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.

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.

Testing elements of your mailings is one of the most effective ways to improve performance of your marketing campaigns and with email, unlike off line media (print, radio, TV) there is almost no additional cost associated with deployment.

When I talk to customers and prospects, I often ask if they are currently doing or planning to do any A/B testing of their messages. I am always surprised when they say that they want to, but don't. Most of them cite time and effort as the main reason, but some also say that it's too difficult to set up the data and track everything.

Pishaw!

A/B testing your email program doesn't have to be a cumbersome, laborious task. If you aren't doing any testing, it's easy to just try one or two things to see if they have any effect. And if you are thinking that it requires re-working your content, there are other aspects of your mailings that you can test that don't require any effort from your creative team.

In Message Studio 4, doing A/B testing is a piece of cake. Message Studio takes care of splitting and randomizing the data and makes it simple to configure each test with the variables you want to evaluate.

You can create between 2 and 20 splits in a single mailing, though if you are just starting out with A/B testing, I recommend that you start with a small number of splits, say 2-3. Within each split you can control a variety of variables including:

1. Template
2. Format (HTML, Text or multi-part)
3. Headers (From Name, From Address, Subject, etc)
4. Launch date and time

This is a great way to try out new elements of your mailing. The A/B testing feature in Message Studio lets you send the test to all or part of your subscriber list, so you can test a particular change with just a sample of your list (e.g., 20%) without affecting everyone else. After you send the tests and determine the winner, you can easily assign those parameters to the remaining unsent recipients and then launch. There's no need to create another mailing or figure out who received the test email and who didn't.

A/B testing doesn't have to be a one-time process either. You can test and tweak as much as you like. Once a month, week or day. Each time you do, you get valuable information about your subscribers and what they respond to in your emails.

Once you have mastered testing single mailing elements, you can move on to multivariate testing to learn how you can fine-tune your email campaigns even further.

For more details on how to configure an A/B split mailing in Message Studio, check out pages 129-130 in the Message Studio 4.1 User Guide.

I just received an email from one of our partners which had a fantastic example of how to use a novel, yet relevant subject line to pique recipients' interest and get them to read your email. Here it is:


I get so many emails that either try to trick me into opening with a subject line that is unrelated to the actual content (Instantly Own your own Business) or is so generic (Missive: May 2008) that even if I know who the sender is and want their email, I am not motivated to open it because it doesn't stand out amid the other noise in my inbox.

This example above demonstrates what you can do (with minimal effort) to improve the visibility of your message. I wanted to open it just to see what they were talking about. The subject line, while somewhat cryptic, made sense to me based on who the sender was (click on the link to see the whole header and top of the content window). The offer inside wasn't my cup of tea, but I forwarded it to some folks who would be interested.

My next post will be about how you can do very simple, very easy tests on your subject line to determine which ones perform best. you can use this to try out a bunch of new ones or just compare a new one against your existing subject line.  Just because it's new doesn't mean that it's better.

Stay tuned!

If you are a marketer (or support a marketing team) that needs or wants to send emails in multiple languages which use different character sets, you can use Message Studio or EAS to accomplish that. EAS provides a bit more flexibility, since it allows users to set both the incoming and outgoing character set for an email template, but for most users, setting the outgoing character set is sufficient to meet their needs.

You may be saying right now, "Ivan, you're right, I HAVE been wanting to send emails in multiple languages, but I don't know how." Well, let me get you started. There are few concepts you need to understand so that yo can make the right choices about how to best create your content and configure your mailings.

For starters, let's differentiate between a language and a character set:

• A language is the set of characters, signs, symbols, sounds of a communication system. It includes both syntax, semantics and phonetics that guide how the components of the language are used. English is a language; so are Hebrew, Italian, German, Spanish, Japanese, Tlingit, and Chinese, just to name a few of the approximately 7000 living languages.
  
  
• A character set is a collection codes that reference characters/symbols of a language so that they can be used to display/process/store those characters/symbols electronically (typically in computer programs and in telecommunications. The character set is only a mapping; it does not contain any logic for how the characters are used.
  

Now that you are an expert in languages and character sets, let me clarify how you can send messages using different character sets. Like any mailing, you need content. In Message Studio, content has to be imported into the system in either ASCII or UTF-8.

ASCII is a character set comprised of the characters commonly found on keyboards in the United States. It is one of the most basic character sets and acts as sort of a minimum requirement for character sets. It supports most latin-based languages, but does lack some of the special characters of some languages.

UTF-8 is a super-set of characters from a variety of languages including single-byte characters like the ones in ASCII, as well as languages which use glyphs to represent whole words, such as Chinese. The great thing about UTF-8 is that it can be used to create content for many languages. The less great thing about UTF-8 is that it is not widely adopted in countries outside of the US and Canada.

Luckily, Message Studio (and StrongMail EAS) can both convert content from one character set to another. So, in order to send content to Chinese recipients using the Big-5 character set, you can create the original content in UTF-8, import it into Message Studio and then have Message Studio automatically send the message out using Big-5, which the email reader that the Chinese recipient uses can display properly.

The steps in the mailing work flow to do this require only a few extra clicks. When you upload the template into Message Studio, you open the ADVANCED section on the CREATE/EDIT TEMPLATE screen. You can then set the character set for both the headers and the body. When you launch the mailing, the message assembly engine will convert the characters from UTF-8 to the character set you specified and also set the appropriate header values.

As with all mailings, but especially for content in foreign languages (at least foreign to you), make sure that you test the template and the mailing. Beyond the normal testing process you may have in place, be sure to view the message using the same applications that recipients will be using. This will aid you in avoiding any embarrassments should the applications that recipients use have rendering issues that would not be evident using your normal testing environment.

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.

In Message Studio 4.0, users now have the ability to easily upload all of their HTML and image files all at once. The new Media Server feature will unpack the zipped files and automatically publish all of the images to StrongMail media servers or third-party servers so that when recipients get a message, the images will be served from the specified location.

The HTML template can also contain absolute (src="http://www.myserver.com/images/2008/picture.gif") or relative (src="images/picture.gif") paths for images. When the template is uploaded, Message Studio will scan the code for all image references. For any images that have relative paths, Message Studio will automatically convert the path to point to the specified image server.

To get started with using the media server in Message Studio 4.0, all you have to do is go to the Administration module in the left navigation panel and create connections to internal or external media servers. You can leverage the StrongMail tracking server (either on-board or off-board) as a media server or you can use a third-party server to host your images. In addition, you can set up a group of servers as a single media server for use with a load balancer.

When you set up a media server, you can designate the server as either writable or read-only. With a writable media server, when you upload a zip file with the HTML and images in it, Message Studio will upload the images into a temporary folder until you specify the media server. If you create a connection to a read-only media server, you must upload images directly to the media server outside of the Message Studio interface. If the media server configuration includes multiple servers, Message Studio will upload the file to each server.

Once you’ve set up a media server configuration in Message Studio, you can upload a zip file (containing images and a single HTML template) or an HTML template that includes image references on the Template import screen. Once you specify the media server the template should use, Message Studio will automatically update any relative image links within your HTML template to reflect the media server URL that you specified during set up.

That's it.

Now, when you preview the email template during mailing setup or when you launch the mailing and recipients view the email, the images in the template will be served by the media server.

In my last post, I introduced the concept of using StrongMail's token capabilities as a way to add relevance to your messages. But as I alluded to in that post, tokens are versatile tools that in addition to inserting personalization data, can also aid in managing and modifying your content with minimal effort.

I'm going to illustrate two ways that you can use tokens, along with content blocks to minimize the amount of work you need to do to get your mailings out each time. The first one involves locking down the template and just editing the copy. The second one makes certain parts of the template reusable across multiple mailings.

METHOD 1: Locking Down the Template

Many of you out there have invested heavily in your email template(s). You've had designers re-do the layout and spent countless hours and dollars getting the design just the way you want it. All that remains for each mailing is plugging in the content specific to each mailing.

Now, you can edit the whole template for each mailing, which can introduce rendering issues and/or template breakage or you can identify which parts of the template change for each mailing and tokenize them. Then all you have to do is upload the part that has changed as a content block and reference it using tokens.

This keeps the layout HTML stable while letting you or your copy editors fiddle with the copy as much as you want. When you are done, just upload the content block file and send a test email to see how it all gets assembled. Using this method, you could even have multiple people working on different parts of the copy without having to worry about one person over-writing another.

This method does take a little extra effort to compartmentalize the template and set up the token/content block schema, but that's a one-time cost and moving to this method can greatly improve your content editing process, especially if your template has a lot of moving parts.

METHOD 2: Reusable Pieces

Maybe you don't have a single template that you use for all of your mailings, but you do have parts that get re-used over and over in different mailing. Things like the mast head or side bar or unsubscribe text. If that's the case, you can start tokenizing the elements that get reused from mailing to mailing.

There are two ways to approach tokenizing the content elements. The first involves creating a single content block file that has all of the reusable elements in it. This option has the benefit of keeping things simple; there's only one one file to keep track of and everything is all in one place. The trade-off is that when a change needs to be made to one element in the content block, you have to edit the file that has ALL of the elements, which could increase the risk of unintentionally modifying one of the other elements.

The second option involves putting each reusable element into its own content block file. Going this route protects you against accidentally corrupting other elements and also lets you use the individual files as building blocks, but it also means keeping track of more files for each mailing.

Once you select how you want to manage the reusable elements, you can easily call those assets from the content block(s) using tokens and then, as in method 1 above, focus on the parts of the email template that change from mailing to mailing.

Whichever method you use, the goal is to make executing your mailings easier, while providing flexibility and control over your content. If you need more information about how to use tokens and content blocks, take a look at Chapter 6, Customizing a Mailing, in the StrongMail System Administrator's Manual.

In a previous post, I talked about how important it is to send the right message to the right recipient at the right time and how you can use the Business rules editor in Message Studio to create that right message. One of the most powerful features of email marketing is the ability to easily personalize the message to individual recipient.

The Business rules editor is great for the emailer who wants to easily manage complex dynamic content, but it might be overkill for the emailer who just wants to include some profile data in their messages. For emailers who just want some basic personalization, StrongMail's tokens are a simple tool that makes it easy to insert dynamic content from your database (you can also do the same thing with reusable content, like a header, footer or legal text). Read on to learn how you can easily insert relevant content into your emails to make them more appealing to recipients.

The first step is to determine what information you have or what you want to collect to use in the content. The most obvious (and common) is profile information:

• Name
• Address
• Preferences
• Membership level
• Subscription settings
• Favorite topics
  

Most mailers collect some additional information besides just email address when a subscriber registers. It may just be basic contact information or detailed preferences. Even if you don't collect anything except an email address at sign up, you can use your mailings to encourage recipients to provide more information about themselves.

Once you have some collected the information that you want to use in your email, you just have to decide where in email message you want to put it. Many mailers use the recipients first name to insert a personalized salutation (e.g., Dear Ivan), but you could also write the body copy to incorporate the recipient's name (Ivan, we noticed that you purchased our document kit, but have not downloaded it from the website yet).

To accomplish either of these, all you would have to do determine the name of the field that contains the first name and add that to the template with a token. For demonstration purposes, I will pretend that the field in my data source is called first_name. My token would look like this:

##first_name##

To create the salutation, I just insert the token in the copy like this:

Dear ##first_name##,

This can be done manually when creating the email copy or by using the personalization wizard in Message Studio:

Now, most emailers know that you don't always have the necessary profile data in every single record and you certainly don't want recipients to see a message that says, "Dear ," as the salutation. Luckily, StrongMail's token capabilities include the ability to add a default value if there is no value in the data source. So rather than than inserting, "Dear ,", you would get something like "Dear Product Talk Subscriber," which, while somewhat formulaic, doesn't look like your message is broken.

Default values can be inserted using the personalization wizard in Message Studio or the following manual notation:

Dear ##first_name[Product Talk Subscriber]##,

This would insert the value of the first_name field if there was one and if the field was empty or null, it would insert "Product Talk Subscriber". Pretty nifty, eh?

There are lots of things you can do with tokens. They can be used in both the body of the email and the envelope, so there are a lot of options on what, how, and where to use them. As I mentioned earlier, you can even use tokens to insert content blocks into a template (or even a section or whole email template). You can even use them as a look up variable to get other data or content (that's a more advanced topic that you will see discussed later).

For now, try out simple tokenization and see how they can improve the value of your message and increase response rates.