StreamSend Email Marketing Blog

Affiliates, rejoice!

2008-10-02T13:38:00.000-07:00

As some of our customers may know, we rolled out our Affiliate Program a couple of months ago. Last week, we received numerous emails from happy affiliate partners as money was being credited to their account. Everyone here at the office is very excited to see how far this program has taken us. We've had a surge in new account sign ups as well as brand recognition. We're glad to give that 20% of reoccurring income back to the people who helped us sign up those accounts. Many affiliates told us it was surprising easy to sign up and get going, and we are thrilled from the positive feedback. Also, people have asked to be able to see which account the credit came from, so we made the account's company name visible. This will help you do some book keeping on your end.

From the StreamSend team, we'd like to say thank you!

Duplicate Complaints Showing Up - fixed

2008-09-24T12:24:00.000-07:00

StreamSend processes complaints that come through ISP Feedback Loops and shows the information in reports. Over the past few days we've been seeing duplicate complaints being processed. We're looking into this-- at first glance it seems that some ISPs are just sending us multiple complaints over and over again.

Anyway, just wanted to let everyone know that we're working on this and should have a fix in place soon.

09/29 - Update: we're now only displaying distinct complaints in most sections of the application. We still have to fix the number displayed on the main reporting page and that should do the trick.

10/01 - Update: Fixed. Complaints are no longer showing as duplicates in the reporting.

What Does the CAN-SPAM Act Mean to Marketers?

2008-09-18T10:33:00.000-07:00

Email Marketers should comply with the CAN-SPAM act not only because it is the law but also because it will make you better at email marketing.

I have covered this topic in an article: What Does the CAN-SPAM Act Mean to Marketers?

StreamSend Resources for our Customers

2008-09-13T04:51:00.001-07:00

We here at the StreamSend Email Marketing Service want to provide you with the best possible service. I would like to bring your attention to some of the resources that are available to you. You may already know about these resources but I want to bring together some links and information here:

StreamSend 2 Knowledge Base - You have a StremSend 2 account if you use an email address (username@something.com) as your username.

StreamSend Classic Knowledge Base - You have a StreamSend Classic account if your username is just a single word.

Deliverability Webinar - Our Deliverability Manager conducts this Webinar live every Wednesday, so you can ask questions, but you can view a recorded version any time. This email marketing deliverability webinar is oustanding and can help you optimize your email deliverability.

Habeas SafeListing and Tool Set - Whether you are StreamSend 2 or a StreamSend Classic customer and send above about 100,000 emails per month you may want to look into getting on the Habeas SafeList and using the tool set that comes along with it (see Habeas SafeListing link for above details). If you want more information, please contact sales.

If you are already on the Habeas SafeList but have not yet made full use of the toolset, I recommend one of two Habeas Toolset training screencasts (depending on which version of StreamSend you use):

StreamSend 2 Habeas Screen Cast

StreamSend Classic Habeas Screen Cast

Note: If you no longer have your username and password for your Habeas toolset, please feel free to contact sales here. We will arrange for Habeas to re-generate this for you.

Whenever you are logged into your StreamSend account you can always look to the top right corner of the screen and click on support. There you will find several options:

1. Get Answers - This leads to the Knowledge Base.

2. Ask a Question - Enables you to file a trouble ticket to our support team. Keep in mind that it firsts attempts to find the answer in our knowledge base then and then you to file the ticket.

3. Update Your ticket - This enables you to update a ticket you have already filed. For example, use this if you want to reply to what support has written in response to your question.

4. Update Your Credit Card Information- This one enables you to update the credit card we have on file for your account.

Note: the large button that says StreamSend Classic Support leads you to another page with the exact same options as 1 through 4 for StreamSend Classic.

Of course, feel free to call us. If everyone is on the phone you may get either voicemail or our answering service. Please leave us a message and someone will get back to you as soon as we possibly can.

Thank you for your business. We appreciate it and work hard to provide you with the best possible service and to continually improve and extend StreamSend.

What is the best day and time to send an email message?

2008-09-11T08:57:00.000-07:00

When I conduct my weekly Deliverability Webinar a couple of the same questions seem to get asked – here is one:

Q: What is the best day and time to send an email message?

A: When the recipient will most expect it. It is much more important to stick to a consistent sending schedule than it is to try to guess when people are most likely to read random email messages. Sending on a consistent schedule also shows that you care about the content of your message and the people receiving it. If you have a monthly news letter that usually goes out on the first Thursday of every month, but this month you send it on the second Wednesday, you are letting the valuable members of your list think that they are a lower priority. If a weekly message that lets customers know about new inventory goes out every Tuesday afternoon, create the content and test the message on Monday, and then schedule it to go out Tuesday afternoon.

Set expectations early and often. When someone joins your list, send them a welcome message letting them know when and how often they will be receiving your email messages, and from time to time include this valuable information in your content.

Team StreamSend: Working for you

2008-09-09T19:10:00.000-07:00

I have worked in the tech industry for more than 15 years and I have to say that this is the best company I have worked for. We may not be perfect, but every day we strive to make StreamSend better for our customers.

Why is it the best team I have worked with so far? The reason starts at the top: Our CEO, Dan Forootan, is a great manager. On one hand he knows how everything works and what is happening in every department; on the other hand, he does not micromanage us.

One of the best things we have done is assemble an extremely talented development team to improve and extend the StreamSend application and its capabilities.

For those who are not customers yet, I ask that you try the StreamSend Email Marketing service. See for yourself. This is a fast moving company with the customer always on our mind. It really is a matter of pride to provide you the best possible service. Dilbert and Wally don't work here.

Enhance Your Email Marketing Response

2008-09-06T13:07:00.000-07:00

I feel strongly enough that segmenting (filtering) and email marketing triggers (often called autoresponders) are two very powerful tools for email marketers, that I published a sort of primer called, Enhance Your Email Marketing Response.

It is all about getting a relevant email into the Inbox of your subscribers at the right time. Beyond that, many email marketers use triggers for drip marketing, which is sending a series of marketing messages scheduled through the trigger feature.

We here at StreamSend use drip marketing by sending out a series of emails to free trial subscribers encouraging them to upgrade to a full account. We have found that drip marketing gets results. It is not an expensive way to market, either, so we find a positive ROI is not hard to come by with this technique. Drip marketing using triggers is worth at least an article focusing only on it. That's for another day, though.

Join us on our Facebook page

2008-08-28T22:28:00.001-07:00

We've setup the StreamSend Facebook page because we're always looking for news ways to interact with our customers.

We have customers of all ages and we realized that it seems a a lot of our customers have Facebook profiles, so what better way to interact with our customers? Take a look at our page, and become our fan!

We'll be updating the fan page with feeds from our blogs, product updates, events / webinars and other information as well.

BtoB Customer Case Study: New England Data Services

2008-08-28T21:16:00.000-07:00

Karen Bannan of BtoB magazine wrote a case study about our customer New England Data Services (NEDS).

Karen spoke with Brian Duke, senior sales executive for NEDS. According to Brian, email marketing efforts result in:

page views increase by more than 400%,
site visitors increase by 300%.
lead generation lifts 10% lift

We love to see StreamSend making a positive impact! Read the full article.

dmPulse August: email marketing volume to reach 838 billion!

2008-08-27T10:28:00.001-07:00

We've sent out the second issue of our Digital Marketing Newsletter: dmPulse.

Some interesting email marketing facts for the month:

Forrester predicts that in the US, email marketing volume will reach 838 billion in 2013! This is roughly double the volume of today.
Another interesting finding in the report is that "Messages triggered by events, which only 13% of marketers currently send, represent the next era of email marketing". This is good news for now because triggered messages, or email autoresponders are powerful feature of our email marketing system. [See our how to video]
Here is the report for anyone that's interested (it costs $279).

Email marketing related articles in the August issue:

We also cover Search, Online Advertising and Mobile marketing. Take a look at the August issue for a synopsis of the going-ons.

StreamSend "Crazy Day"

2008-08-24T20:02:00.000-07:00

We've decided to try something for a couple of months. Each week every single person at our company can spend one full day working on a personal project that some how helps the company. We call this day the "Crazy Day".

The hope is that we can all take some time away from the daily grind to work on something that is interesting and challenging. I'm personally very excited because I think this can lead to innovation. On my part, I'm going to do my best to eliminate as much bureaucracy as possible so that process can form on it's own. I'll share the results (successes or failures) a couple months from now.

By the way, Google famously has been allowing engineers to spend 20% of their time (e.g. 1 day a week) on a self selected project. (Though rumor has it that it isn't happening as much anymore). The results have been successful, leading to products like Gmail and Google Maps. From what I understand, only engineers have the option of doing this. Well, for our little company experiment, everyone will be involved.

We have a very smart group of people across the board. Everyone always has suggestions on how to improve some part of the company. Well... now everyone is empowered to take some time away from the standard everyday work, and make a difference doing something that is interesting and fun.

Do you think we're nuts to try this?

Segment your email marketing list for fun and profit

2008-08-11T13:34:00.000-07:00

Henry Ford once said, "you can have any color car you want as long as it is black." Those days are long gone. We no longer mass market with the assumption that everyone wants the same thing. We slice and dice our customers into market segments based on what will likely interest them.

In email marketing, that is where list segmenting comes in. You tailor your message based on certain criteria. For example, if you have a field called "profession" you might not send the same offer and messaging to accountants as you would to salespeople.

Mark Armistead, our Customer Support Manager, has written an excellent StreamSend Knowledge Base Article on List Segmenting. This should help get you started using this powerful feature if you have not yet.

Later this month, I will be publishing an article about email list segmenting in a marketing publication. I will post a link to the article here.

Email address lists: buy, rent or leave alone?

2008-08-08T08:08:00.001-07:00

One of my favorite email marketing experts, Mark Brownlow, has written an excellent article, called "Email address lists: buy, rent or leave alone?"

He says, "With very, very few exceptions, purchasing a bulk list like this is a shortcut to email marketing hell."

Though Mark is careful to distinguish buying a list outright (where you actually take possession of the list) and "List Rental." He calls list rental an acceptable practice because the owner of the list sends on your behalf. I will add that in permission-based email marketing, the list manager is the one with the permission to send the emails, which is what makes it acceptable.

After the list manager sends for you, you get leads/subscribers that can help you build a stronger, bigger, and better list for yourself.

While with buying a list outright is just buying a list of strangers that have probably been sold many, many times to others. These people are annoyed and poised and ready to hit the spam complaint button yet again. That can really hurt your sending to your gold, which is your core list or lists.

Email Blast is dead

2008-08-06T22:05:00.000-07:00

Blast and pray is over. The way to succeed with permission-based email marketing is to segment your list and send only relevant, targeted emails. In short, send to people most likely to be interested in your message.

Loren McDonald does an excellent job of debunking the myth that moving beyond batch and blast is difficult. It is not difficult.

Some time ago I wrote an article about the importance of targeting and segmenting in my article called, the fundamentals of email marketing.

Most Email Service Providers (ESPs) provide tools to let you segment your list.

For email marketing, shop for value

2008-08-03T08:18:00.000-07:00

I was at my local wine shop the other day browsing for a bottle to share with friends over dinner. The range of prices at this shop is incredible, ranging from about $6 to about $100 for a bottle of wine. But the truth is that blind wine tastings have shown that most people cannot tell an expensive from an inexpensive wine. My friends in the wine industry tell me that wine is often marketed at whatever price the market will bear not necessarily based on the quality of the wine.

The same holds true for the email marketing industry. Many services are over-priced. I invite you, if you have not already, to compare the prices of the StreamSend Email Marketing with the prices of our competitors. Then I invite you to try us and compare our functionality with our competitors. I think you will find us like a value wine: we do the job very well at a lower price.

In fact, not only are we one of the least expensive Email Service Providers (ESPs) on the market today but we also provide something no other ESP offers: a private IP address. Other services charge a premium to not have to share an IP with hundreds if not thousands of other customers.

Especially when the economy is soft, I shop for value. StreamSend is a very good value.

Recommend StreamSend and make 20% on-going commission

2008-07-29T13:52:00.000-07:00

Word of mouth has been a big driving force behind our success. Many of our customers are referring others to use our service each month. We really appreciate the support!

We're happy to announce the StreamSend Email Marketing Affiliate Program to help reward those that wish to refer customers. The commission is 20% reoccurring. We'll be paying out once the commission reaches $100 using PayPal.

We're not requiring affiliates to be customers (though we always urge people to give our software a try). Please pass the word if you know someone that has a web site and can benefit from our program.

Exporting, now with progress bar!

2008-07-28T10:24:00.000-07:00

Our latest update to StreamSend adds a nice little progress bar for exports. Before, you would hit the "Export" button and wait on the page not knowing what's going on. Now, you'll be sent to a page that shows the status of the export. The time it takes to finish will vary depending on your exporting criteria and database size. While the application is doing its job, you may browse around and come back to the Exports page at any time. A "Download" button will appear once the export process is complete. Please note that you can only have 1 export in progress at a time.

A truly beautiful product...

2008-07-21T10:37:00.001-07:00

A couple days ago I was in BestBuy with my cousin who wanted to buy the Rock Band video game. (Before you say why the heck is Dan talking about BestBuy..... I swear, this post is relevant!) While he was investigating his options, I wandered off on my own; perusing the store. Then I ran across the Dyson vacuum cleaner... I personally don't own one, but I know several people that do, including Neil, our Sales Director. I instantly recalled how he said that his friends would want to borrow his *vacuum cleaner* all the time...!

I began to read their marketing brochure and was intrigued. They had innovated, innovated, improved, improved and created an amazing device! Then at the end of the brochure, I ran across a variation of the following quote (I found this one online):

“A product is only truly beautiful if it works well. It’s the performance of a product that counts.” - James Dyson, inventor of the Dyson vaccum cleaner. This man created 5,127 prototypes! Now is that obsession over quality or what??

Our company truly loves this principal. I think that's why we are big fans of Apple products (and now Dyson as well). We believe that products should just work. That's elegance-- a product that does what it is meant to do, without the user having to read through thick manuals, hitting a brick wall or having to jump through illogical hoops to make it happen.

So as of June we've been taking a little break from adding new features to our StreamSend Email Marketing. Instead we have been working on improving our application to enhance it's performance and intuitiveness. We want the application to work just as fast for someone that has 500 subscribers as it does for someone that has 250,000 subscribers.

We've deployed two new product updates since June. These updates improved the application speed and knocked down page load times by 1-2 seconds. However, we're still not happy. We want a "truly beautiful" product. We're betting our customers do too.

dmPULSE Newsletter Launched

2008-07-09T16:03:00.000-07:00

"dmPULSE - the Latest in Digital Marketing News"

We've been working on an informational newsletter to help our customers stay up to date on the digital marketing industry. The first issue of the newsletter, called dmPULSE, is now ready. Here is the July Issue.

We'll be publishing monthly and compiling information that summarizes key happenings in the digital marketing industry. The web site features real-time news feeds on: general industry news, search, online and email marketing. We'll also be putting together exclusive discounts from other industry partners.

Please take a look and let us know what you think. We'd love to hear your feedback!

Improve subscriber interaction with Triggers

2008-06-24T16:01:00.000-07:00

We recently announced the launched our Trigger functionally for StreamSend. This is something I'm very excited to tell you about. Triggers will allow you to send automated emails to your subscribers on a certain date criteria. For instance, some users are using it to send birthday or follow up emails. These types of interactions are great ways to keep the communication between you and your subscribers alive.

It's very easy to set up a trigger (screencast tutorial below) and follow it up with reporting. We've added time zone support and a repeat option so that you may repeat your sends monthly or yearly. For more information you can check out our knowledge base articles.

Deliverability News – Staying on the right side of the law

2008-06-18T13:47:00.000-07:00

Spammer must pay $6 million for phishing on MySpace without a license:
"A Colorado man has been ordered to pay US$6 million in damages and legal fees for spamming thousands of MySpace.com users.
Scott Richter of Westminster, Colorado, must pay MySpace $4.8 million in damages and $1.2 million in legal fees, a court-appointed arbitrator ruled on Thursday."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20080617/tc_pcworld/147159

CAN SPAM regulations that apply to email sent to domains used exclusively for mobile devices:
"While the FTC handles the bulk of the regulation related to CAN SPAM the FCC is responsible for regulating email sent to wireless devices. The act requires the FCC protect consumers from "unwanted mobile service commercial messages." To that end there are specific regulations that apply to email sent to domains used exclusively for mobile devices that do not apply to messages that go out to non-mobile domains."
http://blog.wordtothewise.com/2008/06/email-to-mobile-devices/

here is a link with a complete list of mobile device domains:
http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/policy/DomainNameDownload.html

GoDaddy is now charging its customers for spam complaints:
"Apparently GoDaddy is now charging for handling spam complaints and has a $200 'spam tax' for clients that do email marketing. If they receive spam complaints against you, they are claiming that they will hold your domain ransom unless you pay $75 to release it."
http://blog.deliverability.com/2008/06/dont-host-domai.html

Google Analytics: Using metrics to track and improve email marketing results

2008-06-09T15:01:00.000-07:00

I'd like to bring to the attention of StreamSend clients and other readers of this blog that Dan Forootan, CEO of the StreamSend Email Marketing service, has written an article called, Google Analytics: Using Metrics to Track and Improve Email Marketing Results.

Here is a quick synopsis of the article:

"Marketing professionals know that careful, accurate, and constant campaign tracking and analysis are just as important as delivery itself. Your email marketing campaigns, integrated with Google Analytics, make this possible—and easier to do than ever before."

We at StreamSend hope you find this article useful if you are considering integrating StreamSend with Google Analytics.

Saving Money by sending out Magazine renewal invoices by email

2008-05-23T13:29:00.000-07:00

I always love seeing how customers use our services to save money. Our customer, Imbibe, did just that. Imbibe is very niche magazine targeted to roughly 63,000 Drink Enthusiasts. They started using our service to send out their monthly drink newsletter, Tasting Notes (May Issue). Then they got a little more novel. Siobhan, Imbibe's circulation manager, began sending renewal notices using StreamSend. The results turned out great. The renewal rates were impressive, and Imbibe saved a lot of money.

I had the pleasure of working with Bill Mickey (from Circulation Management Magazine) and Siobhan to publicize Imbibe's success. You can read Bill's article here: Imbibe Transitions to E-Invoicing and Renewals. Hopefully Imbibe serves as an example to the many offline publications that have still not given email renewals a try.

As always, if you are a customer and have a story to tell, then please contact us or submit a comment below.

Staying in-tune with our customers

2008-05-21T23:30:00.000-07:00

As we continue to expand, we want to make sure that we don't lose touch with our customers. It's our mission to offer "true value for the money spent with us."

We've posted a survey for customers to provide us with feedback. We'll be using the results of this survey to improve StreamSend. We're looking for feedback on how we're doing as an organization and service. We're also looking for input on new features.

If you're a customer, then please take a couple moments to take our survey. Be honest and direct (we can handle it). Let us know our strengths, weaknesses and more. We're all ears....

p.s. Please post a comment if you have any suggestions on how else, beside surveys, we can open up a constant flow of communication between our customers and us.

StreamSend's growth, new staff, & our Mission / Values

2008-05-16T11:52:00.000-07:00

We've been experiencing some very good growth. To help better service our customers we've added some new staff members. I'd like to introduce a couple very smart people holding new positions: Kathryn Klammt, Robert Rodriguez (new to sales), Louis Chatoff (deliverability & ISP relations-- a frequent blogger here), Mark Armistead (support manager), Greg Weber (application developer), Olga Reid and Ray Erdmann (customer support).

Without these wonderful people, we couldn't offer the kind of service we strive to offer.

I'd also like to share with you our Mission and company Values. This information is also posted on our web site. We'd love to hear what you think!.

Mission

To offer customers true value for the money they spend with us. We strive to offer our customers with a friendly, patient and educational experience. This can't be done without great employees. Our company must provide employees a great atmosphere to work & grow. We want to offer employees respect, comfort & opportunity. At all times the environment should be encouraging employees to be creative, innovative, open to share ideas and achieve professional and personal growth.

Values

We are consultants to customers
We are persistent
We are problem solvers
We look through the other person's eyes
We shoot for Zero Error in our software
We are proactive
We stay true to our word
We are quick with the communication jab
We always do our best