To make this process easy and straight forward, PreviewMyEmail.com offers a unique service. You can test your email on 44+ email clients (including Hotmail, Gmail, iPhone and many more) within a minute. You will save your valuable time.

The good news is, Oempro is fully integrated with PreviewMyEmail. You can integrate your PreviewMyEmail account with Oempro and run email design tests within Oempro. When creating your Oempro campaign, you can pass your email from PreviewMyEmail’s email design testing service with a single click .

There are many use cases for Oempro and PreviewMyEmail integration:

For email marketing service providers;

• Offer email design testing service to your Oempro users
• Charge them for extra fee to use this feature
• Provide free access to this feature to differentiate your self from competitors

For email marketers;

• Save your time when previewing and testing your email on different email clients
• Get screen shots of your email on different email clients within a few minutes, with a single click
• Optimize your email design to be compatible with all popular email clients

How Oempro and PreviewMyEmail integration work?

Quite straight forward. Visit PreviewMyEmail.com sign-up page and open a free account. Your account will be ready in a few seconds. Then login to your PreviewMyEmail account.

On the top right, click “Plan Information” link:

Account Upgrade Plan link

On the account plan subscription page, scroll down to “Oempro” section and click the big yellow Subscribe button:

Plan Subscription

Once you complete the plan subscription payment process, your API key will be generated for you. This API key can be gathered from your Account Information page:

Account Information link

Copy your API key:

PreviewMyEmail API Key

Now, login to your Oempro admin area and click “Settings” link on the top right:

Oempro Admin Settings

Click “Integration” settings option on the left side:

Integrations Option

Paste your PreviewMyEmail API key and hit the update button:

PreviewMyEmail API Key Setting

Once you enter and save your PreviewMyEmail integration settings, a hidden feature will be unlocked. Your users will see “Design Test” button when creating a new email campaign (in review step). Once they click that link, Oempro will pass the email through PreviewMyEmail in the backend and display real screen shots taken from 40+ email clients.

Watch the following video to see how email design testing process works:

To activate this unique feature, simply head over to PreviewMyEmail.com and sign-up for an account.

When making this decision, we were inspired from Atlassian’s JIRA pricing model where they have $10 10-user license. To those who don’t know JIRA, it’s a well-known enterprise level issue tracking software. We decided to give it a try and started the big discount on 28th October. The discount period ended at the end of November 2011, which means it last for around ~34 days.

In this period, we sold 25x more Oempro 1-user licences. In just 34 days, we gained new customers whom were being gained in 10 months. It was a big success from customer-base and sales quantity side. However, was it really a success?

This was the first time we were reducing our enterprise level email marketing software to a low price level. There were some risks such as;

• Damaging Oempro’s brand. Selling a software with a low price may cause to position it on a “Personal” category instead of a “Professional” or an “Enterprise”.
• Acquiring customers who don’t believe in our product. When you keep the entrance barrier low, anyone can purchase easily which means your product will loose its value on customer’s side.
• Loosing the customer feedback. When you purchase a product, which is cheap, you tend to provide feedback to developers less likely. You see it as a time loss.
• Loosing the customer loyalty. They purchase it almost free. So, they can easily switch to an alternative solution, because their loss will be nothing. Just $29.

These were the main risks involved in our big discount period. However, we wanted to give it a try, because it was working well for Atlassian and many other successful software companies.

In the beginning everything was great. We were making lots of 1-user Oempro sales and our charts hit the ceiling. We were selling tens of 1-user Oempro licenses every day. We were getting tens of new customers every day. We were quite happy and believed that this pricing model was working.

However, a few weeks have passed and we were measuring our success (or failure), we noticed something weird. Even though our customer base was increasing dramatically, the numbers of provided feedbacks were decreasing. The numbers of support requests were decreasing. We decided to wait a week more to see the big picture. On the third week of November, we started to analyze every single parameter and noticed a few things;

• Our 1-user Oempro sales volume has increased dramatically. We sold almost 25x more 1-user licenses compared to previous periods.
• Other Oempro license sales decreased a lot. 1-user license sale was great, but our high profit licenses such as 10-user and unlimited-user licenses were going down. Everyone was purchasing our 1-user license, which was $29, but they were not purchasing $699 or $1979 licenses.
• Numbers of feedback shared with us through our community forums and support desk didn’t increase just like our customer base and sales volume. This was pointing to a warning, because softwares cannot live without feedback provided by users.
• Our revenue didn’t increase a lot. Even though the number of units sold increased, our revenue had no valuable change.
• Support requests didn’t increase. This seems to be good in the beginning (considering customer maintenance costs), however support means questions and questions means feedback for the future of the software. We were loosing this advantage.

So, this “easy entrance barrier” pricing model didn’t work for our software and we decided to stop the big discount at the end of November.

1-User Oempro license is now $299 again just like before the discount. We also have higher licenses with the following prices:

• 5-User Oempro License – $499
• 10-User Oempro License – $699
• 20-User Oempro License – $1099
• Unlimited User Oempro License – $1979

We are still not happy with our pricing. Oempro is one of the best and most powerful email-marketing software designed for ESPs mainly. With Oempro, anyone can build a new ESP business. And it’s the only ESP software which is being used by its developers to run another successful ESP business; Sendloop.com. We believe that we are leaving money on the table.

We are now working on a new pricing model on Oempro. We will announce new pricing in following months but until then we will continue experimenting and measuring.

I want to learn your thoughts. What kind of pricing model do you apply and how do you measure your success. Feel free to share by posting comments below.

Click here to purchase Oempro 1-user license for $29 now

This is a special opportunity to get Oempro with such a big discount. Hurry up and do not loose this opportunity.

By the way, this special discount is available for almost 5 weeks. During 5 weeks, we have sold hundreds of Oempro 1-user licenses and gained a lot of experience about distributing an enterprise level software with such a low pricing level. We will share our experiences and observations about this pricing strategy on a separate blog post in coming weeks.

Hurry up, promotion is about to expire!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Why you do choose us?

We offer advanced services and solutions to all your marketing needs.  Unlike other email marketing softwares, which only offer software, we also use Oempro for running our hosted email marketing service.

What are the advantages about this special offer?

• You can easily purchase multi license Oempro with our special one time discount.
• Buy it for only $29 and name your own price and make a profit each time a client buys from you.
• We produced Oempro but you can rebrand to make it appear as if you made it.

You can visit our website to get the advantages of our biggest discount.

We’re thrilled to add new skills and smarts to our team so we can continue to deliver you the better email marketing solutions for your business needs. Meet our newest team members, Melike and Ferhat!

autoDrop is a very useful script which works in the backend and monitors your Apache web server access log for any kind of flood. Such as high Oempro API connection from a certain source.

By using autoDrop, you can set your own access thresholds and control Oempro API connection. If any source exceeds the defined thresholds, it gets blocked with iptable firewall system temporarily.

Take a look at project page for more information and free download:
https://code.google.com/p/autodrop/

We hope you like it. For any questions regarding this open source project, you may contact project owners via the project page.

Well done on a fantastic product!" — Eugène, Snowball

Here is a screenshot tour of this new feature:
Click on the screenshots to view bigger versions.

Administrator Area, User sign-up reputation setting

You can change the user's reputation level anytime you want

User will see a notice that tells the campaign is pending for approval

Administrator can see campaigns that pending approval in admin area dashboard

Here are the screenshots of this new feature:

New option in Add Subscriber Wizard

New Subscriber Add Form

Setting up this integration is really simple, all you need is to enter your highrise api key and account sub domain. After this, you will see a new button in add subscribers screen which takes you to Highrise contacts import process. You can choose to import all Highrise contacts, only contacts from a company or have a specific tag.

This is the third integration option available in Oempro and we are already excited about the new integration options. We look forward to hearing your feedback! Enjoy!

Oempro v4.2.3 now has a special new feature, which lets system our users, you to integrate subscriber lists with their Wufoo forms. Wufoo enables you to build various different kinds of forms ranging from contact forms to complex surveys, payment forms, employment application forms and other. If you want to learn more about the form options, just check the example Wufoo’s website.

With this new feature, you will be able to transport data from your Wufoo forms into your subscriber lists instantly. No matter how complex the Wufoo forms are, you will be able to integrate the lists with the forms within a couple of minutes. Oempro’s integration is stripped from technical details or data import/export processes and keeps your subscriber lists synced with the forum data. All you need to do for the synchronization is to complete the integration and let Wufoo and Oempro handle the data sync.

Here are the simple steps you should take for the integration:

1) Login to your Oempro account and click on “Settings” on the top right

2) Click “Integration” on the left menu

3) Click “Wufoo integration” option on the menu

4) To create the Wufoo integration, click “Collect data from a new form” option

5) You will be asked about your Wufoo sub-domain and your Wufoo form API key. If you don’t know your Wufoo sub-domain, you can simply look at the URL of your form. If you want to learn your Wufoo API key, follow the steps written at here

6) Oempro will then ask you to choose the target subscriber list and the Wufoo form you want to integrate. Select the ones you want to integrate from the list and proceed.

7) You will then be asked to map Wufoo and Oempro list fields, which will let you to capture any information addition to the email addresses.

You are all done! Your Oempro subsriber list and Wufoo form is now integrated. Whenever you submit your Wufoo form, the data will also be posted on to your Oempro subsriber list.

Our team believes that this new feature will be of great use to many of use. We look forward to hearing your feedback! Enjoy!

Guys in our team had the same problem while developing the Wufoo web-hook integration feature for both Sendloop.com and Oempro and spent their 2 hours to develop this nice service.

Say hello to Postboxey:

Simply, you get a unique web hook URL to use testing in third party web hook services like Wufoo’s. The data posted to your unique web hook URL will be visible in a formatted way to you for easy debugging.

We hope you like it. It saved lots of our valuable time during the development.

Below, you can view an example HTML code optimized for HTML emails:

Here’s the HTML code with inline CSS:

<ul style="color:#6D6D6D; font-size:16px; font-family:Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; padding:0px; margin:0px; list-style-type:none;">
	<li style="text-align:left; font-size:16px; line-height: 20px; padding:0px 0px 10px 0px;"><img src="http://media.sendloop.com/images/mailing/003.png" border="0" style="float:left; margin-right:10px;"> List item #1</li>
	<li style="text-align:left; font-size:16px; line-height: 20px; padding:0px 0px 10px 0px;"><img src="http://media.sendloop.com/images/mailing/003.png" border="0" style="float:left; margin-right:10px;"> List item #2</li>
	<li style="text-align:left; font-size:16px; line-height: 20px; padding:0px 0px 10px 0px;"><img src="http://media.sendloop.com/images/mailing/003.png" border="0" style="float:left; margin-right:10px;"> List item #3</li>
	<li style="text-align:left; font-size:16px; line-height: 20px; padding:0px 0px 10px 0px;"><img src="http://media.sendloop.com/images/mailing/003.png" border="0" style="float:left; margin-right:10px;"> List item #4</li>
	<li style="text-align:left; font-size:16px; line-height: 20px; padding:0px 0px 10px 0px;"><img src="http://media.sendloop.com/images/mailing/003.png" border="0" style="float:left; margin-right:10px;"> List item #5</li>
</ul>

To view results in 30+ email clients, take a look at our PreviewMyEmail design test:

Lists with a custom list item image in HTML emails, email design preview

• Total sales, pre-purchase emails received and answered: 12,180 emails
• Total support tickets received and answered: 3,315 support tickets
• Total Oempro versions released: 10 version updates (v4.1.13 – v4.2.2)
• Total Sendloop.com updates: 30+
• Total PreviewMyEmail.com updates: 15+
• Total SenderSuite.com updates: 8+
• Total Wridea.com updates: 4
• Team: 10 person spread into 4 countries in 3 continents
• Total Oempro feedback received: 1,503+
• Total Sendloop feedback received: 834+
• Total PreviewMyEmail feedback received: 93+
• Total SenderSuite feedback received: 103+
• Total Octeth servers added to the server farm: 1 dedicated server
• Total Sendloop servers added to the server farm: 5 dedicated servers
• Total PreviewMyEmail servers added to the server farm: 5 dedicated servers, 60+ virtual servers including iPads and iPhones
• Total SenderSuite servers added to the server farm: 2 dedicated servers
• Total Wridea servers added to the server farm: 0

That’s all we have. Are you curious about any other metrics? Let us know and we will share it with you if it’s suitable or countable.

We wanted to have our share in this market and developed our first software, named it “Octeth E-mail Marketing Software”. It was our first baby: a simple list management and e-mail delivery software. Just a basic software without any fancy reporting or personalization features.

After two months, “Octeth E-mail Marketing Software” was purchased by our first customer, just through a simple e-mail conversation. We were happily surprised by the success of our software in such a short amount of time. It was a miracle for our small team, just Mert and I. In our first year, we sold around 100 licenses. Yes, not much, just 100 licenses.

New surprises and successes were waiting for us in the upcoming years. In our second year, we grew by more than 500%. As our products became more powerful, we sold hundreds of licenses. Just through online communications, we acquired more and more customers from all over the world; no phone calls, no meetings. It was 2000 and we were proud of the success of our new business model. We continued to grow in the following years. Our software became one of the best e-mail marketing softwares available in the industry, used by more thousands of customers from more than 110 countries. Following our software, Oempro, others started their own E-mail Service Provider (ESP) businesses.

In 2006, we built Wridea.com. While we originally designed this service for our internal collaborations, to share and store our ideas within our company, something unexpected happened. Luck was again on our side. Google (thank you Google!) indexed our service and in a very short amount of time, more than 10,000 users started using Wridea to collaborate with their friends and colleagues. Wridea was our first SaaS experience and are proud of it!

In 2007, we achieved another success with Sendloop.com, a limited feature hosted version of our software, Oempro. In just 1,5 years, we were again serving ten thousand users from over 110 countries and delivering millions of opt-in e-mails every day. Similar to Oempro, Sendlood also runs on our own server farm, and does not require software download, which means less trouble for you! Another wonderful feature of Sendloop is that its revenue model is cumulative. The existing users payments are sufficient for your service to continue even during months where you don’t get new paid users.

In 2008, we found PreviewMyEmail.com. This unique service takes screen shots of your e-mails on more than 30 clients in less than a minute. It enables you to create better-looking e-mails. We are excited about this promising technology that is still new, but continuing to develop day after day.

And finally in 2010, we created SenderSuite.com. Another e-mail marketing tool, SenderSuite.com enables you to send transaction emails (e.g. password reminders, system notification emails) through its easy-to-integrate gateway, without worrying about the e-mail delivery success. SenderSuite.com is an easy-to-use service that comes very handy for all website owners, blog owners, application developers.

2010 has been an excellent year for Octeth. All of our services, technologies continued to grow this year: Octeth by 60%, Oempro by 30%, Sendloop by 80%, and last but not the least PreviewMyEmail by 300%.

And now, we are about to meet the new year,2011. We are happy, and hopeful about the future. We are confident. In 1999, we believed in one thing: Knowing our target customers’ needs, serving them in the best way possible, and making them happy. We have been successful in this and our strategy is already being applied by several other companies, such as 37Signals, Campaign Monitor, Litmus, Mailchimp and thousands of others.

We are a small giant serving ten thousands easily. It’s only 10 of us, spread around four countries in three continents. We love what we do and we are passionate about our work. We are proud of how hard we work and the way we conduct business. We are proud of what we have achieved and look forward to come up with new solutions, and grow for the better in the future.

We would like take this opportunity to thank everyone who supported us in our journey. We would like to start by thanking all of our competitors and companies in the industry. We provide inspiration for each other and move the industry one step forward every single day. We would like to especially thank 37Signals for their wonderful philosophy and passion, to CampaignMonitor and Mailchimp for their impressive e-mail marketing services, Litmus for their amazing email testing service. We would also like to thank other thousands of other hard-working, small but big ISVs, SaaS companies, groups, entreprenours which contribute to our industry.

When we look back to those 11 years and think about the most important factor in our success, we know that it is our customers. Without our customers, their support and feedback, we would not be able to achieve our goals and build better email delivery solutions. As the Octeth team, we thank to all our customers and friends who supported us.

Octeth Email Delivery Solutions Company will continue to provide you innovative, easy-to-use solutions in 2011. We wish you the best in 2011.

NOTE: We are hiring! Do you know someone who might be interested in being a part of our team? We have open job positions

The Octeth office will be closed for the Holiday. Our team will try to spend a few days away from their computers. We hope that you will also take a short break and spend this special time of the year with your loved ones. Thank you for another great year and your continued support. We will be back to provide you the highest quality service also in 2011. We wish you a happy new year!

In case you need to reach us, our support team will continue providing service for urgent issues.

http://octeth.com/docs/oempro/version_log/421/

To get your discount, purchase a new Oempro license or extend your service subscription before 23rd December.

You are special to us! Hurry up and don’t miss your special offer! Start the new year with the most popular and feature packed PHP e-mail marketing software.

Happy new year!

Click here to purchase now with 20% discount

So how does this work? The only thing you need to use this feature is to provide us is the date of the important event you want to e-mail your subscribers on your list about only once. Let’s assume you have a list named as “Website subscribers”. In this list, you have a name field and a custom date field for each subscriber. You can include the subscription date of your customers or their birthdays in the list.

For example, you want to send “Happy Birthday” emails to your subscribers on their birthday every year. How to set up the birthday date information in the list is shown in the screenshot below.

Date field trigger on auto responders

You then create an auto responder that is triggered on “Date Information” for our “Website Subscribers” list. You select birthday field as our date field. Since you want the e-mails to be sent only once a year, yo select “Every year” as our send frequency. After making your choices, you can create the e-mail you want to send, just like creating other e-mails on Oempro and save it.

That’s all! You are now ready. You can just sit back and relax, and trust Oempro to remember important days for each and every one of your customers. (Yes, you can use it to remember your wife’s birthday too)

The v4.2 change log can be found here: Oempro v4.2 Change Log

You can learn more about subscription form wizard here:
The New Subscription Form Wizard

Exporting Subscribers from Browse Subscribers Screen

We have enabled users to export subscribers with rule filters they created in browse subscribers screen. This way you will be able to export your subscribers with more precise targeted filters.

Exporting Bounced Subscribers of a Campaign from Campaign Overview Screen

You were already able to export bounced subscribers of a list but now you can export bounced subscribers of a specific campaign. This was a top requested feature and now it is implemented with this update.

Browse Suppressed Subscribers of a List

With this update, you can now filter your subscribers based on suppression status from browse subscribers screen. You can filter locally or globally suppressed subscribers or not suppressed subscribers.

For more detailed change log, please visit http://octeth.com/docs/oempro/version_log/4119/

30% discount coupon: BFRIDAY

Hurry up, discount ends at the end of November 26, Friday.

1. Make Subscription Easy
If you want more customers to subscribe to your emails, just make it a piece of cake for them! Are you using your emails to advertise about your services and products? Encourage your current customers to pass on the opportunity by using an auto-signature, a simple phrase such as “Please feel free to distribute this email to interested parties. All new subscription requests can be emailed to xxx@xxx.com”. A subscriber button is also a great marketing tool. Just pick your company’s logo as an easy way to click-through for new subscriptions.

2. Make Subscription Fun
If you want more customers to subscribe to your emails, just make it rewarding for them! Who does not like gifts? A simple yet very effective marketing tool is to offer a free gift to your new subscribers. This will increase interest in your emails and encourage current subscribers to spread the word faster. Go ahead and add another freebie for every referral!

3. Make Subscription Visible
Do you want to reach a wider target audience? If you want more customers to subscribe to your emails, do not limit yourself to your own website. Off-site promotion on other channels, such as flyers, is an ideal way to reach new potential customer and increase your subscribers.

4. Make Subscription Interesting
If you want more subscribers to your emails, make the content worthy to follow. Spend effort on creating content that is unique and interesting each and every time. Attract attention by getting personal, encouraging responses and participation, writing that has not been written before. Make people talk about your emails in the offices, on the elevators and during lunch. This will serve as a word-of-mouth marketing effect.

5. Make Subscribers Feel Important
If you want more subscribers to your emails, let them know about the current number of subscribers. People are curious; they want to know everything about others’ lives. Tell your current subscribers the number of people on your subscription list. People want to feel special; your customers will see the number as a challenge, take it upon themselves to spread to word to make the number go up. This is a chain and people will want to be a part of it.

Our costumers are used to receiving regular updates from us for Oempro and Sendloop.com. We believe that this is a good way for us to get feedback from our users and always stay up to date. Now, we are updating ourselves one more time to better serve our customers’ needs.

We will now release a new version update and a new feature every week. Every Friday, Oempro and Sendloop.com development teams will gather and come up with a new feature to for both Oempro and Sendloop.com. They will spend the week to develop these features and release them on Saturdays.

We love receiving feedback from our customers and seeing that they are passionate about our products as much as we are. We see ourselves and our customers as part of a single team, working to improve our products. Our customers have been suggesting more frequent updates and directed us towards this new development. We believe that this new deployment method will give us and our customers excellent results within 2 months. As a result, our clients will receive the fastest updates in the industry.

We appreciate your participation as we change our products for better. With your help, we will continue to provide best solutions for your needs. Thank you!

SenderSuite.com API is an easy-to-integrate API and will take only a few minutes to integrate it with your own websites and applications.

There’s no monthly plan. You just pay when you send. Sign-up now for free and get 100 email delivery credits immediately.

For more information, visit SenderSuite website at http://sendersuite.com

Oempro is now available as a managed service for you under our popular and big email marketing service, Sendloop.

In just two weeks, we will start accepting new users for our Sendloop Partnership Program.

Briefly, this program lets you to open your own email marketing service over our infrastructure and offer it to your customers.

The Sendloop Team handles all technical details for you. Your emails will be delivered by the white-label, high delivery rate mail servers of Sendloop and you will have millions of email delivery capacity per hour. You will just focus on your business and get more customers.

There are endless possibilities with the new Sendloop Partnership Program. You can offer it for free to your customers and make money from email newsletter designs or you can just run it as an email marketing service competing with leading or local ESPs.

To apply for a beta account, please submit the following form:
http://octeth.wufoo.com/forms/sendloop-partnership-program-beta-request-form/

Any questions for the new Sendloop Partnership Program can be asked by contacting our Sendloop Team via sales [at] sendlooop {dot} com

http://octeth.com/docs/oempro/version_log/

After Googling around, the company Octeth came to our knowledge. After installing and participate the beta program for the new version, we where blown away. The support was way better than we could expect. On top of that, we could also give the developers at Octeth feedbacks and they really listen to what we had to say.

Now we are running in production and the system is in our opinion the best in market." — Mats Lindström, CEO
MailCom Europe AB

Sales and support are both good, although could be a little faster at times. Also telephone support could be improved… Just grateful that support exists altogether as it often doesn’t…

Aside from that really happy” — Luke Wingfield Digby

Oempro v4.1.16 update includes fixes for reported bugs since the release of previous v4.1.15 version and also it includes several performance improvements.

Translator plug-in will be helpful for users who wish to translate Oempro into any other language. It’s integrated with Google Translator and with a single click, you can translate phrases to your own language.

Solution is easy, just add “display:block” to your image tags and problem will go away. However, please note that this styling will cause some problems if your image is in a paragraph or next to a text.

More detailed information can be found here.

Gmail has changed how they render HTML images. Unfortunately, it adds spaces after images which may be breaking your HTML email layout just like in our recent email campaign.

As mentioned in theemailguide.com, this issue can be fixed by adding “display:block” style to every single image tag inside your HTML code. However, please note that this may cause another problem if the image is in a paragraph.

p.s.: Thanks to Richelo for sending us the link

We will be updating our website and online demo in a few days. More details about v4.1 features will be published soon. Stay tuned.

All existing Oempro license owners with an active service subscription can download v4.1 Release Candidate 2 for free from the client area.

Hurry up! The last 5 days before the price change. If you are considering to buy Oempro or to extend your license service subscription, the last few days before price change. More details can be found in our April newsletter.

Click here to view our email newsletter on your web browser.

Oempro v4.1 will include several cool features including A/B split testing, advanced list segmentation, more powerful custom fields, better user management, improved campaign management and much more. We will do our best to publish sneak peek videos for each cool new feature in following days if we find enough time to focus on screen casting.

Let's begin with the improved list segmentation feature. Oempro development team spent several days on this feature (congratulations!) to make it user-friendly and powerful. We believe that the result is fantastic. We changed the list segmentation screen completely, now there's rule board inside each list segment to help you design your segment easily just like creating an organization chart.

You can set unlimited rules inside each list segment, group them, and also set rules based on recipient activity such as link clicking or email opening.

We have recorded a short (~2min) sneak peek video to show you how the new user interface of list segmentation screen looks like. Take a look:

We hope you like it and thanks for valuable feedback so far. The next sneak peek video will be covering Oempro v4.1's new A/B split test campaigns. Stay tuned.

Status Update: Oempro v4.1 final release is scheduled for mid-April. This new version will include more than 30 new features, 100+ improvements and several bug fixes reported since the last update.

A/B Split Testing

• Installation guide can be found here.
• Upgrade guide can be found here.

• have intermediate PHP/MySQL knowledge
• have basic/intermediate *nix operating system experience
• know what does FTP, SSH, cron mean
• are passionate and patient about helping novice users
• have good communication skills
• have good/excellent English reading/speaking/writing skills
• are willing to work at a peaceful, motivating working environment
• are excited and passionate about learning every day
• are a good team member

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Ensuring that your solicited newsletter is successfully delivered to your recipients entails a tricky scuffle in this age where spamming is an intensifying issue. Your newsletter is sent to only those who subscribed to it, but the risk that your email is not delivered and is marked as SPAM is present. This depends highly on the way you format your emails and how you write your subject line. Your email deliverability is an important issue as the acquirement of customers and prospects is intricate and undeliverable emails imply a loss of those subscribers. After having crafted a perfect newsletter, its deliverability as a whole is what matters. Undeliverable emails and email bounce backs are requiring more and more concern. Open rates can experience a drastic decrease due to incorrect spam filter classification. Generally, the CAN-SPAM act applies to commercial emails which are sent to advertise or promote products or services. If your newsletter includes advertisements, the recipient can view it as being commercial and hence the CAN-SPAM act can pertain. So, how can you prevent your legitimate newsletter from being marked as SPAM?

• Never send unsolicited emails. Ensure that people on your subscriber list are willing to receive your newsletter before sending. Provide an opt-out option in your newsletter to allow recipients to unsubscribe if they wish to.
• When collecting names and email addresses from your website, ask the new subscribers to add your email address to their address book. This will prevent SPAM filters from blocking your newsletter.
• Whenever a subscriber wants to be removed from your subscriber list, delete his email address from your subscriber list. Else, you will henceforth be recognized as SPAM.
• HTML emails are becoming more popular and most SPAM is HTML formatted. Thus, differentiating between opt-in newsletters and SPAM messages is difficult. Therefore, if you are sending your newsletter in HTML format, send a plain text alternative newsletter as well.
• Investigate about newsletter advertisers before placing their advertisements in your newsletter. Your newsletter will be filtered in case their website URL has been previously used to send SPAM.
• Your language used in your newsletter should be appropriate. Do not include topics such as making money or pornography which make your email look like SPAM. Do not use extra punctuation or odd spelling in your message.
• Use images scarcely as messages that are entirely images are considered as SPAM.
• Include a link to files via a website URL instead of making use of attachments. With the growing of insertion of viruses in attachments, the recipient can tag your newsletter as SPAM to avoid virus intrusion.

An effective way of ensuring that your newsletter is delivered and not marked as SPAM is to use an email marketing firm to distribute your newsletter. Octeth is a recognized firm and its product, oemPro, grants the anti-spam rating feature which determines if your newsletter will be tagged as SPAM. With features like bounce management and use of strong permission policies, email deliverability will hence not be of high concern.

• The content of your newsletter is the key element in growing your subscriber list. Your content should be written with utmost care which will attract subscribers so much that they will be impatient to get the next issue and will even forward your newsletter to their friends and associates. Create interesting content.
• Make use of your website to grab new subscribers. Offer a free subscription link on your website. The enrollment process should be make easy and simple.
• Prompt your subscribers to forward a copy of your newsletter to others. Allow readers to reprint your newsletter or cite about it in other articles or newsletters.
• Maintain your schedule of publication. If you usually offer a weekly newsletter, preserve the schedule. Stay in touch with all your subscribers through regular mailings.
• Whenever you are mailing business prospects, invite them to sign-up for your newsletter and include your free subscription information in your signature. Try to collect as many identities as you can.
• Keep all your published newsletters to your web site to enhance search engine rankings. If more people visit your website, the number of subscribers should increase.
• Lure new subscribers by offering a bonus, such as a free report. The more efficient the bonus is, the more likely they will subscribe. You can also do regular contests where only your newsletter subscribers can participate. Advertise the contest on other websites to boost your sign-ups.

There are other ways you can increase the number of subscribers to your newsletter. Keep promoting your newsletter and it will bear fruits. Concentrate on the content and format as well. Using email marketing solutions like oemPro to create good newsletters which can attract subscribers facilitates your task.

When sending a product release announcement email, another critical thing is to define your target audience. The content should be relevant to your target and moreover, the announcement email should be sent to likely customers, leaving behind those who don’t show interest to such products. You need to first of all identify people who would be interested in using your product and send personalized emails if required depending on the audience. Your product can assist different categories of people in different ways and these varying benefits have to be emphasized. oemPro helps you send your news or even personalized emails to the right people. Unless you use a sensible marketing solution, the need for vigilance is strictly required about sending your product release announcement email.

There is a very sensitive balance between disturbing and keeping them comfortable in your mail list. If you send out so many newsletters to them, they will get disturbed and attempt to unsubscribe from your mail list.

You must find a good way to keep them active, loyal to your services by sending newsletters but not so often.

In this article, I will give you some examples and ideas for how to keep your members active and responsive to your events.

Competitions

You can run competitions periodically and let your mail list members to attend them. At the end of your competitions, you can offer them free or discounted services or products. This kind of events will let your mail list members to remember you more often and be responsive to your events.

Free Courses or Events

Prepare free, basic email courses which can be completed in a few days. For example, at Octeth, we just published a free email course “5 Secrets Revealed in the Special Report on Mail List Building”. This course takes 5 days to complete and at the end of the course, attendant gets 30% discount for any Octeth product. Visitors and mail list members will only click a link to subscribe to this course. It’s totally free! Once subscribed, they will start receiving one secret every day until the end of 5th day. On the 6th day, they will get a “thank you” email with a 30% special discount. To handle this email course system, we use our powerful and popular email marketing solution, Oempro. By the way, do not forget to personalize your course based on member information. This will increase response rate. Also, always include “unsubscription” link in your emails

Requesting Help or Contribution

If you are opening a new service or releasing a new product, send a short newsletter to your mail list members and describe the coming event on your side. At the end of your newsletter, request help from them by trying your new service or product. You can offer a special discount or opportunity to them for their help. This will help you to introduce your service to your customers and mail list members in a better way.

Whatever method you choose, you must be sure that your newsletter will not disturb your mail list member. You must always include unsubscription link, introduction to yourself and personalization based on your member data. For this, we strongly recommend you to use a powerful, feature packed email marketing and mail list management solution such as Oempro.

Every month, we send our monthly newsletters to more than 40,000 mail list members with Oempro. Each newsletter is personalized according to recipient information and includes very important announcements and news based on member interests. That’s why, our newest service Wridea.com has been so popular just in 7 days and had more than 2500 members and 92,000 search results in Google.

How is open-rate determined?

If you use email marketing tools like oemPro to send emails and newsletters to your audience, then the job of establishing the open-rate is not a major issue as it is done by oemPro. The tracking feature of your email marketing solution counts the number of ‘unique opens’, which implies that list members are never calculated twice, despite of the fact that they open the email more than once. Invisible graphics written in HTML are used to track the open-rate. They are placed on the server and when a list member opens and views your email, the graphic is downloaded. All downloads are spotted and the open-rate is subsequently obtained.

Are open-rates reliable?

The open-rate gives you a good estimate of the number of people who are opening your emails. However, two attributes, namely the ‘false negative’ and ‘false positive’ are involved in the ‘open-rate’ jargon, which can cause irregularity and unreliability.

• False Negative In case the email is downloaded from the server and then viewed offline, it will not be tracked and counted as the graphic has not been downloaded. A false negative occurs as the open-rate is actually higher.
• False Positive The recipient might have used the preview feature of his email client. The invisible graphic is downloaded and the email is recorded as opened though it has not been opened and read, but has only been previewed. The open-rate calculated will therefore exceed the real value, causing a false positive.
• With the increased use of anti-spam, some images are blocked to protect the recipient from seeing unwanted images. Therefore, the invisible graphics is not loaded and consequently not downloaded when the email is being opened and read.

You therefore cannot link the success of your email campaigns to only the open-rate. Other metrics should be used in parallel.

There are ways which can ensure that your legitimate emails get delivered:

• Your ‘From’ line and subject line should be carefully verified
• Language and tactics which might look as spam must not be used
  • Spam-like words such as 'free' and 'guarantee', etc.
  • Intense colors like red
  • Headers in all capital letters
  • Excessive punctuation
  • No ‘From’ line
  • Misleading subject line
• Contact recipients only after you have received their permission
• Never spam, else your image will be tarnished and you will be always recognized as spam
• Persuade your recipients to add your ‘From’ address to their address books. This will guarantee deliverability
• Use efficient email marketing tools like Oempro as it administers bounces and reports details about the bounce email addresses. Scrutinize your bounces and remove them from your list
• Remove subscribers from your list immediately when they want to unsubscribe and do not mail them again. Else, your emails will be regarded as spam

Email marketing softwares like Oempro, provides solution to the problem of legitimate emails being flagged as spam by granting the anti-spam rating feature which determines if your emails will be tagged as spam. With Oempro, email deliverability is not a big issue as your emails are delivered using the proper protocols. Octeth maintains strong permission policies and offers bounce management to facilitate your task.

The key articles should be placed at the top to grab the subscriber’s attention and make them starve to learn more. Ads can be placed besides high-quality text. The opposite applies if your email’s content is of poor quality. Here, placing the ads at the top will result in a higher click-through rate. The proper positioning of ads on the email has a direct impact on your click-through ratio. By regularly changing the area of placing the ads, you can experiment the region where the reader is more likely to focus.

Another important factor is the title. A good idea would be to give the title according to what it links. This will definitely lure the subscriber to click on the ad if it contains information of interest. Your newsletter must be given a distinct look and personality. A note from the editor can be added at the beginning to entice the reader. Pictures that are clickable and give an explicit image of your business can be added.

A few useful guidelines are included below:

• Your newsletter should be friendly, bear a sense of humor but at the same time be kept formal and professional. Write articles to tempt the user without boasting about your business.
• Talk about the advantages and benefits that are obtained from your newsletter. Your articles should reflect what other email newsletters might miss out. You can include the new features of your campaign.
• Include important events, new products or any other new things to compel the subscriber to read the newsletter. Use appealing words such as “sumptuous” instead of “good”.
• Adopt a new style and use of new words each time. Do not use the same standard wordings for every issue of your newsletter. Moreover, the paragraphs should be kept short.

Oempro provides advanced link and newsletter reporting features which can give you a better idea of what’s happening about your newsletters. You can decide a better newsletter layout based on these reports and increase your open rate and click-through ratio, thus bringing your business to great heights.

Your ‘From’ Line

Your Subject Line

Your Sending Times

Frequency

Rate Your Newslettter

HTML has gained popularity due to its fancy look which can include photos, graphics and colours and these newsletters can deliver videos, audios and Java applets. They are usually easy to read and include a layout which shows the newsletter’s structure, thus facilitating the navigation process. Publishers expect at least 10-25 % of subscribers to click on links when viewing HTML newsletters, which is not the case when sending plain text newsletters.

According to some readers, HTML email is a useless and unnecessary gimmick that can be put aside. In rural areas and non-developed countries, plain newsletters are preferred since they require less disc space, bandwidth and download time as well. They are unsuitable for subscribers who have slow connections or pay-by-the-minute internet access since they take longer to load. People with non-standard or old web-based email programs, which do not support HTML, will rather have programming codes on their screens. Publishers however consider it as disadvantageous as readers may lose interest when reading text without graphics and moreover, click-through-ratio is very small.

A wise idea would be to use a service which sends both formats of newsletters and detects the best one depending on the type of reader. Nowadays, many email software programs and services make use of ‘sniffing’ and detect if the reader’s email program can read HTML and accordingly delivers a plain text version a HTML version. For subscribers who want plain text newsletters, the version should be made user-friendly, easy to read, tight with fewer words to capture the readers’ minds.

Regardless, the key is to offer subscribers the choice of format when signing-up or provide … Some reliable email technology solutions, such as Oempro, provide multipart messaging to cater for both plain and HTML newsletters readers. Oempro sends the newsletter both HTML and plain text and it’s up to the subscriber’s email client to decide whether to accept the HTML version or present the plain text version. A tip when using HTML would be to keep the file size as small as possible and to always create a text-version for those who prefer or need them using a tool-supporting sniffing technique, or using email technology solutions which provides multipart messaging.

List management features include the building and the growing of email lists. Your email is one of your most precious assets, but building one is a slow process which might be time-consuming and strenuous. However by abiding by the following tips, you can quickly build your email list and increase your email marketing effectiveness by benefitting from communication with your readers.

When deciding to launch an email-marketing campaign, you must not limit your missives, as you will benefit by staying in touch with a wide variety of members and organizations. These contacts should always be kept informed through permission-based email to boost your business. If you already have an email list Oempro enables you to import it and manage the subscribers' information.

An easy way to collect email addresses is to include a sign-up tag on your home page and other appropriate pages of your company website. You cannot afford to lose a single site visitor. You cannot miss the opportunity of turning visitors into your customers. Another effective method is to send emails to people which whom you already have a business relationship but you should provide a clear way for them to unsubscribe. Once you have built an email list, your highest priority now is grow the list as a larger number of subscribers imply more potential customers. Hence, a bigger list obviously implies a higher impact on your business.

If you do not have a website, you can still find ways to gather email addresses to grow your list:

• On invoices, feedback forms,
• In your guest book
• At functions

Building your list and growing it entail the same steps and are done similarly.

You need to email your subscribers often enough to keep in contact with them and at the same time, notify about your new products and new developments. However, you must be careful not to bother them by sending newsletters too often, as this might compel them to unsubscribe though they like the content. Your newsletter can even be marked as spam if it is sent infrequently. How often you send your newsletter is therefore a major feature to consider to succeed in maintaining relationships with your customers and preventing your business from deteriorating by losing subscribers. Although there is no magic answer to which frequency of launching newsletters is the best, there are various factors which can affect your choice, depending on your capability and your subscribers as well.

The most imperative element is your ability to create and send newsletters. You cannot attempt to send more often than you are able to, else the quality of your newsletter will suffer, thereby leading to a decrease in the number of readers. If you think you are capable of preparing daily newsletters, go for semi-daily newsletters. Similarly, if your potential is to send weekly newsletters, choose to send newsletters every two weeks. If you promise a weekly newsletter, readers will expect a new issue every week. If this promise is not fulfilled, your subscribers’ trust in you as a newsletter publisher and merchant will be influenced. You should therefore cautiously decide on your schedule and once you have opted for one, you must stick to it. If ever you plan to change your frequency, inform your subscribers beforehand.

Generally speaking, a frequent publication schedule, such as a monthly issue or twice a month, is more valuable. The trick is to find the balance for you, where you can send newsletters as often as possible, while concentrating on the quality of the content. However, a less frequent newsletter, is not recommended. The rule of thumb is to test for a perfect frequency which will suit you and your company and simultaneously be appropriate to your target as well.

Tips to increase sales during holidays, making use of email marketing:

Email Early

Send your campaigns early, before the holiday shopping rush to grab more customers. You should avoid sending emails during the holidays as people do not tend to check their email regularly. A number of emails pile up and the chance that your email is deleted without being read increases. Therefore, emailing before the holidays is more efficient. Include a sense of exigency in your emails, such as limiting the time period, so that your recipients respond and buy quickly.

Email Frequency

If you have a propensity to rise the frequency of your mailing during the holidays, inform your recipients beforehand. Do not increase your email frequency without notification as this might irritate the receivers.

Notify About New Issues Or Updates

You should notify your recipients in case you plan not to publish issues during the holidays. You can also seize the opportunity to invite new people to subscribe to your email or newsletter. If new updates or offers are expected after the holidays, outline them before the holidays to whet your subscribers' appetite.

Basics Of A Good Email

• A good "Subject" line which outlines a benefit and is free from spam-like words, such as free, or bad formatting, that is all capital letters and excessive punctuation.
• A fine and recognizable "From" line, which includes your brand.
• Send personalized HTML emails. The latter leads to a higher response rate and allows the tracking of opens and click-throughs. oemPro provides the ability of personalizing all your emails.

Holiday Greeting

You should send holiday greetings to all your prospects and customers. The latter will appreciate your thanks and regards.

The header, which is found at the top of your newsletter, is mainly used to build interest and has to be well-designed since it gives an image of the newsletter. It is used as a teaser, which tempts and pushes the reader to continue reading the newsletter and discover its interesting content. It should contain important information about the company, including the company’s name and logo. The content in the header should be relevant to the content of course. All headers should be consistent, and the publication date, issue and mainlines of the content should be clear.

The Footer

The footer is the text which appears below the newsletter’s content and is as much important as the content itself, but many marketers do not make use of it. It is the best place for inserting administrative notices and including CAN-SPAM compliance. It can also be used to advertise your products and services. Since from readers’ point of view, the footer is not considered as being part of the newsletter, you can allow yourself to incorporate other elements, spreading out from subjects related to your business. Though this section of the newsletter is not read at all the time, readers do often scroll down to view more information and the footer’s objective is therefore to ensure that it contains all that a reader might want to learn. Standard information about your business, such as contacts, must always be included, without putting aside your marketing aims, new products and secondary offers. The footer should without doubt comprise of links to your website and your other newsletters.

Some elements which are recommended in the footer are:

• Administrative information, such as contacts and copyright notice
• Links or instructions to subscribe, unsubscribe or modify accounts
• Links to interesting features of your website
• Links to your other newsletters
• Customer feedback link
• Link leading to more information about your business
• A teaser about the coming newsletter

Both headers and footers are essential in newsletters. You can define your header and footer of newsletters being sent through Oempro. It provides great flexibility and privilege mechanism which enables you to send personalized newsletters for each administrator.

In a survey made in 2002, 63.3% of respondents cited the “From” line as the most imperative factor which motivates them to open emails. According to the report, 35% of respondents quoted the subject line as being the most vital factor. The subject line is the first impression that readers will have about your email and it is the element which will ensure that your email is delivered and read instead of being tossed. The subject line corresponds to the headline of a news story. The latter entices readers to know the whole story. Similarly, the subject line whets readers’ appetite about getting the complete message. The subject line should therefore be a compelling, and alluring short and precise message which catches the readers’ attention.

Writing good subject lines is a complex task. But what makes a good subject line? There is no universal applicable “silver bullet” subject line. Different types of marketing emails require different subject line approaches. Subject lines should convey who you are. This is done by incorporating your brand into the subject line if the “From” line does not make this clear. Moreover, you should be always consistent in your branding so that recipients get familiar to your emails. If the sender’s identity is unknown to the recipient, the subject line has the task of establishing the trust and comfort which will prevent your email from being marked as spam and deleted without being opened and read.

The typical subject line window can accommodate between 30 and 40 characters but the subject line should be kept short to ensure that the recipient pays attention to it. The benefits should be spelled out in the subject line. The reader should be aware that the content will improve his life. If appropriate, a limited time offer can also be used to draw the reader to open the email immediately. Unless your subject line is a question, punctuation must be eliminated. Furthermore, capital letters should not be used as all caps indicate spam.

The science in email marketing lies in the continual testing and retesting to find more about customers and their needs. If you really want to maximize success and create a great first impression, devote time and attention to the subject line and test and retest to have good results.

Advantages of Double Opt-in

Disadvantages of Double Opt-in

Secret #4

It Ain’t Necessarily So

Secret #3

Forget This at Your Own Peril!

Suspects > Prospects > Customers > Suspects

Secret #2

Ideas Stolen from Newspapers and Magazine in the Offline World

Secret #1

Life Long Dating > The Marriage > The Divorce

Divorce Court!

Final Secret

Autopilot Automation

Automated Sales and Relationship Building in a Box

Knowing why they are inactive

• The subscriber might be no more interested in your products and emails
• These email addresses may be active but they are seldom used
• Your subject lines might be poorly written and non-tempting. The subscriber feels that it is a loss of time to pen such emails. A good idea would be to write nice and attractive subject lines
• Perhaps your emails are being delivered to the bulk folder which is generally ignored by most subscribers
• Maybe your emails might be considered as SPAM and are being blocked by spam filters

Dealing with them

• Improve the content of your emails and the subject lines as well to entice the subscribers to open the emails
• Attempt to survey your inactive subscribers to know the true reasons of their inactivity

Content

Others

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