Mind your language!

By Cliff Guy

Email marketing knows no national boundaries, and dotMailer has clients from across Europe and the globe sending campaigns to contacts in their own countries, in their native languages.

No surprise then that we’ve had a lot of requests from clients asking us to include translations of the Unsubscribe and Forward to Friend links in their emails.

Initially, clients asked to provide their own translations, some using in-house language skills others using tools like Google Translate and Babelfish, to turn the English language text into their mother tongue.

Lost in translation

However, like a game of Chinese Whispers, it transpired that some attempts at translations by clients lacked something in the quality control area.

Mentioning no names of course, one client even submitted a translation for their unsubscribe link that should have read ‘Please provide your email address’ but actually read ‘Please provide your girlfriend’!

While some other email service providers appear to be continuing down the route of leaving the headache of producing translations to their clients, I’m pleased to report that we’ve put a far more client-friendly solution in place at dotMailer.

dotMailer goes multi-lingual

We took the all the related text for our unsubscribe and forward links to a respected, professional translation agency, with the brief to produce a completely reliable translation of 27 different phrases into 13 different languages.

These accurate translations we then loaded into a brand new feature in dotMailer, that automatically inserts the translated text into your email marketing templates when you use the ‘Insert Action’.

dotMailer chooses the translation to insert, based on the language settings on the PC of the dotMailer user. Clever stuff, n'est pas?

And it works for clients with customised and branded Unsubscribe and ‘Forward to Friend’ pages too!

The list of language translations we have rolled out so far includes:

• German
• Spanish
• Finnish
• French
• Italian
• Dutch
• Polish
• Portuguese
• Swedish
• Chinese
• Hungarian
• Slovak
• Turkish

Where clients have bespoke messages that they specifically want to provide translations for then we can accommodate this, so if that’s you then please contact your account manager.

dotMailer in Best Medium Sized Business Award presentation

By Cliff Guy

Last Wednesday May 20th saw myself and 8 dotMailer colleagues and Directors enjoying a beautiful sunny May evening in the middle of Crystal Palace Football Club's Selhurst Park pitch.

No kick-around though - we were in a grand, white marquee as a guest of the RBS South London Business Awards, where I'm proud to say dotMailer were Highly Commended in the Best Medium Sized Business Award category, for our email marketing service.

A great night, so thanks to all who took part. (Especially to David 'Kid' Jensen!)

A unique new reporting feature in dotMailer

By Cliff Guy

dotMailer Enterprise now includes a powerful new reporting tool that enables you to mine your reporting data even deeper, and profile those who are opening and clicking through your email marketing campaigns.

Now you can get an even clearer, more detailed picture of how different segments within your database behave and respond to your campaigns, analysing the behaviour of your recipients by:

• The address books they are in
• The segmentation queries they are in
• The dynamic content they are shown
• Any single of group of variables that exist in your database

With dotMailer's new reporting tool, you can for example:

• Find out the contact details of all those in a specific address book who opened your email, and send them a highly targeted follow-up

• Build a segmentation query to define the profile of your top spending clients, then pull a report on all those who match that profile and clicked through from your last email. Then follow them up with a lucrative 'upsell' call.

Compare filtered reporting data, in a side-by-side view

Now, using dotMailer’s campaign performance comparison reporting, you can compare the performance of multiple campaigns, side by side, then drill down to compare performance according to recipient profiles and dynamic content, e.g:

• Compare, side by side, the response rates generated by different blocks of dynamic content within your email campaign, and use your findings to create super-performing dynamic content

See an example here.

For a walk-through of this eye-opening new reporting tool, speak to your Account Manager on 020 8662 2762 or contact us.

Our API gets dotMailer linked to your back office systems

By Cliff Guy

API stands for ‘application programming interface’. Put simply, it enables you to share data and information between dotMailer and for example your CRM system, your marketing database, or your website.

Using dotMailer’s API is a straightforward process for your IT team (or even just your IT person). With our API your IT people can automate previously laborious processes and take the pain and potential for inaccuracy out of manually updating your backend database.

For example, the API can be used to automatically update unsubscribes from your dotMailer address books into your backend marketing database, and to update dotMailer with ‘do not contact’ records generated from your direct mail returns or other direct marketing you undertake.

How our clients are using the API to save valuable time and resource

We have so many examples of how dotMailer clients have used our API to make their processes smooth and efficient.

• A major sports and health club using dotMailer took our API to integrate their membership database with dotMailer. Now, when new members join, the membership system tells dotMailer who they are, what sports they play and their level of membership. All the data their marketing team needs for sending targeted emails is populated in their address books – automatically.
• A mobile phone company uses the dotMailer API to capture detailed information from visitors to their website, feed the data into dotMailer and send targeted triggered emails back to the website visitors – automatically.
• A major software company feeds all their dotMailer reporting data back into their CRM system using our API – pumping their CRM with invaluable contact history and behaviour data to help them sell better, both on and offline.

dotMailer and Salesforce

For Salesforce users, dotMailer enables one-click integration – no API coding necessary. You can even integrate dotMailer into your Salesforce users screens as several of clients have already done. Find out more about Salesforce integration here.

Give us a shout

We’d love to know how you’ve been using the dotMailer API to make your processes smoother and your email marketing more efficient. If you’d like to share with us and your fellow dotMailer users how you’ve put the API to work then drop us a line and we’ll give you slot of your own in our newsletter.

For more detailed information on applications for the dotMailer API call us on 020 8662 2762 to get your API switched on, and go to http://apiconnector.com/API.asmx

How do your emails look when they are delivered?

By Clifff Guy

As many as 19% of email recipients will not open an email that hasn’t rendered properly, as they assume it is spam. So it’s critical for email marketers to design and code their templates to ensure they render correctly in all relevant email clients.

In our newly published 2009 Hitting the Mark benchmark survey, we used the Inbox Preview tool within dotMailer to test how consistently the email campaign templates of 43 major name retailers rendered in over 20 different email clients (for full list of email clients included in the Inbox Preview report, download the full report).

We found the results were mixed across the retailers when it came to deliverability, with an average score of 7.2 out of 12. Whilst 12% of those surveyed achieved top marks for their emails rendering correctly in all email clients tested, 10% of the retailers scored just 3 marks out of the 12 available.

Best practice leads to best results

Not adhering to the coding best practice rules laid out below meant that many of the templates we studied did not render correctly in certain email clients, even with images switched on.

Remember that as a default, emails are delivered with images turned off by many email clients. So it’s important for marketers to include a balance of web text with any imagery used so the template is still legible and meaningful when viewed with the images turned off.

Here are dotMailer’s best practice guidelines for ensuring your emails render correctly and consistently across the key email clients:

1. Ensure images are imported into your template at the correct size you want them to render – do not rely on the HTML height and width settings as some email clients may not support these
2. Make sure your HTML height and width settings match the actual dimensions of the image
3. Ensure an equal balance between web text and images – image heavy emails may attract high spam scores and are less effective when images are switched off
4. Design your template with preview panes in mind – ensure your brand, key message and/or call to action are visible and above the fold
5. Include a link to a web version of the email to help solve rendering issues for the recipient
6. Test how your emails look when viewed using mobile broadband connections. We found different ‘dongles’ lead to some emails being rendered differently for different members of our panel
7. Use an ‘Inbox Preview’ tool (provided by many leading email marketing providers) to test quickly and easily how your email template renders with and without images switched on in all relevant email clients and through different preview panes
8. Focus on the relevant email clients for inbox preview testing, depending on whether the email is B2B or B2C
9. Make sure your designers are experienced and qualified in email design and are aware of the issues of designing for the inbox

Best practice guidelines for coding to ensure renderability

1. Avoid using cascading style sheets (CSS) in your code – not all email clients support them, and your email may not render correctly
2. Use background colours as an alternative to background images behind text - not all email clients support background images, and your email may not render correctly

And our top tip is:

Segmenting your database into regular openers and non-openers means you can send less image-heavy emails to non-openers, and increase the chance of these recipients reading the email with images turned off.

dotMailer Online Help system goes live June 1st

By Cliff Guy

From June 1st, dotMailer users will be able to take advantage of our new Online Help system, designed to provide detailed and practical on-screen help. Covering every feature and function within dotMailer, searchable Help topics will also include best practice guidelines and clear explanations of where and why you should be using certain features to get the most from your email marketing.

The help system is all about answering your questions - so if you want any additional questions answered in the Help content, just click on the 'Ask a Question' tab in the Online Help window.

The Online Help also provides links to dotMailer resources, including User Guides, videos and training webinars.

Zombie Nation

By Tink Taylor

I read an interesting BBC news site article yesterday on 'Zombie' computers, prompted by new research figures released by McAffee. Their figures report that over 12 million computers have been hijacked by cyber-criminals since January this year alone.

These hi-jacked computers are gateways for cyber crime and provide the infrastructure for vast scale global cyber criminal activity.

Not mentioned in the article but another critical piece to the picture, is that these 'Zombie' computers are also the source of the majority of the world's spam. A recent report stated that email makes up 95% of global internet traffic. Therefore it is important that we reflect that the majority of this traffic is in fact spam, which is an illegal activity.

These Zombie computers which pump out illegal spam emails are hindering permission based email marketers from using the medium for legitimate, targeted, permission-based messaging. No one reading this blog needs me to tell them how frustrating that can be.

There are even bigger issues at stake here, now that email (or rather this should be seen as spam as it was not reported!) is being implicated in global warming - the carbon footprint of the estimated 62 trillion emails sent globally each year is reported to be 17m tons of CO2. This really is an issue that effects everyone - not just those in email marketing.

It's time for individuals and businesses to take seriously their responsibility for tightening up security on their PCs and preventing exposure to hi-jack risk. Firewalls and regularly updated virus scan software are non-negotiable in the fight against hijackers.

ISPs need to employ tighter monitoring and security measures on email sends rather than relying on filtering at the point of receipt - i.e. the inbox. Intensified monitoring of the 'upstream' of email sends can help to identify 'Zombies' that are sending vast volumes of email and take action.

Cyber crime and spam are now everyone's problem and we all need to step into the breach and take security of the internet back into our own hands.

How does it do that?

By Eleanor Workman

Last week was Internet World week, and myself along with the whole dotMailer team had a great show. It was a whirlwind 3 days of meeting clients and demo'ing our products to prospective clients. Email marketing demonstrations were as popular as ever, but this year there was something a little different on the dotMailer stand.

Not only did we exhibit for the first time as dotDigital Group PLC, with a brand-new, purpose built stand. We also showcased our full digital marketing product and service range, celebrated our 10th birthday with drinks and amazing special offers on the stand each day, held a vintage champagne prize draw every hour, and had some really cool technology called Augmented Reality to give our prize draw a digital edge.

We incorporated the augmented reality technology into our prize draw cards handed out by the lovely dotMailer Girls.

When visitors held their prize draw card in front of the webcam on the dotMailer stand, an image on the card was scanned and the card appeared on the screen with a 3D animation and message telling them if they'd won or lost. It certainly puts an end to picking a business card out of a glass fruit bowl!

If you want to know more about Augmented Reality technology get in touch with the Cowan Group and don't forget to tell them that you saw it on the dotDigital Group stand at Internet World.

To the lucky 30 winners, I very much hope you enjoy your champagne and we look forward to seeing you all again... next stop - the online marketing show in June.