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 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.

If your company has multiple staff members working on your email marketing programs, you are probably interested in learning more about Message Studio's role capabilities. Roles can streamline your work flow and insure that individuals working on your email only have access to the functions relevant to them. This is especially important for those companies that are governed by security processes or by compliance regulations.

In Message Studio, a role is a collection of permissions that is assigned to a user. A role belongs to a single organization, but is available across that organization’s sub-organizations.

Message Studio includes four pre-defined roles: Approver, Content Manager, Data Manager, and Mailing Manager, each with different permissions across the functional areas of the application.

A description of each in included below.

• Approver - An approver can edit, view, and approve message templates and mailings
• Content Manager - A content manager can create, edit, delete, and view message templates, attachments, and content blocks
• Data Manager - A data manager can create, edit, delete, and view internal data sources, external data sources, targets, suppression lists, and seed lists
• Mailing Manager - The mailing manager has all permissions pertaining to a mailing

But those are not the only roles you can have. Message Studio allows you to create roles using any of the permissions that are available for each functional area. Below, you can see all of the different permissions that are available.

You can create roles specific to your business or based on the needs of different types of users. For security reasons, only super-users and administrators can create and edit roles, so you don't have to worry about unwanted roles popping up or existing roles changing beyond their intended scope.