In the United States and in many other countries, there are legal requirements for including certain text in every commercial email that is sent. To insure that the language and content of this text is consistent and conforms to the legal requirements, email marketers may want to create a custom content block to add to their mailings. In this post, I'll describe how you can set that up.

1. Define the Compliance Token

Create a content block file named CanSpamTokenFile.txt (you can use whatever name you like, but make it easily recognizable) with a token called CAN-SPAM (again, you can name the token anything you like, but try to select a token name that is unique and recognizable) and upload it into the Content Block section of the Content Library in Message Studio. You can create the content block file off line using the text editor of your choice or just write it in the text box of the CREATE CONTENT BLOCK screen.

Here is an example of the text you could use in the content block:

CAN-SPAM {
##First_Name##, you are receiving this message because you visited the ##Company_Name## website and signed up to receive information from us. If you would prefer not to receive future communications, click or copy/paste the following URL into your browser: ##Unsubscribe_Link##  to be removed from this mailing list. All Mailings are provided by ##Company_Name##. Our address is ##Company_Address##.
}

NOTE: This is the format for creating tokens in content block files. You can learn more about tokens and content block files in this posting or in the Message Studio product documentation.

This example has tokens that references additional profile data from the target data source. If those token values do not exist in the target data source (First_Name, Company_Name, Unsubscribe_Email and Company_Address), the content block will not populate the values correctly.

To avoid having to put all of those values in every data source, you could create another content block file with tokens for Company_Address, Company_Name, Company_Address and Unsubscribe_Link, since those are not likely to change very often. Another option would be to eliminate the personalization within the content block.

2. Associate the Content Block File with a Template

After you have uploaded your template, scroll to the bottom of the EDIT MESSAGE TEMPLATE screen and click on the + icon next to Content Blocks. You will see the section expand and a shuttle control. The list on the left is all of the uploaded content block files. If you want to use a content block file with the template, select it with your cursor and then click on the right-facing arrow, which should move the selected content block file(s) to the list on the right. Then click on the SAVE button.

3. Insert the Token

Place the token into the email by inserting ##CAN-SPAM## at the appropriate location in the message template. You can do this in the template before you upload it, by manually typing it into the template via the Message Studio online editors or by using the personalization wizard. When the email is assembled, the token will be replaced by the contents of the content block file.

That's it. Now you have a compliance text block that you don't have to write in every version of your email. And you can use the content block in multiple templates, so it's always consistent, both in content and functionality.

Despite it being April Fool's Day, this is no joke. It's 4.1 on 4/1.

StrongMail EAS and Message Studio 4.1 are now available for download. These latest releases of the StrongMail software have a lot a great new features that will appeal to a wide range of users. Customers using Message Studio 3.2.x will be especially interested in the new Migration Tool that we have included which will make the transition from version 3 to version 4 a snap!

Here's a quick breakdown of some of the new features in each version--

StrongMail EAS 4.1

• Overflow to Disk
  Customers can now configure their injecting applications to send SMTP messages to a StrongMail server at a high sustained rate. The StrongMail server buffers the incoming messages to disk to avoid sending server busy messages back to the injecting application. There are two modes, Memory Queue and Disk Queue, that users can choose based on their business requirements.
  

• Pause/Resume Message Assembly API
  StrongMail has added the ability for applications to request that message assembly be paused temporarily but still allow the StrongMail server to continue to accept transactional mailing SEND requests and queue them up until a resume request is received. This enables users to make changes to the transactional mailing without having to shut down the entire transactional messaging process.
  

Message Studio 4.1

• Transactional Mailings
  Customers now have the ability to create, manage, and test transactional mailings through the Message Studio user interface.
  

• User-Defined Asset Lists
  Most menu categories now support user-defined lists. Users can select items and either right-click or drag-and-drop items into the list to create your a custom collection for browsing and organizing data.
  

• Expanded External Data Sources
  This release introduces support for connecting to the following external databases: PostgreSQL, Sybase, IBM DB/2.
  

• Automated Web Analytics Tags
  The Add Tracking Tags screen has been enhanced to allow users to easily add parameters to the tracking URLs that are utilized by web analytics applications. Users can create their own tags or modify the default tags for the following products: Omniture, Coremetrics, and Google Analytics. This feature works with any link-based web analytics software.
  

• Target Editor Enhancements
  The Target Query editor now supports grouping terms with parentheses and allows the of deleting specific terms from a query. Additionally, a data preview button allows users to browse the values contained in a database column and select the value into the query.
  

• Migration Tool
  A new migration tool enables the migration of data from existing Message Studio installations from versions 3.2.3 and 3.2.4 to version 4.1 (upgrades from 4.0 do not need to migrate any data). The migration utility is automatically invoked when you run the setup script for Message Studio 4.1 using the upgrade mode.
  

These are just the highlights. There's much more in each of these releases than I have room to list. If you are a current StrongMail customer, visit the Support Portal today or contact StrongMail Support to get ready for Version 4.1! If you are not a current StrongMail customer and want more information about version 4.1, contact our Sales team to learn more.