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.

When I travel to visit customers or get on calls with prospects, I am often asked about how to aggregate the report details for multiple mailings in Message Studio. Rolling up mailing data this way is key to evaluating how your different mailing types or mailing programs are performing at a global level or over time.

In Message Studio 4.x, there is a feature that makes it easy to roll up mailings into campaigns, which allows you to view mailing response data holistically. Setting the campaign field is not required when setting up and launching mailings, but if you would like to use it, here's how--

1. Go to ADMINISTRATION tab in the left navigation panel
2. Click on CAMPAIGNS
3. Click on CREATE button
4. Enter a CAMPAIGN NAME and click SAVE
5. Click FINISH (or close the CREATE CAMPAIGN tab)
6. Repeat as necessary

Now when you set up any type of mailing in Message Studio, you can select a campaign from the CAMPAIGN drop down menu. When you want to run the campaign-level reports, just go to the REPORTS tab in the left navigation panel and select CAMPAIGNS. You can select an individual campaign or multiple campaigns to be included in the report.

The Campaign report looks similar to the Mailing report, but allows you to view the both the aggregate information and the individual mailing data. If you see something interesting at the mailing level, you can easily jump to the report for that individual mailing just by clicking on the name of the mailing. You also have ready access to the failure details for each mailing within the campaign by clicking on the failure data in the campaign report.

Campaign reports are just another way you can look at your mailing data and with Message Studio, it is easy to group mailings together in a logical way to see the macro trends instead of just reviewing each mailing in isolation.