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.

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.

While email is obviously a mission-critical channel for all StrongMail customers, it typically is not the only channel that they use to market to customers and prospects. Online ads, affiliate programs, partner programs, and their own website are just a few examples of other methods that marketers use to communicate with subscribers, customers, prospects and the public at large.

As with StrongMail EAS and Message Studio, each of these other channels provides some level of reporting data. For the marketer, that can mean a lot of work to aggregate, view and analyze all of that data in a coherent and holistic way. Enter the web analytics products.

There are several web analytics products out there. The one's that we hear about most frequently are Omniture, Coremetrics, Google, and WebTrends, but there are others out there. For the most part, all of these products work in the same way--by attaching tracking variables to the URL that are passed to the web analytics engine when a link is clicked. That allows the click data to be captured both by the originating system and the web analytics system.

You can set up analytic tags in StrongMail or Message Studio by creating a content block file that contains the appropriate information for the analytics tag. Here are two examples:

OMNITAG {
cid=##SERIAL_NUMBER##&rid=##USERID##
}

GOOGTAG {
utm_source=email&utm_campaign=##segment##
}

In the first example, there are two parameters that would be included based on StrongMail system tokens--Serial Number and User ID. In the second example, the campaign parameter is passed a value from the mailer's data source.

Next, you just need to append the analytics tag token to each link you want track in your mailing. Here's an example:

http://www.domain.com?##OMNITAG##

If you want to include the StrongMail click tracking, you could set up the URLs like this:

##CLICKTAG##http://www.domain.com?##OMNITAG##

You can do this manually when you are creating the content or add the StrongMail clicktag token(s) automatically in Message Studio using the Add Clicktags feature. Now you will be able to see the click data in your web analytics dashboard, along with other metrics from all of the other streams that you tag. Gathering and analyzing the data in this fashion can reveal patterns and segments that may not be readily apparent when viewing the metrics of an individual stream.

To make the process of adding web analytics tracking tags even easier for Message Studio users, we are adding the ability to manage web analytics tags within the UI in an upcoming release. Message Studio users will be able to configure the system with default tracking tags, as well as have the option to utilize unique analytic tracking tags. Users will be able to select the default parameters and apply them individually or globally to all of the links in an mailing or modify the parameters for special cases (promotions, partnerships, etc) on the fly (as seen in the screen shot below)

Here's a sneak peek at the new Add Clicktags screen in Message Studio 4.1:





























Within the Add Clicktags screen, you can now apply pre-configured web analytics tags to individual or all links within the template. Message Studio also provides a way to modify the web analytics tag just for a particular link in the message. Business users now will have a flexible, easy-to-use method for inserting the appropriate tags in their email tracking links.