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!

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.

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

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.

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.

The “from name” and “email subject” plays the biggest role in helping your recipient to make a decision: Delete or Open.

However, there’s one more thing about the from name. In fact, it’s more important. Your “from name” affects the delivery rate of your email campaigns. Big email services such as Hotmail pays big attention to from name of incoming emails and mark them “dangerous to open” or “valid”.

For example, if you send an email with the from name “youremail@domain.com” and from email “youremail@domain.com” (the proper email header will be From: “youremail@domain.com” <youremail@domain.com>), your email will be marked as “dangerous” by Hotmail and it will ask your recipient to confirm if he wishes to open or delete it.

A proper from name must be a valid name such as your or company name. Example:

From name: ABC Co.
From email: contact@abc.com

This seems to be small detail but definitely affects your delivery rate.

This is really dangerous. Making your unsubscription link (the link which lets your recipient to go away from your service) invisible or difficult to notice will push your recipient to click on “Report as SPAM” button on the email client. This means your mail servers and domain will be banned, black listed. This means $$$ to waste on monitoring your mail servers and domain against spam filters.

Instead, make your unsubscription link noticable by your recipients. Put it on the top and bottom. Make it bigger. In this way, you can let your recipients who are not interested in your services to go away from you. Just focus on loyal subscribers let the others go. Give them freedom. Believe it or not, your unsubscription rate and spam complaint rate will decrease.

In your Sendloop campaigns, you can insert unsubscription link tag to anywhere you want. You can style it based on your newsletter layout design and make it even more noticeable. To help you at this point, we verify every outgoing campaign against properly inserted unsubscription links and provide suggestions to make your newsletter more recipient friendly.

To complete the steps described in this article, you need to have access to DNS zones of your domains you use as from email address.

SPF/SenderID settings are quite important and plays a big role on detecting your email as spam/junk or legitimate. This setting can easily be added to your domain by accessing its DNS zone and adding a TXT record with the following command:

TXT v=spf1 mx ptr include:sendloop-1.com ~all

The above line tells the recipient mail server that Sendloop servers are authorized to send emails on behalf of your from email addresses.

Leading email services such as Hotmail and AOL checks your domain SenderID settings to decide if your email is valid or not. So, we strongly recommend you to set this setting for your domains which are used in from email headers of your newsletter campaigns.

For more information about email authentication in Sendloop, please refer to Manage Account > Email Authentication section in your Sendloop account.