Blogs

As announced today, Message Studio now provides multiple ways for your subscribers to engage with and share your email marketing messages with their friends and networks. All of these capabilities are now standard features (that's a code word for FREE) of Message Studio and provide rich reporting and analytics so that you will clearly know what works and what doesn't.

Influencer
Influencer is a powerful viral marketing solution that enables you to extend the reach of your existing email and online marketing campaigns into Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, blogs and other social channels. Unlike typical social sharing solutions, Influencer creates an interactive experience that motivates consumers to share offers and information with their networks. See my previous post for ideas on leveraging Influencer in your online marketing efforts

Social Notes
Social Notes delivers instant social interaction into any email campaign and makes it easy for your subscribers to share branded email content across the most popular social networks, blogs and email, all while engaging in a contextual dialog.

Forward to a Friend (FTAF)
FTAF provides your subscribers with the quickest and easiest way to share your email messages directly with their friends via email. FTAF provides subscribers with direct access to their web-based address books including Yahoo!, Gmail, AOL, MSN and Hotmail and gives you visibility into your top forwarders, as well as the ability to track multi-generational forwarding.

All of these features provide marketers with the industry's most comphrehensive solutions for "socializing" their email marketing campaigns and monetizing their investment in social media.

Please send comments, questions and any feedback to me at dcormier@strongmail.com. You can also follow me on Twitter @daveacormier

I just got back from the DMA09 show in San Diego. It was great to see all the interest and excitement around our launch of StrongMail Influencer.

While showing the product to dozens of interested parties over the 2 days, I often found myself talking about Influencer in the context of extending the reach of email marketing programs. This makes sense considering that StrongMail also offers a leading email marketing platform. But the reality is that Influencer allows a marketer to inject rich social networking functionality into any web page, social network or other online medium that allows you to click on a link.

While on the flight home, I started jotting down the following list of uses cases where Influencer could be deployed:

• Create a new viral email communication focused on new customer acquisition
• Extend the reach of existing email campaigns by inserting rich offers that motivate and reward sharing
• Extend the reach of online advertising by transforming traditional web-based ads into viral marketing experiences
• Create website-based customer referral programs, motivating sharing activity and rewarding influencers
• Develop and run sweepstakes programs that drive new customer acquisition
• Increase ecommerce revenue by presenting refer-a-friend opportunities within purchase confirmation pages
• Leverage transactional email streams to drive new customer acquisitions with your most engaged customers
• Collect user-generated content and post to popular social networking sites like Twitter or Facebook
• Leverage promotional email campaigns to drive new customer acquisition by replacing traditional refer-a-friend links with embedded influencer programs
• Develop a Twitter-based Influencer promotional and referral campaigns
• Develop an Influencer promotional and referral campaign for your Facebook fan page

If my flight was longer, I’m sure I could have doubled this list.

To learn more about StrongMail Influencer and how it can help your organization monetize social media feel free to drop me a note a dcormier@strongmail.com. You can also follow me on Twitter @daveacormier.

One of the biggest challenges marketers can face when trying to incorporate dynamic content into their mailings is proofing or testing all the different permutations of the message before launch. In Message Studio 5.0 we have greatly enhanced the Test Mail capability to allow for easier proofing of templates and mailing that include dynamic content using actual recipient data for personalization.

Follow these simple steps to proof your mailing during the creation process.

One of the exciting new features in StrongMail 5.0 is a Planning Calendar that enables you to view future and past mailings in a calendar view. From the Mailings screen, simply click the Calendar button from the action bar to view all your mailings in a calendar format.

The Planning Calendar allows you to see all completed and planned mailings, including scheduled, recurring, A/B Test and Transactional for the month, week or day. Once you find the mailing you're interested in, you can mouse over the title to get results data for completed mailings or status information on scheduled ones. From there, you can click on the mailing to bring it up in a separate Mailing tab for even more information.

Completed Mailings will automatically appear on the calendar according to their completed date. Future mailings that have not been launched or scheduled (status = Editing) will appear on the calendar according to the Planned Launch date that was defined when the mailing was created.

Finally, if you have a large amount of mailings, you can filter the type of mailings displayed on the calendar. Choose any combination of one-time, scheduled and recurring mailings, and then further fine tune the results to include A/B test and transactional.

The planning calendar is a great way to keep track of your mailing schedule and optimize them based on their number, frequency and type.

If you have any recommendations for future Product Talk articles, you can send them to me at dcormier@strongmail.com.

I just finished two days at ad:tech SF, where I had the opportunity to talk with many customers and prospects about our newly launched Message Studio 5.0. It was great to hear the positive “buzz” about all the new features and enhancements, and I was often asked to demo the top five enhancements. With over 50 new features and enhancements to choose from, it was difficult to choose "My Fav 5 for Message Studio 5.0," but here they are:

1. Dynamic Content Testing and Preview – We have greatly enhanced our Test Mail capability to allow for easier proofing of templates and mailings that include dynamic content before launch using actual recipient data for personalization.

2. Business Intelligence Suite (BIS) – This is a must-have module for any serious marketer who cares about driving better relevancy with their campaigns. BIS allows the marketer to identify trends, anomalies and correlations in customer and response data with easy-to-use OLAP analysis, ad-hoc reporting and dashboarding tools. More information about BIS can be found here.

3. Global Search – No more hunting around to find mailing assets. Our new powerful search capability allows you to quickly find templates, targets, mailings, content blocks and other mailing assets. This is just one of the dozen or so usability enhancements that make Message Studio even more intuitive and easy to use.

4. Planning Calendar – Easily plan and navigate your mailing schedule directly in Message Studio using our Planning Calendar with day, week and month views. Future mailings appear on the calendar according to their planned/scheduled launch date. Past completed mailings are also displayed with visibility into response results.

5. Template Flow View – Now you can navigate templates and mailings by flipping through a collection of template images. This is a great way to browse through your templates and mailings visually to find exactly what you are looking for.

Customers who are interested in upgrading to the 5.0 release should contact their StrongMail Account Manager.

Please send comments, questions and any feedback to me at dcormier@strongmail.com. You can also follow me on twitter @Dave_StrongMail.

Back in November, I explained how to keep mailing assets organized using Campaign Smart Lists in Message Studio. However, I’ve since been asked if there’s another easy way to keep things organized for customers who don’t happen to use the campaign functionality.

The good news is that as an extremely flexbile application, Message Studio also allows you to organize your assets by simply creating a List and manually adding assets according to your own organization requirements.

A StrongMail List is a lot like a traditional folder, but with the added benefit of allowing an asset to be referenced in multiple Lists without creating additional copies of the asset. So, if you want a particular asset to be included in several different Lists, you can go right ahead and add it with no impact on performance.

Creating Lists in Message Studio can be accomplished via these three simple steps:

• From the left-hand navigation menu, click on a menu option (e.g. Standard) under Mailings and select the Add button at the bottom of the menu. Alternatively, you can simply right-click on the Standard Mailings menu node and select Add from the drop down menu.


• Give your List a name that makes sense for the type of assets you will be adding to it.


• Now that your List is created, you can simply drag and drop assets from the List screens right into the List. Right-clicking the asset will also allow you to add it to a List.

If you have any questions, comments or other feedback, feel free to contact me via email. You can also follow me on Twitter.

Message Studio has an innovative feature, called Campaign Smart Lists, which allows users to manage and organize different mailing assets, including Mailings, Templates, and Targets, by Campaign. Since Campaigns in Message Studio are user-definable, you will be able to categorize your mailing assets according to your business requirements. Here’s how it works:

First, you need to define your Campaign in Message Studio. Think of campaigns as logical groupings or categories of your different mailing programs. For example, if you send out a monthly newsletter, you may want to have a campaign called "Monthly Newsletter." While setting up your campaigns, you will have the option to have Campaign Smart Lists automatically created for different mailing assets. When you save the Campaign, a new menu node called "Monthly Newsletter" will be added to all the selected assets. Campaigns are set up in the Administration module.

Next, whenever you create a new target, template mailing or other asset, you will have the option to assign a Campaign. For example, if you were creating a template for your monthly newsletter, you would select Monthly Newsletter for the campaign. This will automatically categorize this template so that any time you select the Monthly Newsletter Campaign Smart List in the menu, you will only see this and other templates that have been assigned a campaign category of "Monthly Newsletter."

Another added benefit of using Campaigns to categorize your mailing assets is that it also adds a filter when creating templates and mailings, so that only the appropriate data is shown, which enhances the user experience.

This feature was introduced in Message Studio 4.1.1. If you haven’t yet updated to this version, contact StrongMail Support to get started.

Depending on how you have implemented StrongMail, it may make sense to create a limited access user account. This will allow you to setup processes that can harvest information from the StrongMail application log files.

Here's how to do it:

1.) Create the following group with the groupadd command.

$ groupadd -g 5000 smuser

2.) Use the useradd command to create the following user account in the home directory.

$ useradd -u 5000 -g 5000 -md /home/smuser -c "Strongmail Linux User " -s /bin/bash smuser

$ cat /etc/passwd
$ cat /etc/group

Review the changes you have made to these files, there should be lines at the bottom beginning with the string smuser.

3.) Assign initial passwords to both accounts. For user smuser assign the password of smuser (type smuser in at this point - lowercase no quotes)

$ passwd smuser
Changing password for smuser
New Password:
BAD PASSWORD: it is based upon a dictionary word

Retype New Password:
$

4.) Logout of the StrongMail system.

$ logout

5.) Test the account you have just created by logging in as user smuser with a password of smuser. IMPORTANT: Once you confirm that the user is functioning properly, change the password again to insure that it is secure.

6.) Repeat steps 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 for each additional user account to be created. Note that linux expects the home directory name (/home/smuser1) to be identical with the username (smuser1), the last argument to the
useradd command.

7.) To allow read only access to the strongmail/log directory for read only access, the world permissions of Read/eXecute must be granted to both directories.

Existing Permissions for the directories strongmail and strongmail/log are:

Perms      Owner       Group       Name
drwxrwx--- strongmail strongmail strongmail
drwxrwx--- strongmail strongmail log

and should be changed to the following:

Perms       Owner       Group       Name
drwxrwxr-x strongmail strongmail strongmail
drwxrwxr-x strongmail strongmail log

$ cd /data1
$ chmod 775 strongmail
$ cd /data1/strongmail
$ chmod 775 log

Special thanks to Norm DeValliere for helping out with this post.

Each release of StrongMail EAS and Message Studio goes through a rigorous testing and certification process. From the software engineers who unit test their code to the quality assurance engineers who hammer on the application in every way they can think of to try to break it, StrongMail software gets put through the wringer in order to make sure that our customers get the most robust product possible.

Unfortunately, there are just some things that we cannot reproduce in our testing environment. For that, we need the help of our customers. We need customers to put StrongMail EAS and Message Studio through real-world trials, including high-volume and high-frequency sending, very large data sources and advanced targeting queries.

As we get closer to the release of StrongMail EAS and Message Studio 4.2, we are looking for customers who are willing to install the Beta software and test it out using their own templates, mailings, and process. Testing those types of scenarios will make sure that we have captured any remaining issues before the final certification process.

What, you ask, would make someone want to participate in the Beta program? Well, there are many reasons, including

• Early access to new features, enhancements, and bug fixes
• Opportunity to provide real-time feedback and have direct influence on the software
• Extra support from StrongMail for installations and addressing reported issues
• Test new software in advance of its availability
  

Below is a short list of some of the new features that will be available to 4.2 Beta program participants

• Numerous usability enhancements
• New EAS clustering options
• New and improved APIs
• New dynamic content testing engine
• Enhanced standard reporting options
• Business Intelligence Server integration for advanced and ad-hoc reporting
  

If you are interested in being 4.2 Beta program participant, contact us at product@strongmail.com.

This will probably be the last pun that I use to announce the release of a new version of StrongMail EAS and Message Studio (who am I kidding? It's not the last time).

I am excited to announce that the latest release of StrongMail EAS and Message Studio software is now available. This is an exciting release with many new features and security enhancements, including certification on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, versions 4.4, 4.5, and 4.6.

You can download the new version from the StrongMail FTP site. Just download the installation file(s), unpack them and then install at your convenience. Specific instructions for installation are included in the README file. For questions or for further assistance, please contact StrongMail Support.

Included below are details about many (but not all) of the big enhancements.

EAS

• A new HighPriority mailing class has been added that allows Message Studio users to specify high priority for specific mailings.
• Load balancing across Virtual IPs. Users can now distribute the load across IPs within a Virtual Server Group by designating a percentage of the total volume of messages to be sent through a particular IP address.
• A new Feedback Loop report is now available. This report displays the count of FBLs received, categorized by ISPs.
• A new failure category (8xxx) has been added for invalid addresses.

Message Studio

• Ability to send mailings using Normal or High-Priority (related to the EAS enhancement above).
• Ability to filter and sort templates in the Content tab of create/edit mailing screens. This feature allows users to include or exclude approved/unapproved templates and to sort the template pick list by last modified date.
• Ability to do mass deletes on all list screens. This allows users to select one or more rows in any screen that displays multiple items and then click the delete button to remove all selected items at once.
• Ability to copy a template or a content block from one department to another department within the same organization.
• Campaign SmartLists: the most mailing assets (data sources, targets, lists, templates, mailings, etc) can now be assigned to a campaign. When a user does this, a new SmartList will be configured that contains the assets assigned to the campaign.
• StrongTools menu: users can add a web application to be displayed under the StrongTools drop down menu and when clicked will be opened inside a Message Studio tab.
• Enhanced the scheduling options for recurring mailings to allow very flexible options for launch cadences.

The README files have much more information about all of the new features and bug fixes in this release, so be sure to review it to get all of the details.

Got an idea for an enhancement you would like to see in a future release of EAS or Message Studio? Send an email to product@strongmail.com.