, coding, testing, and asking questions.

On day 2 they took each of us through the whole process of quickly creating a sample web app, database, and then deploying both to the web (using a host called Heroku). Click here to see my first web app.

I can't praise the event organizers enough: they did a great job of working with a group of beginners, and leading us to some early success. If you're interested, they're putting on another class May 19th-20th, 2012; you can register here. They even documented what they learned as instructors: this would be a great resource for developers wishing to put on a similar event.

Coming back, I definitely had a greater understanding of the development process. Now that I have the "big view" I need to go back and keep practicing the basics (in this case, writing code as often as I can).

Here are some of my photos from the trip:

Here's me deploying my first Rails app:

The conference was held in a really cool co-working / art studio space downtown:

HTML Email for Non-Geeks!

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 19:40:00 +0300

1)2)

3)4)

Let's start out with a little game of "Spot the Differences." The above previews are all the exact same message: this blog post, in fact. Posts 1 and 2 were copied from Word, while 3 and 4 were copied from Word Pad. The first two are preview only, 1) in Google Chrome and 2) in Internet Explorer. Did you spot the stray bullet numbers? The second set were samples that I emailed. 3) is what I saw using Outlook, while 4) was what I saw in Gmail. Do you see the sides of my Outlook email? Me neither.

Technology can be frustrating, especially when things don't work. And when we need help, we, as users, need to contact the "computer geeks" to get answers. Sometimes talking to a geek can leave you even more confused than when you began!

Since I now work at a software company, I've started to understand the computer geeks. I thought this was valuable information to share with other non-geeks. For your enjoyment and reading ease, here are some basics about HTML email:

1) Emails are written in a language called HTML so that all email clients (Outlook, Gmail, Hotmail, etc) can read them. Unfortunately, in order for all clients to read them, they have to be written in a very simple, very limited form of HTML. This is why your email can’t do cool things, like your webpage can.

2) Every email client reads and displays emails differently, so if you send a proof to yourself and open it using Gmail, don’t be surprised if it looks different to those using Outlook. The Mailout Interactive system is designed to make sure the emails look the best across all email clients, but it isn’t infallible. There will always be differences (and we find Outlook to be one program that likes to point out those differences.)

3) Speaking of our system, we try to make it as user-friendly as possible. Unfortunately, some things that seem simple can cause major problems. Take formatting, for example. If you type your article in Word, and then copy and paste it over, it will bring a lot of unwanted HTML formatting along and make your article look strange. It’s best to write your article in something like Word pad (because Word pad doesn’t add any formatting), paste it into our system, and edit it within our system.

4) SPAM filters are tricky. They may not filter your email one day, and then filter it the next. This is because spammers are always changing their tactics. Email clients have to update their tactics as well. Read our post on SPAM (not the luncheon meat) for more information.

5) How we track email readership. Justin did a great job of explaining email tracking in a previous post. He explains how an unconfirmed read doesn’t necessarily mean the mailout wasn’t read, and how this information is still useful.

I hope I have been able to demystify some of the 1s and 0s that have been boggling us non-techies for years, but as always, give us a call (877 260-6005) or email (info@mailoutinteractive.com) to get your questions answered… in plain English.

Newsletters that People Love to Read & Receive

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 00:18:00 +0300

You have been charged with creating your company or organization’s next great email marketing campaign. You have a list of subscribers. You have a deadline. You even have some content. Now what?

Assembling and organizing a mailout can be a daunting task. Prioritizing your articles and developing a great layout can be tricky. Here are some tips from the Mailout Interactive Tips vault.

Your readers, on average, spend only 51 seconds skimming your email. Let’s make those 51 seconds count!

What makes you stay on a page for more than 51 seconds? In this article, we’ll explore three things that do it for me: a Big Picture, a Clear Focus, and an Invitation.

The Big Picture:

I like a clear, concise design with multiple articles. I like images (and anything else really colourful and ‘busy’) to be in well-defined areas instead of all over the page, and I like things to be placed where I expect them to be, so that they’re easier for me to read.

One newsletter I’ve been crushing on lately is the one put forth by Behance. They have a clearly designed header area, a main article area, with a number of sub-articles, some less-important articles in the sidebar, along with their social media links, a section (near the bottom) for their products, and then all the other stuff that nobody reads condensed into minutea in the footer.

Some people may argue that you should ‘shake up’ your e-newsletter design so that it stands out. I argue you should format it well and create great content, so that it stands out.

A Clear Focus

Your mailout should have one central purpose for being. Every article in your mailout should work to promote that purpose. This purpose can have many side-effects, but in general:

Your mailout creates value for your subscriber
Your mailout captures the attention of your subscriber
Your mailout creates value for you / your company or organization

Some Examples of a central purpose could include:

Creating a unified organization (company / government / not-for-profit organization, etc.) through education, communication and feedback
Enhancing the experience of your customers through tips and education
Keeping alumni engaged with your organization

In the case of Behance, the ‘raison d’être’ for their newsletter is “Making Ideas Happen.” While this newsletter is a division of the greater Behance Company, it isn’t your run-of-the-mill marketing catalogue. In fact, only a very small part of their newsletter is focussed on their products, but because the whole newsletter is aimed at making ideas happen and their products are a tangible way to support this mandate, they become handy tools instead of an overbearing sales pitch.

You may want to revisit your mailout's ‘central purpose’ if any of the following are true:

The majority of your subscribers will only be interested in 1 of the x number of articles in your mailout or each article you write is intended for a different audience
You’ve never thought about your mailout’s central purpose
You can’t easily answer the question “Why should I sign up for your newsletter?”

An Invitation:

When I talk about an invitation, I don’t literally mean an invitation. I mean that your email looks inviting. People are attracted to it. People want to read it. There are a number of things you can do to make your e-newsletter more attractive to your readers.

Write great titles. There are a bunch of suggestions on the web about how to create great titles and subject lines. I’m most attracted to ones that are
- Clear: I know what I’m going to learn when I read this article, and I’m interested in that information
- Conspicuous: I recently wrote a blog post about Indiana Jones whipping your contact list into shape. I love reading articles where the title doesn’t seem to fit the subject. I wonder to myself, ‘how is the writer going to tie this one together?
- Contradictory – like a business that has grown by ignoring 16,000 companies, or
- Funny. “Who doesn’t love a generic smiling lady?” says the header of a post to which I will refer shortly. This is something I would say. This tells me that the content is likely to have some humour too. Conveniently, it does!
Use images. Justin has already written a blog post about using photos in your mailouts, but to summarize, he suggests using photos of real people in real scenarios. Another tip about using photos comes from the blog post with the humorous header to which I referred earlier. The key principle of this post states to use images that create value. An image is only worth a thousand words if those are the words you’re looking to convey.
Use easy-to-read formatting. We’ll get into more detail in the 2nd and third parts of this series later, but for the big picture stuff, here are some tips.
- Use “email content” and “landing page content” effectively, as described in this post by Justin.
- Limit the number of articles or article groups to approximately 3 to 5
- Use colours, fonts, and font sizes effectively in order to differentiate groups of articles, individual articles and article sections.

These ‘big picture’ guidelines will help you to get started. Stay tuned to the next post to discover more simple tips to enhance your mailout. If you have any questions, please call us at 877-260-6005 or email us.

Reports Galore

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 23:50:00 +0300

For those of you who simply can't get enough data, we've recently launched our new reporting tool: Custom Reports. This handy feature can be found tucked under your 'Configure' tab. But don't let its functionality overwhelm you. Use this handy PDF to guide you through slicing and dicing the data, just the way you want!

Client Guide to Custom Reports.pdf (212.68 kb)

As always, we are here to help. Contact us at 877-260-6005 or info@mailoutinteractive.com.

New feature for Sent Mailouts

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 18:36:00 +0300

We've added new functionality to the Sent Mailouts screen. In addition to new charts, you can now filter the list on screen by date range and by mailing list.

Need help with this new feature? Have some feedback? Give us a call at 1-877-260-6005 or email us: info@mailoutinteractive.com.

With this release, we've added 4 new charts that you can view: Sent trend, Read trend, Bounce trend, and Forward trend. These charts are available at the bottom of the Sent Mailouts screen.

Here's how to use and understand these new charts:

At the top of the screen, filter by the desired mailing list and date range.
Scroll to the bottom, and select the chart that you wish to view.
Hover on a data point and you can see information about that particular mailout.
The red line shows you the general trend for that chart. For example: are the number of emails sent going up, and what are the outliers?

We're going to continue to develop new reporting features. Eventually you will be able to compute percentages for reads, clicks and bounces, as well as export your data.

Me and... Jon!

Fri, 12 Aug 2011 00:27:00 +0300

Many of you will have spoken with Jon Larson, one of the co-owners of Mailout Interactive and the lead on the customer service side of the business. His wealth of knowledge makes him a great resource, as I’m sure many of you have experienced when you’ve called in for help or information. (He’ll probably laugh at being described as having ‘a wealth of knowledge;’ he once posted on twitter that “Our goal @industrymailout for hiring people has been to keep me as the dumbest person on staff. 13 people now and still meeting that goal.” But Jon’s interests are much more diverse than the email marketing business. In fact, I would say that Jon can be downright passionate sometimes.

Many of the livelier conversations in the office begin with one of us asking, “Jon, what do you think of…?” This question is sure to garner not only an opinion, but more than likely a spirited debate. In fact, I would have to say that I’ve come to rely more on Jon than on Google for opinions and explanations on politics, the economy, world events and history, among other topics.

But I don’t think I’m fairly describing Jon’s full personality. He’s definitely not some pompous political pontificator (although I may just ge

t that t-shirt created for him.) He’s also an avid skier and mountain biker, he seriously enjoys a great Edmonton festival (if only for the beer gardens) and he’s even a dad. I couldn’t quite picture it at first; I made him show me proof of him with his baby, who is quite adorable by the way.

My first meetings with Jon involved serving him lunch, something he would often take long after the regular lunch crowd had come and gone. I thought he must have been a hard worker, dedicated employee or the bottom man on the lunch totem pole. As it turns out, Jon is well above the bottom rung of the totem pole. He describes his role at Mailout Interactive as: “Director of Something.”

These were the days when I ran Axis café, and knew Jon only as a regular customer, lover of the three-cheese Panini and the guy who I always thought was kind of smirking at me. I learned later that this was in fact not a smirk, just Jon’s smile, but it is always funny to me how first impressions can be so wrong. (“Who is this smirky guy, who thinks he’s so much better than me? Oh, my new boss, that’s who.”)

Actually, I’ve always had a great respect for Jon and the Mailout gang. Whenever they would come in to the café, they always seemed to be in a good mood (as previously mentioned in my post about Gregg.) I just assumed it was the great coffee I served them, or that they were just so excited to see me. As it turns out, that’s just the way these guys are, and I’m not even exaggerating.

My desk sits right next to Jon’s, and you’ll often hear us say to each other, “what are you laughing about?” It’s like we have our own private contest to see who can laugh more during one working day. It makes the workplace a very enjoyable place to be.

The other thing that makes Mailout Interactive enjoyable is working with people who really love what they do. Jon loves the customer service side of our business. And even though he’s an owner of the company, I don’t think he’ll ever want to give up answering the phone when you call. (By the way, have you called us yet? We do answer the phone, and if you’ve ever had some question about our software, why not just test out our phone answering skills? 1 877 260 6005.)

While this Jon Larson may not be the US congressman, or even the Jon Larson that wrote the music for RENT, he’s definitely one Jon Larson worth getting to know.

Best Little Tool: Publishing

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 02:05:00 +0300

You know your brand. You also know how important it is to send a unified and consistent message. But did you know that we have an easy tool to help you do this, enterprise wide? It's called "publishing," and if you haven't been taking full advantage of this neat feature, then read on to learn how.

Our publishing system allows you to create a central message and send it to subordinate accounts. It's a simple concept: create an email newsletter, then send it to all 'publishee' accounts that are tied to the master 'publisher' account. Now each publishee can add content that is specific to that publishee's division, faculty or branch.

Some examples of where publishing has been useful to our clients include:

Universities, who publish articles throughout all facutlies,
Nationwide companies who publish general info to their stores and let each individual retail outlet add their own regional promotions,
Financial firms who publish to their advisors.

In fact, we offer in-house publishing on the Advisor Mailout side. Once a month, we create a third-party mailout full of educational and timely articles specifically geared toward the investment and advisor marketplace.

Furthermore, publishing allows for the same informative and in-depth tracking. Publishers are able to drill down to each of their publishees to see how well the mailout performed in each area. It's a very powerful way to ensure that your message stays strong and that your people are all informed with a consistent message.

If you are interested in publishing, or have any further questions, please give us a call at 877-260-6006 or email us at info@mailoutinteractive.com.

Indiana Jones Will Whip Your Contact List Into Shape!

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 01:34:00 +0300

In the wild world of email communications, it can be tough keeping up with the Joneses. (Cue "Indiana Jones" theme song here). There are technological barriers and standards that keep changing. Not to worry, however, because our hero Indy has some great tips and advice on how to make the most of your contact list, as demonstrated by the challenges he faced in “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade”… Oh, I’m feeling nerdier already.

Only the penitent men shall pass - Filter your list. When you export contacts from your regular email provider, there will often be a lot of junk that comes along: email addresses that aren’t actually tied to a real recipient, even abuse@domain addresses, designed to report abuses. Always go through your list to weed out contacts that haven’t specifically given you permission to email them. We’ll talk about why this is so important a little later on.

Watch out for booby traps – Spam traps. Some of these abuse@ or info@ email addresses may even be flagged as spam traps. These are addresses not tied to an individual, and therefor they are unable to subscribe themselves to any mailing list. As a consequence, anti-spammers know that if these addresses receive email, it is spam and they can report the sender as a spammer. Your reputation, as the sender, can be irreparably damaged by sending to such addresses.

The Name of God – Spelling matters. Just as Indy had to remember how to spell the name of God - in Latin – so it is equally important that you review your list for accuracy (no, the floor will not fall out from under you each time you make a spelling error.)

Fortunately, Mailout Interactive has made this easy for you. If there are any obvious errors, they will be flagged during the final stage of your import, as shown in these screen shots. Here you can see that one of our addresses was invalid. During this stage of the import, you can click on the number next to the error to view the details of this error. Return to your original spreadsheet, correct the error, and import it again.

Choose wisely. We once had a customer who, despite our warnings and against our best advice, chose to email recipients who did not wish to receive his emails. He chose… poorly. Not only did these recipients report his email as spam, damaging his sender reputation and potentially blocking future emails from being received, but he also spontaneously aged, shriveled and died. (Or perhaps was that only in the movie.)

It may not be the flashiest way to do business, and we definitely lose out on a small portion of revenue, but we choose customers who are above board on the SPAM issue, customers who send only to recipients that have asked to receive their emails. We do our best to choose our clients… wisely.

All of these steps simply lead to the Holy Grail of clean contact lists, which should result in higher open rates and better engagement from recipients. Oh, and you get to be the hero of email communications!

Statistical Inference: Hypothesis Testing

Mon, 04 Jul 2011 13:35:00 +0300

Have you ever wondered how to prove, conclusively, that performance optimisations you've made to some code have actually helped? In this blog post, I'll show you how we use Inference to guide our work when trying to speed up slow bits of code at Mailout Interactive.

What is performance optimisation?

Occasionally we'll become aware of a certain feature or operation in our application that is taking longer than we'd like. We might find out because a database timeout error occurs, or perhaps a customer mentions that something seems to be sluggish on the web site. Either way, once we track down the offending code, we must make changes to alleviate the problem. But how can we be sure that these changes have actually improved the situation?

Inference & hypothesis testing

To prove that our changes have been successful, we'll need to rely on a Statistical Inference technique known as Hypothesis Testing. In particular, we'll be focusing on the Paired Sample Student's T-test. Before I explain exactly what that means, let's cover some interesting historical context.

Student who?

Way back when, around 1906, an enterprising young English chap called William Sealy Gosset had been a mere working stiff in an Irish Brewery, of some repute, owned by a right geez named Arthur Guinness (yes, that Guinness). Incidentally, you may have heard of this brewery, which Wikipedia describes delightfully as having been "a progressive agro-chemical business".

Anyway, our man Gosset was an engineer whose job was to ensure the quality of the brew being produced. To do so, he would take samples of stout and analyze them using the accepted calculations of his day and determine, based on those calculations, whether the current batch of stout was OK or needed to be rejected and analysed in more detail by a laboratory. Based on his calculations, Gosset knew that he should reasonably expect to "reject about 5% of the good [sic] batches of stout. However, the lab told him that he was in fact rejecting about 15% of the good batches." (De Veaux 589)

It was during this work, and some incredibly painstaking research, that Gosset realized that the commonly used calculation for the standard error of a sample mean was wrong, thus distorting the results. By changing the calculation of this standard error, Gosset realized that the shape of his sampling model also changed, and the t-distribution was born. These results would be confirmed, years later, by the great Sir R.A. Fisher, but first Gosset had to get them published.

As it turns out, the folks at the Guinness brewery had been burnt in the past, and were thus afraid that Gosset might be publishing valuable trade secrets (it's also likely that none of them actually understood what he was publishing, since it was pretty advanced mathematics). Anyhow, one of the concessions Gosset was forced to make was to publish under the pseudonym "Student", and alas, Student's T-test was born.

How it works

By taking measurements (AKA: samples) of our slow bit of code before and after we make our optimisation changes, we can use the T-test to accept or reject a hypothesis, namely that the changes have made the slow code faster. Let's setup our samples and hypothesis:

Let's call our sample (measurements) of the old, slow code A
And we'll name the sample (measurements) of our new, hopefully faster, code B
Each sample will contain a number of observations (individual timing measurements).
Finally, we'll hypothesize that that the new code, B, will be faster (i.e.: smaller numbers) than the old code, A

We can think about that last point mathematically like so: If we subtract the mean of A (μA) from the mean of B (μB), we should end up with a negative number, since we're expecting the measurements in A to be greater than the measurements in B, on average:

μB - μA < 0

But how can we be sure that this difference is statistically valid? We can't possibly control for all the things that could be different between the samples (e.g.: 'are other processes running on the computer during tests?', 'what direction is the wind blowing?', etc.) but we can convince ourselves, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the results are statistically valid by performing a test of our hypothesis. First, we need to set up the null hypothesis (H0, pronounced "aitch-naught"), which will be the winner by default if our calculations do not result in conclusive evidence. This is good practice, since it causes us to be cautious about the conclusions we draw: if we don't prove, convincingly, that something has changed then we'll assume no change at all. For this test our null hypothesis, H0, is:

H0: μB - μA = 0

That is, there is no difference between the two samples; both algorithms are depressingly slow. Our alternative hypothesis, Ha (pronounced "aitch-eh"), which we're hoping to prove convincingly, will be that our changes were effective and so the B algorithm executed faster than the A algorithm:

Ha: μB - μA < 0

Case study: investigating alternative clustering keys in the Mailout Interactive database

Now that we've got the historical context, and a general understanding of how to set up the T-test, let's look at a case study. The database at Mailout Interactive contains a table called "listmember" which contains the details of all the subscribers who receive email from our clients. It's one of our biggest tables, containing several dozen million rows, and a couple dozen columns. Consider this very simplified schema (before any changes, hence we'll label this table 'A'):

Table: A
ID	Email	First Name	Last Name	Mailing List ID
1	babs@frs.co.uk	Charles	Babbage	9
2	ada@kirkby.org	Ada	Lovelace	7
3	alan@bletchley.gov.uk	Alan	Turing	8
4	knuth_dawg@san_serriffe.com	Donald	Knuth	9

But imagine that there are, say, 100 million rows, rather than 4. Now, the data is physically stored on disk in the same order shown above: by the ID field in increasing order. In order to speed up some of our queries, we hypothesized that changing this physical row ordering might make it faster to locate groups of records by the Mailing List ID, since the hardware would need to look in fewer locations on the disk. To test this, we created a copy of the table, let's label it 'B', and changed the order of the rows to this:

Table: B
ID	Email	First Name	Last Name	Mailing List ID
2	ada@kirkby.org	Ada	Lovelace	7
3	alan@bletchley.gov.uk	Alan	Turing	8
1	babs@frs.co.uk	Charles	Babbage	9
4	knuth_dawg@san_serriffe.com	Donald	Knuth	9

Notice now that if we want all the subscribers on Mailing List 9, they are located together in a contiguous group, and they'd be stored this way on disk too. We've now got our two cases, A and B, and we're going to be conservative and assume that our changes have had no effect. Here are our hypotheses:

H0: μB - μA = 0
Ha: μB - μA < 0

We're hoping to find conclusive evidence that will allow us to reject H0 (the null hypothesis) in favour of Ha (the alternative hypothesis), proving that our change has made the query faster. To continue with the test, we ran the same query on both tables several times and collected the timings for each execution. Here is some of the data (in milliseconds):

A: 1818, 1278, 1090, 4609, ... 1083

B: 1040, 967, 1128, 4280, ... 903

Now we're ready to complete the T-test and determine if our changes were successful. I often use my trusty TI-83 calculator (photo above) to crunch the numbers, but since this data is in a CSV file I've chosen to use the t.test() function in the R statistical environment. Here is the R script:

#Load the data
data <- read.csv('C:\\data.csv', sep=',', head=TRUE)
A = data$A
B = data$B
#Perform a t-test
t.test(B, A, paired=TRUE)
#visualize input data
boxplot(A, B, names=c("A", "B"), col=c("red", "blue"), 
    xlab="Index Configuration", ylab="Latency (ms)")

And the output of the t.test() function:

Paired t-test
data:  B and A 
t = -3.7003, df = 56, p-value = 0.0004929
alternative hypothesis: true difference in means is not equal to 0 
95 percent confidence interval:
 -6986.544 -2078.825 
sample estimates:
mean of the differences 
              -4532.684

There are a few interesting things to note in that output:

First, we're performing a paired test, since in this experiment we essentially took measurements on the same database table under two different treatments
Next, notice that the test has reminded us that the alternative hypothesis is that the mean of the differences is not zero
The p-value is the really interesting bit. It denotes the probability that our data could have ended up the way it did by simple chance alone. 0.0004929 ~ 0.05% or 1/20th of a percent. What this means is that if we performed the experiment 2000 times, we'd likely see this result only once. Those are pretty long odds. It's safe to assume that this result is not due to chance, but is a legitimate difference caused by our changes to the database. Thus, we reject the null hypothesis (no change) in favour of the alternative hypothesis (the new data ordering results in faster queries).
Another way to interpret this is that 0 does not lie within the listed bounds of the 95% confidence interval. Therefore, it is unlikely that 0 (no change) is due to chance alone.

Here is a (fairly ugly) boxplot that I made to help visualize the data, and which intuitively appears to confirm the conclusion that the code changes were successful:

Works Cited

De Veaux, Richard D., Paul F. Velleman, and David E. Bock. Intro Stats. Boston: Pearson Education, 2009. Print. ISBN-13: 987-0-321-50045-8.

The UP Side of Everything

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 20:21:00 +0300

With the current postal lockout, I’m sure you’re all wondering how you will keep in touch with your customers, clients or colleagues, giving them up-to-the-minute (minus three days of average postal service) advice and information. Why oh why is the Pony Express no longer in service?

What better time than now to investigate the alternatives. Even if you’re not the tech-savvy wizard in the office, Mailout Interactive’s easy-to-use platform and complimentary phone or email training and support will make you look like an e-newsletter genius. We help people create brilliant and engaging e-newsletters in minutes.

Side effects may include:

Saving money. Check out this comparison of traditional mail marketing costs to our email newsletter service.
Improved environmentalism. The trees will thank you for converting your paper mail to electronic format
Enhanced customer relations. Clients will appreciate timely, informative and interactive newsletters.
Real-time tracking and reports. Keep your audience engaged by catering to their interests.
And the best part? No more paper cuts!

Call us at 877-260-6005 (we answer the phone during business hours) or email info@mailoutinteractive.com.

Click here for a free trial.

Around the Water Cooler

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 17:53:00 +0300

These are the conversations to which I am privy at the Mailout Interactive 'water cooler'... or chat room. And I figured that if we garnered an iota of enjoyment from them, perhaps some of you out there might as well. Enjoy, and feel free to keep the hysterics going in our comments section. Warning: there *may* be puns.

At Brock's new Toronto Office:

Brock Armstrong: Luke who came to work! Get it? Luke instead of look?

Justin Jackson: Haha Sweet.

Adam Patterson: It's too early for this :)

Camerson Dyck: Hmmm. He does Luke familiar.

Brock Armstrong: HEY-OH!

Ashley Jacobsen: Yeah, I'll give you a Han for that one!

Brock: YES! Keep Going!

Ashley: Steve [Kiers] says, "that cardboard looks a little Chewy.." Yup, it's officially out of control.

Brock: Awesome!

Justin: Yo'da man!

Brock: Uh oh... that was a stretch... is it time to stop?

Justin: Did I tell you I took the eleVader to the 2nd floor this morning?

Cameron: I think I'll just go Solo on that one.

Brock: I've been gaining a lot of weight lately because I've been Leia-ing around too much

Adam: Jabba we still need to get coffee B4-D4 it's too late!

Adam: Anyone know a good place for Thai? [I don't actually know if this is some kind of reference, or if it was an earnest request for a recommendation]

Cameron: Hey! B4 is a Star Trek reference! You're out of order Adam. I think you just must've fallen for that old Jedi mind trick.

Adam: B4-D4 was in the Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Star_Wars_characters

"The administrative droid that works for Czerka on Telos in the Outer Rim. It is possible to control B4-D4 in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II The Sith Lords while helping the Ithorians with their restoration project."

Cameron: Oops! I thought you meant Data's successor, B4 in the elast viewed ST film of all time - Nemesis.

Moral of this story: It's all pun and games until someone pulls out a wiki reference.

Into the Deep End: Compilers

Sat, 04 Jun 2011 00:43:00 +0300

This is the second instalment of my technical posts for any non-technical readers who might be interested. Today I'll be covering compilers, what they are, how they work, and why it's important.

Anyone who has had the (mis)fortune of being interviewed by me has learned that I'm something of a stickler when it comes to developers understanding how compilers work. Don't get me wrong - I'm not suggesting that every software developer out there needs to be able to write a compiler from scratch on the whiteboard during an interview. I couldn't. But, since the compiler is the most important tool we use, we each need to have at least a topical understanding of what a compiler is and how it works (people sometimes refer to this as a "20,000 foot view"). After all, would you hire a car mechanic who couldn't give you an overview of how a car engine works? How about a welder who was unable to explain how electricity can cause metals to fuse together? Perhaps a teacher who stared blankly when asked "what is a lesson plan?" No?

6096 Metres Up

Ok, so, in an incredibly simplistic explanation, what is a compiler? Simply put, a compiler is a program that translates instructions written in a human-readable programming language into executable machine code that can be run by a computer. Sure, there are plenty of variations on this theme - interpreters, cross-compilers, source-to-source compilers, JIT compilers, compiler compilers, etc. - but any interview candidate who can get this far is already (sadly) ahead of the pack. As an aside, it's often an interesting milestone when a compiler is first able to compile itself (go ahead and read that again if you need to).

Keeping in mind that compiler construction is a massive topic that relies on heaps of other computing science theory, let's take a brief look at how this translation from source code to executable code actually happens. For the sake of brevity, we'll be skipping over many important concepts. The upshot, though, is that I'm planning this post to be another technical post that does not contain any code!

Why Does This Matter?

Well, for starters, writing machine code is incredibly tedious and error prone. This is because the low-level instructions that are carried out by the processor in a computer are terse and difficult for a human to interpret. They also lack useful abstractions, like loops, that increase programmer productivity. Using a compiler enables an application developer to write programs in a high-level source code language (e.g.: Ruby, Java, Erlang, etc.) which is much closer to natural human language. The compiler then handles the tedious heavy lifting of transforming the human's source code into something that can be efficiently executed by a computer. And tedious heavy lifting is exactly what computers excel at.

How it All Works

A compiler generally consists of two (sometimes three) distinct sections, each of which handles a different set of tasks. When one section has completed successfully, it will invoke the next section, passing along the transformed results of its computations. The input to get it all started is the human-readable source code of the program to be compiled.

Front End

The Front End of the compiler is responsible for checking the validity of a program written in a particular language and preparing a target platform-independent representation that can be used by the Back End to generate executable code. It accepts the input source code, and performs the following operations:

Lex: the input source code is broken into individual words and symbols, called tokens, according to the grammar of the source language. In many languages, reserved keywords like "if", "while", and "class" are defined as tokens. The process of 'lexing' a file is basically just splitting it into separate words.

Parse: in order to make sense of the tokens provided by the lexer, we need to arrange them into reductions, as defined in the grammar of the source language. The reductions defined in the grammar describe the relationships between individual tokens. The reductions created during the parse phase can be thought of simply as groups of tokens.

Most of the time a compiler writer will use a tool called a parser generator to automatically generate the lexer and parser from the source code grammar definition. This is simply because writing these modules manually is incredibly tedious and prone to errors. Generating a parser from a language grammar is what I referred to earlier as a "compiler compiler", since we're compiling the grammar into a runnable program, although still written in a high-level language, whose purpose is to provide the building blocks of a compiler for the language defined by the grammar.

Semantic Actions: also known as parse actions, this is where the compiler builds a special data structure called an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) which it will use to represent the program being compiled. At this point, we are done with individual tokens and we now focus on complete data objects. In order to build this AST, the compiler writer will sprinkle many small fragments of code all over the generated lexer and parser to instantiate each AST data object as the parser scans over the tokens.

Although the previous three phases are very closely related (and logically distinct) they are often not physically separated within the compiler code.

Semantic Analysis: the fully-formed AST can now be validated to make sure that it conforms to the rules of the source code language. This involves a number of steps including checking that variables exist before they are used, ensuring that values being assigned to variables have the correct data types, ensuring that class, variable, and method names are spelled correctly, and checking that function calls provide the correct number of parameters. During type-checking, a symbol table will be added to the AST.

Intermediate Representation: a common goal for compiler writers is to allow programmers to write applications in different source code languages (e.g. C, Java, etc.) and then deploy those programs on various types of computers, called platforms (e.g. Pentium, MIPS, etc.). This, however, creates a combinatorial problem: to compile S source code languages to P target platforms, the compiler writer would need write S x P modules. This becomes a massive amount of work even with very small values of S and P. The solution is to translate the AST for each source code language into an intermediate representation (IR) that can then be used to generate code on all target platforms. This reduces our workload to S + P modules, which is much more manageable (see diagram). Each of the blue "S" circles in the diagram can be thought of as a complete Front End, while each of the red "P" circles represents a complete Back End.

After the AST has been translated into an IR tree, the Front End of the compiler is complete, so the IR is handed to the Back End for the desired target platform, which will generate the executable code.

Back End

The Back End of the compiler is responsible for optimizing the IR tree for a particular target platform and generating executable code that can be run on that platform. It accepts as input the IR tree, and performs the following operations:

Canonicalization: an IR tree is generic (i.e.: platform-independent) which makes it difficult to optimize. To make optimizations more likely to occur and easier to produce, the IR tree is translated into a tree that is canonical (i.e.: as simple as possible) for the target platform. During this process, certain classes of side effects can be removed and unneeded branches can also be cleaned up.

Instruction Selection: the nodes of the canonical IR tree can now be grouped into batches that correspond to the specific actions handled by the instructions of the target platform.

Various analyses and optimizations: modern compilers often take care of a huge number of optimizations. These can be anything from relatively simple things like constant propagation and loop optimizations to much more advanced items such as garbage collection and automatic parallelization. The details are really beyond the scope of this blog post, but it's important to understand that the purpose of these optimizations is to make the compiled program as compact and efficient as possible. This way, every application programmer can benefit from an optimization without first having to earn a Ph.D. in Computing Science and then implement it by hand each time s/he writes a program.

Register allocation: the register and memory locations of all the variables in the compiled program are planned out, in accordance with the hardware specifications of the target machine.

Code emission: insert the register locations just computed into the machine instructions that we selected earlier. This is the final executable code for the target platform, which will be output and saved in file format which can be run on the target platform (e.g.: a .exe file).

And that's it! Once the executable program has been saved on disk somewhere, the process is complete, so the compiler terminates.

How to manage your full inbox

Thu, 02 Jun 2011 00:56:00 +0300

Three years ago, Gregg recommended I read Mark Hurst's book, Bit Literacy. In it, Hurst describes techniques for managing our digital lives. His most helpful tip was a method for organizing my email inbox. Recently, in a blog post, Hurst summarizes the technique:

The method is very simple: separate your todos from the rest of your emails, so that you can work from a todo list, rather than an inbox (which wasn't designed to manage workflow). If and when your todos are on a todo list, you can remove everything else from the inbox - by archiving, filing, or deleting various bits to suit your own tastes. Once an inbox is empty, it's really difficult to be distracted by email any more. You're forced to get your work done - from the todo list.

I've been using this approach to process my email for the past 3 years. It's one of the best things I've done. By separating conversations from tasks, I can organize my time appropriately. Rather than feeling overwhelmed by email, I have the headspace to dive into my work and get things done.

How do I record a screencast?

Thu, 26 May 2011 21:02:00 +0300

We've had a number of people ask how we create our screencasts. As with anything creative, our process is constantly evolving.

If you're just starting out, I would recommend these steps:

What you will need:

Screencasting software - for serious projects, I would recommend Screenflow ($99, on a Mac), or Camtasia ($299, on a PC). For less serious projects, you can record and publish screencasts "on the go" with Jing (free, PC or Mac).
A microphone - for higher audio quality, I would recommend the Audio-Technica AT2020 USB mic ($99). If audio quality isn't an issue, you can always record with your computer's internal microphone.
Portable sound booth - controlling background noise is a real challenge. The guys in the office laughed at me, but I bought the Original Sound Porta-Booth ($139) and it's turned out to be a great investment.
A computer - you'll need a machine with enough power and RAM to do the video editing and rendering once you've recorded your screencast.

The process

Write the script - start by writing a draft script, and have other people in the office review it and make suggestions. This is an important stage. Personally, I’m a “off-the-cuff” kind of guy, but having a solid outline will decrease the number of mistakes you make when recording.
Record a quick draft - there’s a free product called Jing that allows you to create screencasts in real-time. I use this to practice the script, and to give my co-workers an idea of the visuals and narration.
Record the real thing - to record my final draft I use screencasting software for the Mac called Screenflow (it’s similar to Camtasia for the PC). This tool allows you to record everything on your screen, while narrating at the same time. Some people will record the visuals first, and then go back and do the narration, but I find it easier to do it all in one pass.
Graphics and animation - You will notice that throughout the Smart Sublist screencast there are some visuals: titles, images and animation. I created these manually as layers in Adobe Fireworks (a cross between Photoshop and Illustrator). Next, I recorded my screen as I turned these different image layers on and off. It’s a bit of a hack, but it was a quick way to present graphic information. You could also record these type of visual elements in Keynote or PowerPoint by recording your slideshow screen with your screencasting software.
Editing - After capturing, Screenflow and Camtasia both feature a non-linear editor that allow the user to trim and move your clips, as well as add zooms and other special effects. After I was done editing, I exported my project from Screenflow as a Quicktime file.
Converting it to Flash - Quicktime is a great format, but only about 70% of users have it installed on their machine. Adobe Flash, on the other hand, is in the upper 90th percentile. The easiest way to convert your screencast to Flash? Upload it to YouTube.
Putting it online - To put it online I created a page on our website, and embedded the YouTube video.

Me And... Gregg

Tue, 17 May 2011 00:01:00 +0300

Me And…

I’m starting to notice how little we see you, our customers. In fact, in the three months I’ve been here, I’ve seen precisely 2 of you, face-to-face. By my math, that means you probably don’t see us much either. I’ve developed this new feature to introduce you to our ever-expanding team. (‘Expanding’ meaning that we are adding people to the team, not that we are putting on weight.)

Let’s start at the top! This is Gregg, the founder of Mailout Interactive. I first met Gregg a few years ago when he frequented the café I managed. He was always in a good mood, a trait I’m finding pretty universal here at the office. He’s a down to earth kind of guy, someone I erroneously thought to be very normal.

The first clue that led me to believe Gregg had some interesting idiosyncrasies was when I first met one of our office mates… Han Solo. Here’s Gregg with his pal.

One of the first tasks I was assigned was some general office organization. Normally, I’m quite the take-charge kind of girl and will rely on my best judgment regarding what is junk, and what’s necessary office accoutrements. I’m glad I asked about Han before retiring him to the dumpster… This likely saved my career at Mailout Interactive. Han, as it turns out, is a very important office staple. We recently sent Brock off to Toronto with Han’s counterpart, a full-sized Luke Skywalker.

Aside from our expansion to Toronto, we also have two rooms in Edmonton now. Gregg and I are on separate ‘islands’, which means I only see him at coffee breaks or when he relies on muscle memory and absentmindedly comes to our office by mistake.

Speaking of muscle memory, Gregg is big on promoting fitness at the office. We all go to the Y nearby, or pursue other health endeavors, but Gregg has a bit of a secret: he is the world’s most fit guy who doesn’t actually focus on being fit. I’ve heard stories of him biking up hills, easily passing younger guys, all while dragging a child’s chariot! While he doesn’t boast of his strength, I do make a mental note never to get into a bar brawl with him.

Many of you have been calling our office, asking for Gregg. As I mentioned, he’s moved to our new second office down the hall. This is because he’s developing a new web app to add to the Mailout family, and not because of some strange survivor-type game we have going on here. I’ll leave him to make the teaser announcements… but do look forward to some exciting things!

Gregg’s a great guy to work with. He’s flexible and encourages everyone to be adaptable. He’s also an inspiring leader: willing to take on new risks and challenges, learn from them and always focus on growth. He doesn’t try to do everything, but delegates well. All in all, I consider myself very fortunate to be included in Gregg’s Mailout Interactive family… right there beside Han Solo.

Open rates aren't everything

Wed, 11 May 2011 00:02:00 +0300

After you send an email newsletter, what's the first thing you check? It's the stats. Most of us are looking at one thing: confirmed opens. If the number is high, we're happy. If it seems low, we wonder what we did wrong.

How we calculate opens

When you click the "Send Now" button, we attach a unique image to each outgoing email for each of your subscribers. When your subscriber opens the email, and loads the images, that unique image is downloaded from our server, letting our system know that that subscriber has "opened" the email.

How important are opens, really?

Open rates can't tell us who has actually "read" the email; it can tell us who has opened the email, and loaded images.

The number of confirmed opens does give us some good information. A high percentage (which on our system is anywhere between 20%-40%) could mean:

subscribers trust the "from" address on the email
subscribers responded favorably to the email's subject line
subscribers were curious to see the images in the email

Ultimate purpose

Our emails should have a greater purpose than just pure opens. Every time you write a newsletter, you should have a clear objective: what is it you want your audience to know or do? This is why shorter emails are often better: it forces you to boil your objective down to one or two points.

Example 1. Purpose: registrations

Let's say you have an upcoming workshop, and you would like people to register online. With that purpose you can track your success rate in a variety of ways:

how many people clicked on the registration link?
how many of those people filled out the registration form?

Example 2. Purpose: to inform

If you're sending a newsletter, your purpose is often to give your audience information. Generally, the best way to set up a newsletter is to give each article an "intro" paragraph, and allow the reader to "click through" to the full article. Because hyperlinks are trackable, you can see:

how many people wanted to read the full article
what your most popular article was
what kinds of articles generate the most response over time

So remember: open rates aren't everything. Rather, choose an objective for your email campaign and evaluate your stats against that.

A-Ha! Moments for the Effective Communicator

Mon, 18 Apr 2011 23:24:00 +0300

As someone in charge of communications, I'm guessing you're pretty busy. I'm also guessing you'd like to learn one, two or even three quick tricks for improving your email communications, getting your message out more effectively and garnering better results. Am I right?

As a recent addition to the Mailout Interactive team, I have been perusing our blog posts and help articles. Hidden among one of them was a small, seemingly insipid sentence that was so self-evident, it nears being overlooked entirely. The first step in our design process help article says, "Define the goals of your newsletter. Remember, these shouldn’t be your goals, but your subscribers’ goals."

How often to we attack a newsletter with goals like "I want to inform the reader, inspire them to engage in our event or business and create sales"? Have you ever asked if your subscribers want to be informed, engaged or sold to? "Well, of course!" we think to ourselves, "they are signed up to our newsletter. They must be interested in what we have to say!" But if we take their needs for granted, they may not remain our subscribers for long.

Here are a few tips to ensure that what you have to say is what your audience wants to hear:

1) Personalize. Find out what facet of your business or organization is of most interest to each subscriber, and create sublists to capitalize on that information. Try to gether enough information about your subscribers without being overwhelming.

2) Write information that speaks to people and their needs. For instance, instead of writing about a health issue, write about how that health issue affects people. Ideas remain abstract until you link them with how your readers can use those ideas.

3) Ensure that your call-to-action (the next step you want you readers to take) is clear, pertinent and valuable - and I'll say it again - to your readers. Does it pique the curiosity of the vast majority of your subscribers? More importantly, do your readers know what will happen when they answer that call-to-action? Take away the fear of the unknown by describing what will happen when they click on links (Ie. "Read More" and "Sign up now," help prepare a reader far better than the old stand-by "click here.")

4) Most importantly, make sure you've answered your readers' question, "What's in it for me?" within your first few paragraphs. According to our research, readers will spend an average of 51 seconds per email. This is no time for a treasure hunt. An easy way to determine the values of the members on your list is to review the subscription invite that got them to sign up in the first place. What value and features did you promise? If your newsletters aren't delivering on that promise, don't be surprised if your followers jump ship.

Remember that successful communicators first learn the needs of their prospects, and then apply their products, not the other way around.

Employee profile: Adam rides his bike in snow

Fri, 15 Apr 2011 22:01:00 +0300

Adam Patterson is a true Canadian. While we have a number of employees who ride their bikes to work, Adam is the only one who rides his bike year-round. In Edmonton, Alberta, that means riding in snow and winter temperatures that drop to -30° C (-22° Fahrenheit).

Spring has come to most parts of North America, but we're still getting snow here. True to form, Adam showed up to work on his bike:

Adam is one committed cyclist!

Stand while you work

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 20:24:00 +0300

Stand while you work. After months of experimenting at home, I recently built myself a "standing desk" for at the office. Now, instead of sitting at my workstation, I stand for most of the day (I use a stool whenever my legs need a rest).

Why are you doing this?

I've had a few people ask me: "why do you want to stand all day?" My answer: it's about not sitting all day. At a standing desk you can choose your position: standing, leaning, sitting, standing with one foot up, etc... When you sit, you're limited to one posture; when you stand, you have more flexibility. I've found I have much more energy and focus when I stand.

Furthermore, there are a number of health benefits to a standing desk. Studies have shown that sitting at a desk all day causes a number of health problems.

How do I build one?

I built my desk using components from IKEA. Here is what was required for a desk that stands 40" tall:

VIKA AMON tabletop - $49
VIKA BYSKE adjustable stainless steel legs - $20 x 4
HUGO barstool - $119
Total cost: $248

Since then, Brock and Ashley here in the office have both built standing desks using the Frederik ($169) from IKEA.

Meet our new team members

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 22:28:00 +0300

Our team has grown! We've added five new team members who will be working hard to improve our application. Our objective: to help you create and send awesome email newsletters.

	Adam Patterson will be doing web design and development. He joins Kevin Horek as our second full-time web designer.
	Ashley Jacobsen is our new Office Manager, and will be working with our business team. She will be helping customers, and keeping our office organized.
	Cameron Dyck is the newest addition to our team of developers. This team builds and maintains the software you use on our site.
	Stephen Kiers has joined our business team. He will focus on improving customer experiences, doing communications work, and developing our product.
	Brock Armstrong is our first team member in Toronto! He will be leading business development for eastern Canada. If you would like to have him demo our email newsletter software for your team, please give him a call: 1-877-260-6005.

Making Javascript & CSS less frustrating

Sat, 19 Mar 2011 00:26:00 +0300

This is my first post in what will likely become a series of (unscheduled) technical articles on the Mailout Interactive blog. Hopefully these posts will shed a bit of light on how we do some of the more technical jobs behind the scene here at MI. For this inaugural post, I'll be describing some of the techniques we use to solve a few of the annoying issues caused by using lots of javascript and CSS in a largish web application.

This post is quite a bit longer than our other bloggers usually get away with, so you have my apologies in advance.

What's the big deal?

Many people are surprised to hear that we run a reasonably large and complex system composed of many different bits of software. I think this is because we essentially just send email, and many people don't realize how complicated it actually is to get a newsletter into a recipient's inbox. Anyway, the most important part is our web application. It's the website where you (our beloved customers) do the dirty work of creating and sending mailouts.

As it happens, our website is built using the Microsoft.NET platform (for you techies, C# & ASP.NET specifically) which, unfortunately, leaves something to be desired in terms of easily controlling the usage and placement of client-side javascript and CSS resources. Some of the problems we've had to deal with are:

Minifying and combining files to reduce page load time
Pre-fetching resources in the background
Dependency resolution to make programming easier

Minifying and Combining Files

Every resource that we include on a page causes that page to take a slightly longer time to load completely in the browser (this load time is called "latency"). This usually isn't a big deal when we first start building a page, but over time the extra requests and dependencies pile up until the page is noticeably slow to load, and that's when we need to do something to reduce the latency experienced by our users.

There are some excellent resources out there explaining how to reduce latency, and two of the most important things they recommend are to reduce the number of requests that need to be made (i.e.: include fewer resources) and reduce the amount of data that needs to be transferred over the wire on each of those requests.

In order to reduce the number of requests, we've configured our web application to take slightly different action on the live server than when our developers are working on their local machines. Using two different build configurations (Debug for working, Release for the live server) allows us to use the full-size, individual versions of all included resources while we're debugging locally. In release mode, though, the application is clever enough to realize that it should serve up combined files whenever possible to reduce the number of requests. To achieve this, the files are combined and stored on disk by some simple scripts in a post-build event.

Once these files have been combined in the post-build event, it's time to minify them. The process of minification is similar to compression, except that it tends to be rather conservative. That is, we don't want to risk breaking any code while we're trying to be stingy with our bytes, so the minifier (minifyer? minify-er?) plays it safe and simply removes all the comments and non-string whitespaces in the files. We're currently using Douglas Crockford's JSMin for javascript files and YUI Compressor for CSS files.

At this point, you might be thinking "that seems like a lot of hoops to jump through" and you'd be exactly right. But it does make a big difference. Minifying files can often easily reduce their size by at least 50% and combining files regularly allows us to reduce dozens of requests down to a just a handful.

Pre-fetching Resources

We've got our combined and minified files ready to go, so it's time to get sneaky. Since our application requires users to login, we can pretty much guarantee that even the quickest keyboardists will have at least one or two seconds of idle browser time on the login page while they enter their username and password. We exploit this fact by silently loading a pile of resources that we know they'll need once they've successfully logged in. The details are neither exciting, nor complicated: when the page load event fires in the browser a little bit of script code begins loading as many resources as it can while you're busy entering your login info. The browser dutifully caches the files to eliminate future requests, meaning that upcoming page requests during your session will exhibit reduced latency.

Dependency Resolution

This is my favourite of the three topics, though it actually has little impact on our users' overall experience. It does, however, make a software developer's life easier by reducing the amount of code that we have to write (and handling some of the complexity). Plus, graph theory is fun! If graph theory is something that doesn't immediately bring back a flood of fond memories for you, feel free to check out these resources:

Graph theory on Wikipedia
A fantastic dependency resolution tutorial at Electric Monk
And of course, Google

How can graph theory make a software developer's life easier? Well, the relationships (known as dependencies) between different source code files can easily be modeled as a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG). Once this step is complete, if we want to use a particular file, we can program the computer to automatically figure out what other resources (i.e.: dependencies) need to be included on the page for everything to work. This reduces the amount of time a developer needs to spend figuring this out manually, and reduces the number of lines of code s/he has to write. Also, if the dependency graph changes in the future, the revised dependencies will be automatically resolved without changing our code base.

How, Exactly?

Perhaps the best way to demonstrate how we coax the computer into sorting out the dependency hierarchy for us is to look at an example. Let's assume our dependency graph looks like this:

Let's pause a moment to get some terminology out of the way. First, each of the circles is known as a vertex (or node) and represents one of our files, for example a javascript file. The arrows are called edges and they represent the relationships between each file. You may have noticed that since each edge is an arrow, it implies direction, and this is where the "directed" part of "directed acyclic graph" comes from. The arrows can be thought of as meaning "depends on". An arrow pointing from, say, A -> B indicates that resource A depends upon resource B. We'll get to the "acyclic" part in a minute, so for now just ignore that big red arrow from E -> A.

From our lovely graph (which astute readers might recognize as a tree, but that's merely a coincidence), we can see that D depends on E, A depends on everything else, and C depends on nothing. That's easy enough to intuit since this graph is small, but a computer can't simply understand a picture of a graph. More importantly, if our graph had a few hundred vertices and a few thousand edges we might find out that determining everything that a given vertex depends upon is no longer a trivial task.

Graph Algorithms

Enter graph algorithms. More specifically, we're interested in a cousin of the Depth-First Search (DFS) algorithm, known as a topological sort. I'll spare you the details, but the result of a topological sort is an ordered list of each vertex sorted by dependency. For example, the result of the sort starting at D would be the list: E, D. If we started at A instead, the resulting list would be: C, E, D, B, A.

So, we've now got a list of all the dependencies required by any given vertex; let's revisit that whole "acyclic" thing. Acyclic means that the graph does not contain any cycles. That is, you can start at any vertex in the graph and move forward without ever visiting any vertex twice. This is where the big red arrow from E -> A comes in. If this edge were actually in our graph, the graph would become cyclic because you could revisit vertex A by visiting A, B, D, E, A. This poses a big problem for a topological sort! Since A depends (indirectly) on E and E depends on A, we end up in a deadlock and can never resolve the dependency.

To prevent such a deadlock, we must keep track of the visited vertices during the sort to ensure the graph is indeed acyclic. If at any point during the sort we encounter a node that we've already visited, then we have detected a cycle and must throw an exception, abandoning the sort.

In this manner, even an antiquated computer can resolve dependencies within graphs containing hundreds of thousands of vertices, making life easier for us software developers.

TL;DR

That's it for this first technical post. We've looked at how the software developers at Mailout Interactive deal with:

Minifying and combining files to reduce page load time
Pre-fetching resources in the background
Dependency resolution to make programming easier

Hopefully you've enjoyed it. Next time I'll try to keep the length in check.

Cheers!

New Pantone chairs!

Fri, 11 Feb 2011 00:21:00 +0300

With the addition of a few new bodies to the team it was time to increase the amount of seating in the office.

I would like to introduce to you Cool Gray 10C, 15-5519, 14-0848, and 186C

Is social media more important than email?

Thu, 27 Jan 2011 19:43:00 +0300

This year I've seen more and more organizations using social media to communicate. The assumption is that organizations need to use social media, or they will lose their audience. There are even predictions that email will gradually lose its reach as a platform.

Is email dead? In the future, will all of our messages be sent through Facebook or Twitter?

Today, I want to argue that email is still one of the Internet's strongest platforms, and most organizations should keep it as their primary communications tool.

Email is trust-based

Tim Grahl helps authors market themselves on the web. He notes that having a person subscribe "is a huge sign of trust." Email overload affects most users; Tim points out that subscribing to receive an email shows a special type of commitment.

Your audience on Facebook and Twitter can be fickle. "It’s much easier to ignore a status update than a new inbox item," states Grahl. Your post on a social network's stream could be lost in minutes. Your email in an inbox will persist until the recipient responds with some type of action.

Email is universal

Pingdom's annual review of Internet 2010 in numbers pegs the number of worldwide email users at 1.88 billion. Facebook, the world's largest social network, had 600 million users at the end of 2010. Also interesting: there were an estimated 480 million new email users added last year.

Email is universal: it is still one of the most accessible, easy-to-use, messaging tools available. If you have an email address, you can contact anyone else on the planet who has an email address. While texting may rival email in popularity for short, instant messages; email is able to handle a variety of lengths and formats (HTML and plain text).

Email is for grown-ups

Those predicting the demise of email make the point that usage amongst the younger generation is down. This is half-true: according to this Pew Research study, email is the least used form of daily communication for teens (11%). However, Nick Saint at Business Insider points out that the most recent Pew focus groups have 68% of youth still using email "at least occasionally."

We should remember that these kids will grow up. And each step towards adulthood brings an increase in email usage. Think about it: the first thing college freshmen receive is a school email address. After graduation comes the first job and a company email address. From that day on, email will probably be the first thing they will check when they arrive at the office.

The stats back this up: 94% of adult internet users send or read email (Pew Internet, 2010), and 470 million of the world's email accounts are corporate (Pingdom, 2010).

Know your audience and test your assumptions

I'm clearly biased towards email. In my defense, I've seen email newsletters perform consistently for most of the organizations we've worked with. I don't think companies should ignore social media, but I think they should test their assumptions. For example: does your organization need a Facebook page? That depends: is your audience on Facebook? If you communicate primarily with professionals, they may not be able to access Facebook at work.

One simple method for comparing the effectiveness of email vs social media is to run parallel campaigns. Send an email, post an update to Facebook, and tweet out a link that takes the reader to the same landing page (it could be a blog post, or other form of content). Then use email reporting, Google Analytics, or Bit.ly to track the clicks. See how engaged each audience is. If Facebook is only generating a 0.001% click-through rate, you may not want to invest a significant amount of resources into that platform.

With all this said, deciding on the right platform will come down to knowing your audience, identifying what you want to achieve, and then producing and delivering good content. Once you've decided, run your campaign, and test your assumptions!

Canada's new anti-spam legislation: Bill C-28

Mon, 20 Dec 2010 20:38:00 +0300

Joining other members of the G8, Canada recently launched its new anti-spam law. The key message of the bill? You can only send a mass email to recipients who have opted-in (given their consent).

There is also a provision that allows senders to email business contacts where there is "implied consent." As a general rule, this means not emailing people with whom you haven't done business in the past 2 years. Click here for more information.

In many ways, this new legislation won't change much for our existing customers: we only allow our users to send to opted-in lists. That being said, now is a good time to re-examine your list(s) and ensure that you have permission from each recipient. If there is any doubt, it's best to play it safe and remove those contacts from your list. The CRTC now has the power to impose fines for offending senders: of up to $1 million dollars for individuals, and $10 million dollars for businesses.

Fines aside, the biggest reason for maintaining a clean list is to protect your reputation with the big ISPs (Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo). As mentioned in this blog post:

When multiple users complain about the same sender, or the same email, the internet service providers adjust their spam filters and start blocking that sender.

If you have specific questions on how Bill C-28 might impact your organization, please give us a call: 1-877-260-6005 or email us: info@mailoutinteractive.com

How to grow your list from scratch

Tue, 14 Dec 2010 00:42:00 +0300

Avoiding shortcuts seems to be the key to communicating effectively. This is perhaps most true when it comes to email, and building your email list. As we've mentioned before: sending email to people who haven't opted-in is a bad idea. But what are the benefits to building a list from zero? And what are some ways to do it?

The benefits of starting from zero

Building a mailing list from nothing can be a really satisfying experience. The benefits include:

Better open and click-through rates: typically, when a list is grown organically through subscriptions, the engagement level is high. Your email is anticipated, and you are recognized as a legitimate sender.
You can grow with your audience: when your list is small, you have the great opportunity to discover what works and what doesn't. You can experiment, make mistakes, and test your assumptions.
You view your audience as human beings: a spammer is someone who views their audience as a number. A communicator has an intimate connection with the people on their list. They've watched their list grow slowly over time, and have responded to the unique characteristics of that group.

How to grow your list

Ok, you've set-up your new mailing list, and you have the URL for the subscription page. Now what?

Link to your subscription page from your website: this is the natural first step. Having a prominently displayed "Sign-up for our newsletter" button on your homepage could be the primary way people join your list.
Include the link to your subscription page in your printed newsletter: you may already have a built-in audience reading your printed newsletter. Why not invite them to switch to an environmentally friendly email version?
Put the URL in your personal email signature: something like "Would you like to receive our newsletter? http://bit.ly/hp78x0" is a great way to start getting new subscribers.
Make your own kiosk: some organizations are having great success creating email sign-up kiosks using the iPad and a kiosk attachment.
Put your form on your Facebook page: it's possible to embed your email sign-up form on your Facebook page. Want to know how? Follow the steps in this tutorial.
Post "teaser content" and invite your readers to subscribe: write a blog post, post a YouTube video, or tweet from Twitter a little introduction, or taste, of what readers can expect from your newsletter.

Those are just a few of my ideas. Have you had success with something else? Post a comment below or email your idea to me.

Why you should use real photos in your newsletter

Wed, 03 Nov 2010 01:30:00 +0300

Finding that perfect stock photo for your newsletter could be a waste of time. According to a recent eye-tracking study by Jakob Nielsen, online readers tend to ignore stock photography, but spend more time examining real photos. Here is a quote from his post:

Our eyetracking studies have documented a dramatic gap in how users approach website images: Some types of pictures are completely ignored. This is typically the case for big feel-good images that are purely decorative. Other types of pictures are treated as important content and scrutinized. Photos of products and real people (as opposed to stock photos of models) often fall into this category.

What kind of photos work?

Take simple photos of the people, places, events and things that define your organization. These images will give a sense of authenticity to your newsletter. They introduce your audience to the people and places associated with you, and your business.

You don't need a fancy camera or impressive Photoshop skills. You don't even need to hire a photographer. Take a look at the articles you've written, and then take a digital camera (or even your camera phone) and set off to take photos that match your content.

How an email newsletter helps cut costs

Mon, 25 Oct 2010 20:02:00 +0300

Focusing on your email newsletter is a great way to communicate effectively, and cut costs at the same time.

Let me give you an example: we have a customer in the non-profit sector who used to send out approximately 500 color print newsletters (via snail mail) every month. You can see their expense structure below; basically their total cost was $1,095 every time they sent out a printed newsletter. What's worse, they had no idea if people were reading the newsletter or what readers were most interested in.

They decided to sign-up for an account with us, and began sending out email newsletters instead. Their costs? $300 total (you can see the breakdown below).

When you take out all that printing, envelope stuffing, and manual database updating, you end up saving both time and money. Furthermore, they were able to track what their subscribers were reading, and started reducing the numbers of articles and adding more photographs. The result? Happier readers, who forwarded the email to their friends, who in turn, also subscribed to the newsletter. And when someone wanted to unsubscribe, they did it themselves by clicking the link on their newsletter: no manual labor required.

Cost breakdown

Print newsletters

writing, editing and layout: $25 per hour x 8 hours = $200
envelopes: $0.10 per envelope x 500 envelopes = $50
color photocopying: $1 per copy x 500 copies = $500
envelope stuffing, labeling and stamping: $15 per hour x 3 hours = $45
stamps: $0.51 per stamp x 500 stamps = $255
update database: $15 per hour x 3 hours = $45
$1,095 (total cost)

Email newsletters

writing, editing and layout: $25 per hour x 8 hours = $200
monthly subscription = $100
$300 (total cost)

Is it time for you to start using email newsletters? You could start benefitting from our service today: our online software is easy to use, and can be set up in a manner of minutes. If you would like more information visit our web site, or call us: 1-877-260-6005.

How do I avoid spam filters?

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 01:53:00 +0300

There are actually two filters that your email needs to flow through in order to reach your audience:

spam filters used by the different ISPs (Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo)
and the spam filter on your subscriber's individual computer (Norton, McAfee, Apple Mail)

I can't give you an exact science to avoiding spam filters (since no two are alike), but I can give you some general recommendations:

Ensure that you are sending to subscribers

A "subscriber" is someone wh o has said: "Yes, I want to receive email from you and I expect to see it in my inbox." If someone isn't expecting an email from you, you risk having them hit the "this is spam" button in their email program, which will send a complaint to their ISP. When an ISP gets too many complaints, they will start blocking your emails completely.

Send an introduction email

If you've just imported your list for the first time, it's generally a good idea to write an "introduction to the newsletter" email. In it you could explain that you will be sending them a regular newsletter, and ask them to add you to their safe senders list in advance.

Avoid using the wrong kind of words and formatting

When you get spam, you know what it looks like. Words like "free," "act now," "limited time," and "only" (especially in the subject line) have a greater chance of being flagged as spam. Furthermore WRITING IN ALL CAPS and using excessive punctuation are other easy things to avoid.

Don't send an email that contains only images

A well formatted email will have both regular text and images. Sending just one big image with no text is another item that gets picked up by filters. If you are going to send an image, balance it out with text as well.

Update: Many ISPs now report that they are no longer relying on content filtering, but rather how many people click the "this is spam" button. Read more >>

Pass-Through Variables

Wed, 13 Oct 2010 20:15:00 +0300

Transferring Subscriber Data from a Mailout to a Web Site

A pass-through variable is a field one that originates in a subscriber record and is passed offsite.

The variable looks like this:

${variablename}

and it can only be used in an extracted URL or a landing page link. (i.e. not in the text of a mailout — that scenario is handled differently)

Most web sites use a question mark (?) followed by variablename= to pass data.

For example, the url:

<a href="http://www.google.ca/search?q=${lastname}">Search for me in Google</a>

…will place a recipient’s Last Name after the =

To pass information from a mailout to a web site, add any of the following to the link in the mailout accordingly:

${firstname}

${lastname}

${email}

${specialfield1}

${specialfield2}

${specialfield3}

${externalid}

firstname	First Name
lastname	Last Name
email	Email Address (@ as %40)
specialfield1	Your 1st custom/user defined field
specialfield2	Your 2nd custom/user defined field
specialfield3	Your 3rd custom/user defined field
externalid	A unique id from your CRM

Note that when you're previewing a mailout, it renders using some test data.

Uses

We’ve seen customers apply pass-through variables to the following situations:

Tracking subscribers’ purchases related to email campaigns
Pre-filling form data (Registrations, Webinars, Online Presentations, Surveys, etc.)
Marrying web site usage patterns and Email Campaigns to Customer Relationship Management

Why email tracking isn't perfect

Tue, 12 Oct 2010 06:11:00 +0300

Tracking the opens and clicks for every subscriber on your list is impossible. That's a pretty bold way to start this article, but it's the truth. When you look at your reports, you will notice there are two types of readers: those we can confirm have opened the email, and those who are "unconfirmed."

How does email tracking work?

When you click the "Send Now" button, we attach a unique image to each outgoing email for each of your subscribers. When your subscriber opens the email, and loads the images, our system is alerted that the subscriber has "opened" the email. Our system also tracks links in the email that have been clicked.

Why doesn't email tracking work for all subscribers?

Anyone listed as "unconfirmed" is a subscriber who hasn't yet downloaded that unique image or clicked on a link. Just because someone is listed as "unconfirmed" doesn't mean they are not reading your email: there are readers who will read the text of an email, without loading blocked images. There will also be a small percentage of subscribers who only receive the plain text version, which is not trackable.

If tracking isn't perfect, how is it useful?

Tracking becomes useful once you can compare the performance of your current mailout, to past mailouts. When you're sending regular newsletters, you can start observing trends with your audience. Things to measure and think about:

What is a regular "confirmed" open rate for my audience? Across our site, the average is 30%.
How many people click on something? What types of article introductions cause people to click through and read the "full story?" For most of our customers, having a click through rate that approaches 10% is very good.
What subject lines produce the greatest open rate?
When I send at certain times of the day, or week, does that improve the open rate?

How can I improve my confirmed open rate?

There are a number of things you can do:

Encourage your subscribers to add you to their address book
Write great content
Write attention grabbing subject lines
Don't send too often, or you might burn out your list

Creating Mockups for HTML Email Templates

Tue, 05 Oct 2010 22:20:00 +0300

The basics:

Keep it within 600 pixels wide
Make sure the email will make sense to the recipient BEFORE they download the images. (i.e. keep images small and don’t use them in place of text)
Make sure there is CONTENT (not just mastheads and images) in the first 300 pixels vertically
Every email must have an unsubscribe link in an obvious location (at the top, bottom or both)
Every email must have a physical address (not a P.O. Box) of the sender. Companies in the UK must also include their “Registered in England number”
Dark backgrounds are generally a bad idea.

At Mailout Interactive, we design our customers’ email templates in two steps. First we create a graphical mockup of the template. Then, once the design and layout are approved, we build the template. (Note: The Text Only version of the email template is generally an afterthought for clients. As a result, we generally find it useful to wait until the HTML email is created before introducing the Text Only version to our clients). The mockup is designed to the “Best Case Scenario” where images load, css is applied and web standards are adhered to. This isn’t the way the email will render in everyone’s mail client but it’s the best that can be done.

Designing for email is difficult. There are no well-accepted standards that are applied to how an email will display. As a result, designers must consider several factors when creating a message. These factors include: Preview Panes, Image Blocking, Web Fonts, and Unsubscribe / Privacy / Legislative Requirements. There are different types of mailouts and each has its own unique qualities and best practices. The most common that we see are Newsletters, Announcements, Invitations, and Promotions. Each of these types has it’s own common elements and challenges.

Preview Panes

2005 statistics showed that 69% of business to business email users read their email in the “Preview Pane” of their email program. This feature is increasingly becoming available on web mail services as well (i.e. Windows Live). There are two varieties of preview pane that designers must contend with, vertical and horizontal.

Vertical preview panes require that the width of an email be narrow 550 – 640 pixels is optimal. There are situations when you can have greater widths such as when recipients are high tech business users. However, this is the exception rather than the rule.

Horizontal preview panes make for a short area with which to get your point across. This is challenging for designers who are accustomed to web pages or printed communications. In both of those media, the masthead can be very large and the message and/or call to action is generally in the center of the page. If an email that is designed with a large masthead and content in the middle of the page, the recipient is unlikely to understand the message. All they will see is the branding. It is important to ensure that at least some of the content of the message appears within the first 300 vertical pixels of an email. If the mailout is a newsletter, it’s a good practice to give the reader an “In this issue” index that gives the reader indication and navigation to what lies below (and outside of the preview).

Image Blocking

It’s tempting to design an email as a single graphic. To do so would give the designer complete control of the creative. Sadly, this approach just doesn’t work. Many (and possibly most) email programs initially block images in emails. As a result, many of your recipients see grayed out boxes or blank spaces where your lovely images appear. For the email designer, this means that the verbiage or copy of an email ought to be in text as opposed to being part of a graphic. This limits the choices of fonts available for your copy to the typical web fonts. These fonts include: Times, Times New Roman, Georgia, Arial, Verdana, Helvetica, Trebuchet MS, Tahoma and Lucida Sans. Don’t count to heavily on any of these though. In some extreme cases, email clients will override your fonts with their own.

Mailout elements that should not be images include:

Unsubscribe links
Privacy Policy Links
Article titles
Body copy
“If you are having trouble viewing this properly” text
CAN-SPAM address (physical address) and/or Registered in England number

Unsubscribe / Privacy / Legislative Requirements

Unsubscribe - Unless your mailout is an internal mailing, you need to include an unsubscribe link. In many countries it’s the law. In cyberspace, you’re asking for BIG TROUBLE without it. As a our customer, we require it.

Privacy Policy – This is never a bad idea. Why not set your subscribers at ease? If your organization has a posted privacy policy, you should link to if from your mailouts.

Legislative Requirements – In addition to the unsubscribe link the two big legislative requirements come from the U.S. and the U.K. The United States requires you to put a physical address (NOT a P.O. Box) on your mailouts. The U.K. requires Registered in England numbers from those who are registered there. Although your recipients may not be located in one of these countries, it is entirely likely that their email box physically resides there.

Rich Media (i.e. Flash, DHTML, Javascript, etc.)

Forget it. The best you can hope for is to use the “Sliding Doors” image rollover technique for some email clients. Everything else doesn’t really work and will result in broken or blocked mailouts.

Using Google Analytics with your mailout campaigns

Fri, 01 Oct 2010 00:27:00 +0300

Google Analytics Tracking Code enables Google Analytics customers to better track their sources of web traffic.

Now when you create a mailout, you can automatically apply tracking codes to your email campaign. By selecting to "Automatically apply...." we will check each of the links in your mailout to see if those pages are using Google Analytics. If they are we will append the tracking codes to the URLs of those links.

The tracking code that we apply will follow the format:

?utm_source=mailoutinteractive&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign={your Subject Line}

When viewed in Google Analytics, webmasters will be able to identify traffic by:

Source: mailoutinteractive
Medium: email
Campaign: the subject line of your mailout

Update: it's now possible to toggle the analytics setting through our API. Please contact us for the documentation.

How to add a subscription form to your Facebook page

Tue, 28 Sep 2010 23:52:00 +0300

Want to add an email subscription form to your organization's Facebook page? Here's how:

**Step 1: add Static FBML to your Facebook page:**

The first step is a bit quirky. To add a custom tab to your Facebook page you will need to add an app called "Static FBML." To do this, log in to Facebook, go to your organization's page and click "Edit Page." Scroll to the bottom, and under "More Applications" find "Static FBML."

Step 2: Configure your custom tab

Once you've added the "Static FBML" app, go back to "Edit Page," find FBML in the list of applications, and click on "Edit."

Step 3: Get your subscription form embed code

We're going to leave Facebook for a moment (keep the window open), and log in to your email newsletter account. Go to the "Configure" tab and click on the "Subscription/Archives URL" icon.

On this page, click on the link that says: host the subscription page on your own server. Click "OK" to generate the code. It should look something like this:

Select and copy all of the form code.

Step 4: Paste subscription form code into Facebook

Back to Facebook and your waiting "Edit FBML" screen. Here you will paste your form code into the "FBML" box:

Step 5: You're done!

Once you're done this step, go back to the Facebook page and test it to make sure it works.

Why do I need an unsubscribe link?

Tue, 14 Sep 2010 20:14:00 +0300

If you are sending email to any email address outside of your organization, you need to have an unsubscribe link.

It is important that your subscribers have the ability to "opt-out" whenever they like. Without an "unsubscribe" option, people get frustrated. They will look for the quickest way to be removed from your list. This usually means clicking the "this is spam" link.

ISPs, like Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo, don't look at these complaints favorably. When they receive a number of spam complaints, they will start to block email from you entirely.

When the ISPs treat complaints like this, we can't take any chances. You might have an internal policy that requires specific people to receive a particular email, but the ISPs won't consider this. This is why the unsubscribe link needs to be standard on all group emails.

Delivering good email - how Gmail's Priority Inbox works

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 19:54:00 +0300

Email users have always struggled with the amount of email they receive. Specifically, it's hard for the average person to prioritize their inbox: most people start at the top, and work their way down.

Gmail has just announced a new feature that promises to sort email by importance. It is called Priority Inbox, and this is how Google defines it:

Priority Inbox automatically identifies your important email and separates it out from everything else, so you can focus on what really matters.

Google produced this video to illustrate how this new tool will work. It explains that Gmail will use algorithms to determine which emails are important, and then bring those to the top of your inbox. For example, if you email your boss, Fred, a fair bit, it would highlight emails from Fred. The software also learns as you use it; thus improving the results over time.

One of the most telling scenes from the promotional video is this one below, which appears after the title, "It's really good at predicting what is important":

In this frame, the promotional offer is lowered, while the love note is elevated. It begs the question: how would our email newsletters be considered in Priority Inbox? Is this something we need to be worried about?

I don't think so. Here's why: email has always worked best as a relational medium. Whether you're sending a personal note or a newsletter, everything you send should be based on a relationship. If you're tone is too corporate or aggressive, people get turned off. They want a conversation, not a "blast."

Here are 3 things you can do to improve your relationship with your subscribers:

Thank them: sending a thank you note is a good way to let people know that you appreciate them. I would recommend sending a "regular email" that doesn't look like your newsletter template. Write something short and personal that thanks your audience for reading and engaging with your emails.
Show them something real: this really boils down to not using clipart, and writing with a conversational tone. Show real photos from your office, tell a story about a recent event; build the relationship by getting personal.
Use a real "reply to" address: nothing kills a relationship faster than an email with a "noreply@" return address. It's basically saying: "we don't care about what you have to say, and we don't want to hear from you." You should be encouraging feedback and conversation, not discouraging it. Use a real return address, and reply to comments and questions right away.

Gmail's Priority Inbox is currently being rolled out to users, and should be available to most by the end of this month.

Coming soon: HTML emails on a BlackBerry

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 18:22:00 +0300

Support for HTML email is coming to BlackBerry devices. This week Adam Stanley, a consultant with RIM, confirmed that the new BlackBerry 6 will use the WebKit rendering engine for both the web and email. This was revealed in the comments section of his recent blog post.

What does this mean? Ideally, this will allow email recicipients to view your email completely: including images and layout. WebKit is the same engine that the iPhone, Palm and newer Android devices uses to display emails, with very good results.

Up until now, BlackBerries have not rendered HTML email properly: images were displayed as links and formatting was removed. This made it challenging to create eye-catching messages for mobile subscribers.

This new upgrade is a part of the new operating system (BlackBerry 6) that will be available on future phones by RIM. The first phone with the new OS is the BlackBerry Torch 9800.

What makes us different

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 22:03:00 +0300

Potential customers ask us how we compare to other email service providers. Here are some items that we feel define us, from a service perspective:

We answer the phone: when you call us, a real person will answer the phone (not an automated attendant). All of our employees can assist you with a high-level of knowledge and service.
We care about you and your message: we take an active interest in your newsletter. Want feedback or tips on how you can improve your results? Give us a call or send us an email and we are happy to help.
We are subject to Canadian privacy law: we are Canadian owned and operated and our data is hosted in Canada. Many organizations, including government agencies, academic institutions and banks, require their data to be stored in Canada.
We choose our customers carefully: as an email service provider, the reputation of our IP addresses is formed by the quality of relationship between our customers and their subscribers. We want to provide a high level of service and deliverability. This means screening all of our customers, and turning down anyone that might damage our sender reputation.
We support payment by invoice: many organizations need to pay the old-fashioned way: with a cheque. We are happy to accept them!

Of course, we want to get better. If you have a suggestion on how we can improve our service, please let us know. You can email us here, or call 1-877-260-6005.

The subject line of an email is like the headline of a newspaper

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 17:24:00 +0300

Think about your inbox on a Monday morning:

How do your readers decide which email they're going to open? There are two factors:

who the email is from
what the subject line says

Your email's subject line is like a newspaper's headline. Normally you see newspaper boxes side-by-side:

What pulls you in as a reader? It's the frontpage headline. Headline writers need to write short, eye catching phrases. They draw the reader in. It's the same for you as a "subject line writer."

You will want to follow these tips when crafting subject lines:

Give your readers a sneak peak into your content; give them a reason to open the email
Highlight your most interesting article
Write tight. Omit all unnecessary words. (Taken from The Elements of Style, 1918.)
Lead with active verbs.

However, there are a few differences between writing a subject line in an email and a newspaper headline:

in email, your subject line should never be IN ALL CAPS
in email, you should avoid using "spammy words" in your subject line

Are your emails stressing people out?

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 17:17:00 +0300

At our recent workshop, I was speaking to the idea that readers will always prefer one simple message as opposed to many. I also mentioned that most readers spend only 51 seconds per email. One of our workshop participants stood up and made the following candid comment:

In this clip, this customer expresses what many of us feel: stress from too much email.

We need to remember that our readers are like us: they get to work, they fire up their computer, and they see a long list of emails waiting for them. Some of these are leftovers from the day before that weren't dealt with. Added to that heap are new emails: messages from coworkers, their boss, and family. There's also spam, marketing emails, and finally your newsletter.

All of that email in our readers' inboxes is overwhelming. In a 2007 study by the universities of Glasgow and Paisley, 34 percent of respondents were "stressed" about the number of emails they received. To care for our audience, we need to think not only about content, but also frequency.

What you can do

Make your content compelling: when you write, make it awesome. Develop a reputation for sending really good content that is either helpful or entertaining (ideally both).
Send just 1-3 articles: fewer articles means a recipient can scan the email quickly. It also improves the chances that they will "dive in deeper" to one of your articles.
Don't send too often: if you send an email too often, you contribute to the overload in your subscribers' inboxes. Send at proper intervals; I think a frequency of 2-4 weeks is right for most audiences.
Ask for feedback: call or email your recipients and ask them how you could improve your newsletter.
Provide a way for them to opt-out: if a subscriber is too overwhelmed to continue receiving your emails, they should be able to unsubscribe quickly and easily.

The customer in our video clip expressed relief at being able to read an email quickly, and then file it away. Too many articles, or too much information, can overwhelm a reader. This means you will need to prioritize: what is (are) the most important thing(s) I need to say? Cut down the number of articles, and the length of each article.

When you keep your newsletter simple, you will convey your message more effectively and cut your subscribers' stress at the same time!

Other resources on email stress

"Email is ruining my life!", BBC, 2008
"Workers suffer from email stress", London Evening Standard, 2007
"Email reply to all: leave me alone", Washington Post, 2007
"Email Overload in the Workplace: A Multi-Dimensional Exploration", Orange, 2006

Why "eblast" is the wrong word

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 00:12:00 +0300

Here in the office, we've been thinking about the words we use to describe a group email. One commonly used term is "eblast" or "email blast." And while they're common, we're beginning to feel like these are the wrong words to use.

The truth is, no one wants to be blasted.

When we send an email, we are sending to an audience made up of human beings. We are writing for people who want more than just "stuff" in their inbox. A "blast" doesn't match the thoughtful value that we want to give our audiences when we send them something.

Contrary to popular belief, email is the least forgiving medium on the planet. If someone feels like they're being abused by the tone or frequency of your email, they can instantly report you as spam, block you, or unsubscribe. Feedback doesn't get more immediate than that.

So let's put the words "email blast" to rest. Let's replace them with sentences like "I'm sending an email to my group." Even more, let's think critically about what and how often we send to our audience.

Our first workshop

Mon, 31 May 2010 17:17:00 +0300

On May 28th we held our first workshop for Communicators focusing on helping those creating email newsletters to connect effectively with their audience. The whole workshop was videotaped, thanks to Plain Peak's Peter and Christy Urban. You can watch the entire workshop online by clicking here:

Using the iPad for business

Thu, 20 May 2010 19:40:00 +0300

I recently purchased an Apple iPad for my wife and kids. Even though its primary purpose now is "home use;" I can already see its potential as a business machine. Here are some things the iPad does extremely well, that I think make it a winner in a work environment:

Form factor

The iPad has an 9.7" display. With the right case, it feels almost exactly like carrying (and using) a daytimer. This is one of its key features: portability. In the past I've taken my Netbook to meetings, and have still found it awkward to carry (because of its width). But heading out the door with the iPad feels like carrying a thin book. This is why many airplane travelers prefer it to their laptops: you can hold it comfortably like a book, without having to position it on your lap or the fold-out tray.

Email on the go

As you can imagine, email is extremely important in our office. When I'm out of the office, I use my iPhone to check and respond to email. While it works for quickly scanning what's come to my inbox, it's difficult to read email on the small screen. Responding to email is challenging too; I generally don't like sending email from my iPhone unless it's a "one-line reply." On the iPad, you have a full screen view of email, as well as a column for your inbox (or other folders you might have). While it's still not ideal for typing out long emails, it's definitely faster and more accurate than typing on the iPhone. A company called Flairify claims that most users can get up to 50-60 words per minute with practice. In my trials so far, I think I'm pretty close to that number.

A mobile calendar that works

I've always been frustrated with the iPhone calendar. The interface for entering new events seemed clunky, especially having to "roll" to get the right date and time. The iPad calendar feels like a proper daytimer: you can get a full monthly view, and easily read the events listed for each time. The daily view shows the full day on the right, and upcoming events on the left.

Presentations and demos

Our friend Gene, of nForm, has commented that "[the iPad is] great as a shared screen, especially for two people." I couldn't agree more, and think that for one-on-one meetings where you need to present information on a screen, it doesn't get any better. I can see a lot of potential for demoing websites and web apps, as well as using other apps (like YouTube and Keynote) for showing presentations.

Reading and reference

Like many companies, we're constantly looking for good books that could help us enhance our business. I do most of my business reading when I'm away from the office: on the bus, or attending a conference. Mike and I recently went to a conference in Miami. Before we left I had intended to purchase a few books from Amazon, but didn't get around to it. For the whole trip, I was stuck reading in-flight magazines. The iPad makes it easy to buy books on-demand, either from the iBook store, or by using the Amazon Kindle app. Newspaper and magazine titles, like the Wall Street Journal, are also available as apps.

Final thoughts

Based on what I've experienced so far, I think the iPad is most suitable for business users who find themselves "out of the office." Whether it's at a meeting taking notes, travelling on a plane, or visiting customers the iPad seems like a good choice when it comes to mobile computing.

Help your subscribers add you as a safe sender

Mon, 10 May 2010 20:13:00 +0300

Many of you have been asking how to improve your "confirmed open" rate, as it's shown on your Sent Mailouts reports.

To increase the number of people that show up as "confirmed" when they receive the email, you could send a targeted email to all the "unconfirmed" addresses, that looks something like this:

Dear First Name,

I want to thank you for subscribing to our email newsletter. To ensure that you continue to receive our emails, please add the fromaddress@yourdomain.com email address to your address book.

If you wish, you can also click on the link below to add our vCard to your contacts.

Sincerely,
Justin Jackson

>> Click here to add us to your address book

When your subscribers add your email newsletter's "from" address to their address books, their email software should load images automatically; allowing us to track whether or not these subscribers have opened the email or not.

Sending your email newsletter to a Blackberry

Fri, 07 May 2010 02:19:00 +0300

Even though Gregg has written a great overall article on mobile rendering, I thought I would focus specifically on the Blackberry in this article.

If you send email to business people "on-the-go," they are likely using a Blackberry to read their email. The problem is that these devices do a terrible job of displaying HTML email. Even more confusing, instead of showing the "plain text version" they opt to show a stripped down HTML version. This is how this email looks on the Blackberry Curve:

This often creates confusion, as explained by this customer:

"We have a number of key people [in our organization] who check their email on smartphones, and they say our newsletters just don't look right."

What can you do? As a sender, you have a few options:

Ask your subscribers to enable HTML email on their Blackberries: if your list of Blackberry recipients is small, contact them and direct them to this tutorial on enabling HTML email functionality on their device (works on OS version 4.5+)
Create a sub-list of Blackberry users, and send them only plain-text emails: instead of sending a regular multi-part email (with both HTML and plain text bundled together), you can send a pure, plain-text email to Blackberry users. The plain text version can contain a link to the "online version" which will allow them to see the regular HTML layout.
Have us a create a "Mobile Version" link at the top of your emails: this will allow a reader on a mobile device to click and open the newsletter in a format more suited for smaller screens.
Put your most important text at the top of the email: the Blackberry screen isn't very big. It displays all of the text at the same size, with very few characters per line. If you want to keep your reader's attention, write short sentences that get to the point quickly.

Who is your audience?

Mon, 03 May 2010 23:54:00 +0300

I used to work for a national charity. Each month, I would create an email newsletter. My objective was clear: "I need to inform them!" So I would compile a series of articles on what we'd done in the past month, and what we were about to do. I would also have articles on events, donation opportunities, and photo features. But the one question I wasn't asking was: who will be reading this?

"Who is my audience?" is the first question you should ask when you sit down to write a newsletter. The goal is to define their readership habits, so that you can write the content they are the most likely to read.

Here's how it worked while I was working at the charity: over time, I learned that people differed in the way they processed email. Over the years, I created profiles for my readers with the idea of serving them the right type of content. Here's an example of how this worked for donors and stakeholders:

For donors

Most of our donors were A-type personalities: they were always on the move, moving from meeting to meeting, and generally consuming email on-the-go. I started calling different donors on my list to ask them what kind of information they wanted to receive. After interpreting those conversations, I came up with two types of email they wanted to receive:

Yearly: a longer update on where their money was going. This email would say "Yearly report" right in the subject line. It was formal and contained an introduction, a financial chart, success stories, and a conclusion.
More frequently: quick "actionable" requests. These people were problem solvers: they wanted just one article, that quickly and clearly defined a problem for them to solve. This could mean an urgent financial need, or an important event that we wanted them to attend. Because it was likely that they would be reading on their Blackberries, the subject line and the first line of content were very important for this type of email.

For stakeholders

These were the people in the community who identified strongly with our work and our narrative. This group was definitely more relaxed when it came to email: they would read email leisurely. For them, I decided to send:

A regular monthly newsletter: this was a traditional newsletter, with 3-5 articles. Whenever I could, I included a photo with each article that came from our charity work (no clipart allowed!). Each issue also included at least one story. These recipients loved hearing real-life stories and examples; these types of articles were always my "most viewed."

If you don't know you're audience, it will be hard to know what to say. Building a profile for the different groups within your subscription list is a great first step to understanding what to send your audience.

Takeaway points

Sometimes you have to talk to people directly: I found my "voice" conversations (over the phone and in-person) really improved my understanding of my audience. Don't just rely on email; try to contact your subscribers directly and ask them what they would like to see in your email newsletter. If you can't call them, post a link to survey. (You can use Wufoo or Survey Monkey for this).
A newsletter shouldn't be a "buffet:" people don't have time to wade through a "buffet" of content. It's better to define your audience, and "cook up" a newsletter made especially for them. Additionally, a newsletter works best as a 3-5 course (article) meal.

Writing articles that people read

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 22:36:00 +0300

Our customers generally want to communicate something to their audience, and then track how their readers responded to their message.

Here are a few tricks to writing good articles and having people interact with your newsletter...

Use "email content" and "landing content" effectively

The best way to organize your email newsletters is to use the "email content" box as a place to write a "hook" that pulls the reader in, and convinces them to click on the "read more" link. Not only will this encourage your audience to read your article (too much content in the body of an email can overwhelm a reader), but it will also enable you to track clicks for anyone who reads the complete article.

Limit the number of articles

It's a good idea to limit the number of articles in your newsletter to 3-5 (and use landing content). Anything more, and subscribers will feel like they're reading a book. People read their email quickly: according to this useit.com survey "the average time allocated to a newsletter after opening it was only 51 seconds."

Use photos

When people read email, they are actually scanning. A well placed image can attract attention and quickly communicate what an article is about.

Help readers share and comment

Having a "forward to a friend" link, or allowing your readers to share on Twitter or Facebook will help broaden your audience. If you have a blog, you might want to link to the comments section and provide readers with the opportunity to discuss what they've just read.

What is spam?

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 19:48:00 +0300

When Miles Libbey says that Yahoo “defines spam as anything users don’t want in their inbox” he is revealing that email recipients play a big role in affecting spam filters.

Yahoo, and other ISPs, receive this information primarily through complaints: when a user clicks the “this is spam” button in their email software, it creates a complaint. When multiple users complain about the same sender, or the same email, the internet service providers adjust their spam filters and start blocking that sender.

This underscores two important points:

You should never send email to someone who isn’t expecting it.This is especially true for an email that looks like a newsletter or marketing piece. Even better: build your list from scratch using a subscription form.
All email newsletters should have a visible unsubscribe link.People want an easy way to stop receiving email from you. If they can’t find your unsubscribe link, there’s a greater chance they will hit the “this is spam” button. I think it’s best to have a link at the top and the bottom of your email.

Adding personalization to your email

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 00:57:00 +0300

You can add personalization to your emails to make them more relevant. In the past, you would have to edit the HTML to insert the personalization code. We now have an easy way to do this within the editor: a button on the toolbar.

This feature will allow you to address your subscribers with their name (ie. Dear Preview), their email address, their company or any other field you're using in your account.

To enable new subscriber fields, go to the Configure tab and click on the Subscriber Information icon.

I want an email newsletter. Can you send me samples?

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 22:55:00 +0300

People ask me this all the time. My response is always to redirect the conversation to help guide them to a healthy starting point for designing their email newsletter.

Here are the tried and true steps to designing a great email newsletter …in chronological order.

Define the goals of your newsletter. Remember, these shouldn’t be your goals but your subscribers’ goals. What is it that they want out of these emails? Defining your goals helps clarify the content (writing and imagery) that you need to be creating to populate your newsletter going forward.
Categorize and prioritize your content. Should your newsletter be focused on one topic or article? Is one article or image more important than the rest? Do you have event calendars to share? Do you have lots of articles that should be grouped into logical categories? When you have a clear idea of the kind, quantity and relative importance of your content, the design decisions for laying out your newsletter become obvious.
Define your identity. Who is sending the newsletter? Is it a person, an organization or a person from an organization? Should the newsletter have a name that will help subscribers identify it?
Create graphical mockups of your newsletter. It is at this point that samples of other e-newsletters become helpful. You can start looking for examples of how others with similar goals and content have laid out their newsletter and you won’t fall in love with design elements that don’t fit your identity. Creating mockups of an email can be tricky. In the process, you need to optimize for small screens and preview panes and you should cater to the subscribers who will skim your newsletter as opposed to the minority who will read every word. The mockups will likely be proofed in large windows or on paper. Either scenario is not a good representation of the inboxes the final product will appear in. If you are proofing an email on paper, one trick is to fold the paper in half. That's your preview pane!
Code your templates. For web designers, this is where they get to party like it’s 1999. That’s probably the last time they built anything in a Table Layout (as opposed to a CSS Layout). Notice, I said templates. Don’t forget your text only versions. Every good e-newsletter is a multipart email meaning there is an HTML and Text Only version contained in the same email. The Text Only version is a bit of a vestigial limb but it is necessary for many spam filters. Also, it gives you the capability of offering your subscribers a Text Only option when they subscribe. There is a tiny (but vociferous) minority of people who do prefer this.

Good luck!

The difference between digital and print

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 00:56:00 +0300

It used to be, that if you were speaking about communication you were probably talking about something that would be printed. Look at the software we use on a daily basis; all of them based around paper and ink: Microsoft Word, Microsoft Publisher, Adobe Acrobat, Apple Pages, etc...

"Print workflow" looked like this: the content would originate from your desktop. The creation, editing and layout would occur within a given software suite. Each time you went to create a new newsletter you would have to beg around the office for content submissions. You would take that content and manually copy and paste it into your print layout; or even worse, manually re-type the article that was given to you on a piece of paper.

In 1993 Time Magazine reported that Bill Gates would herald in a new era of the "paperless office." I'll admit that paper hasn't gone away, and continues to be used in most offices around the world.

But now, here in 2009, Bill Gates' prediction is finally starting to come true (albeit a bit late). The trend towards relying exclusively on digital distribution for communications is increasing: email newsletters, corporate blogs, and RSS feeds are becoming more widely used. We are switching from a print paradigm to a digital paradigm.

How does this affect content?

Instead of content originating from a variety of different sources (loose-leaf paper, files on other people's computers, emails) there is a better way: having all of your writing originate in a blog (or blogs).

Using this system, everyone submits content digitally: the staff of an organization contributes to the company blog on a regular basis. These regular posts become a part of the RSS feed for that blog. That same RSS feed then becomes a "pool" of content that can be accessed for other types of communication such as email newsletters and press releases.

On our system you can do just this by adding RSS feeds to your account. When editing an article, one click will allow you to base that article on an existing "post" from your RSS feed.

You can see how this works by clicking here:

Change your password

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 01:07:00 +0300

This month an individual from Europe known only as Hacker Croll was able to log into a Twitter employee's personal Gmail account. He gained access after he found a password the employee had used for a different web site; the password for that web site and the Gmail account were the same. Once in, he was able to see the employee's emails and confidential file attachments.

The problem is that most of us are guilty of the same password no-nos:

We use the same password over and over again, for different sites and applications
We choose simplistic, "easy to remember" passwords that might be easy for a hacker to guess (the most notorious are "password" and "secret")
We keep the same password for years, without changing it

Our system has solid security, but our security won't do you any good if someone is able to guess your password. To ensure that your account is kept safe, you should change your password regularly.

Designing for email

Thu, 28 May 2009 01:03:00 +0300

The evolution from print to digital distribution is having some growing pains. One of those pains is the difference between designing something for print and designing something meant to be viewed on a digital device.

With print, many of your layout decisions depend on the physical size of your medium (billboard, brochure, postcard). Once this is established, the designer can assemble the content in any way they wish - as long as it fits the page: fonts can be sized horizontally and vertically to fit a given space, elements can be overlapped, and once it's printed, it becomes a static document.

Email design is different: there are new rules.

When designing for email, realize that there is going to be a bit of "give and take" involved in translating a design into basic HTML. Most of the fancy CSS tricks, that provide a great deal of flexibility when designing for the web, won't work in email.

For example, you might want to increase the whitespace between words in your paragraphs. This is fairly easy to do both in print and web design, however the "word-spacing" attribute doesn't work in some email clients, namely Outlook 2007. Also, text edits, such as rotating, stretching, and squeezing, can't be done in HTML.

Creating your mailout as a single image won't work either. This means you wouldn't want to email an invitation where all of your text and images are contained within a single JPEG. There are two reasons for this: many email clients will block images by default, and most spam filters are looking for a good balance between images and regular text. It's best to keep your written content as text and be flexible about where your images can be displayed.

The key is to keep it simple: the most readable designs use a single column for the main content. Adding a sidebar for smaller news items can be effective as well. However, having multiple columns and content blocks in different areas can create the feeling of clutter, and hinder readability.

Ultimately, it's a good idea to have a designer, who understands how to build an HTML email, design your communication piece (whether it's a template or a one-off) from start to finish. We can help you with both. One of our core competencies here is building customized email templates that reflect an institution's corporate style guide.

If you have specific questions about getting your HTML design just right for email, give us a call: 1-877-260-6005.

Tips For Designers

For positioning and spacing, it's best to avoid CSS and use regular table cells, with uniform spacing and padding.

Be careful when using nested tables; here, we try not to go more than 3 deep. Too many nested tables can overload an email client, and may throw off your entire design.

Outlook '07 does not support background images in table cells. Use a background color, or use both.

Flash, javascript, and other forms of embedded media will not work in email.

Design for the preview pane: in email software, emails are displayed in the preview pane. To be safe, and to fit all screen sizes, it's best to make your HTML emails no more than 600 pixels wide, and have your call to action within the first 400 pixels of height.

Video in an email?

Tue, 05 May 2009 01:00:00 +0300

Here's the first thing you need to know: video doesn't work in email. Most email clients (like Outlook) will not play video embedded in an email.

But there is a trick: people will generally click on static images, with a play button, that look like a video box:

When your readers click on your "video thumbnail" graphic, it can take them to the actual location of the video on the web (such as YouTube).

To create a video thumbnail, you will want to grab a frame of video to be used as the "static" image.

Load up the web site where your video is located and start playing the video.
On a PC you can usually copy what's on your screen to the clipboard by clicking your "Print Screen" button (on the keyboard).
On a Mac, hold down Apple-Shift-4 and select the part of the screen that you want to capture.

Once you have your image, bring it into your photo editing software (like Adobe Photoshop or Fireworks). Now you will need to overlay a play button over top of it (to make it look like a video).

Here are some source files you can use to create video thumbnails:

Video box: includes a pre-sized video box, with a "play button" overlay. Download the file here. (Layered PNG file)
Play button: a small "play button" you can use to overlay on top of your thumbnail. Download the file here. (Layered PNG file)

Sending unsolicited email doesn't work

Thu, 27 Nov 2008 00:50:00 +0300

Researchers from the University of California have just published a report that proves a point we've been making for years: spam doesn't work. For the study, the university set-up a web site for a phony pharmacy, and then sent out 350 million emails to see if they could trick anyone into buying something from the site. According to the team "After 26 days, and almost 350 million e-mail messages, only 28 sales resulted." This signifies a success rate below 0.00001%.

That's 1 response for every 12.5 million emails sent.

We understand that organizations are under incredible pressure to obtain results: more sales, increased awareness, and new prospects. Often, a potential customer will call us and say: "My list is really small; I need to use a list I just purchased/rented/borrowed to get things going." This is a bad idea for two reasons: the first I've just explained, and the second is that ISPs could detect that you're using a "spammy" list and block you from sending future email to anyone on their system.

At Industry Mailout we want your email campaigns to be successful. Our customers will often see click through rates of 10%. That's a lot higher than 0.00001%. It means that using an opted-in list of 10 contacts where 1 person responds has the same net effect as using an unauthorized list of 12.5 million.

Sources:

BBC and Techradar.com

Mailout Interactive Blog

I Want Your Email!

Content is the Most Important Thing

What Makes Content Good?

Be Consistent

Group Accounts: Manage Your Organization's Email Communications

Group Accounts

Approval Permissions

Publishing

We have a new person on the team!

Is your data hosted in Canada?

Why aren't people reading my emails?

How to create a CSS button for HTML emails

Why Plain-Text emails are important

What is a plain-text email?

Why do my mailouts need a plain-text version?

Tips for building custom plain-text emails

How I read

Organizing Your Subscribers: Lists, Sublists and Smart Sublists

Basic Setup

Advanced Setup

Subscription Form Setup

Definitions

Me and... Mike Bridge

Learning to program

My programming story

Learning to program

HTML Email for Non-Geeks!

Newsletters that People Love to Read & Receive

The Big Picture:

A Clear Focus

An Invitation:

Reports Galore

New feature for Sent Mailouts

Me and... Jon!

Best Little Tool: Publishing

Indiana Jones Will Whip Your Contact List Into Shape!

Statistical Inference: Hypothesis Testing

What is performance optimisation?

Inference & hypothesis testing

Student who?

How it works

Case study: investigating alternative clustering keys in the Mailout Interactive database

Works Cited

The UP Side of Everything

Around the Water Cooler

At Brock's new Toronto Office:

Into the Deep End: Compilers

6096 Metres Up

Why Does This Matter?

How it All Works

Front End

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Further Reading

How to manage your full inbox

How do I record a screencast?

What you will need:

The process

Me And... Gregg

Open rates aren't everything

How we calculate opens

How important are opens, really?

Ultimate purpose

Example 1. Purpose: registrations

Example 2. Purpose: to inform

A-Ha! Moments for the Effective Communicator

Employee profile: Adam rides his bike in snow

Stand while you work

Why are you doing this?

How do I build one?

Meet our new team members

Making Javascript & CSS less frustrating

What's the big deal?

Minifying and Combining Files

Pre-fetching Resources

Dependency Resolution

How, Exactly?

Graph Algorithms

TL;DR

New Pantone chairs!

**Step 1: add Static FBML to your Facebook page:**