Andrea Says: New Feature – Let Your Customers Upgrade Easily

By Andrea Saez, on January 23, 2012 - Leave a comment
Tag(s): ,

We have added a new feature to our system that lets you add an Upgrade URL for your clients. When their account has reached its contact limit, they will be notified and offered the opportunity to upgrade. (In the future, they will be notified when they reach 50% of their limit, 90% of their limit, and overusage)

This new Upgrade URL will send your clients to a custom page that is created and hosted by you – it is up to you what you include in it. We recommend that at a minimum, you include pricing information and upgrade instructions or contact info. This new feature will allow your users to see upgrade options and easily access your pricing information.

Once you receive the user’s request, you can adjust their limits by hovering over their account name under your Clients tab and clicking on Edit account limits.

To set your Upgrade URL, go to your Settings tab > Your Site Settings > Upgrade URL

Enter the URL you wish your clients to be redirected to.

The notice will look like this:

 

Andrea Says: Use Google Analytics to track your campaigns

By Andrea Saez, on January 16, 2012 - Leave a comment
Tag(s): , ,

If you have a Google Analytics account and wish to track details of your campaign, you may do so with the Google Analytics add-on. This will enable you to track links, opens, email client versions, and demographics.

All available add-ons will appear in the Marketplace tab. If the add-on has yet to be installed, click on Manage next to an add-on. You will see the following pop up window asking you to install the application.

To complete the installation, click on Install this Add-On

Once this add-on is enabled simply create a new campaign and select the Google Analytics option from the external analytics drop-down menu in the Campaign Wizard. Once checked, all of your campaign links will contain a unique source code – specific to that particular campaign – that will allow you to measure what your email recipients did on your site after receiving your campaign through your Google Analytics account.

Andrea Says: Upload your contacts from Zendesk!

By Andrea Saez, on January 9, 2012 - Leave a comment
Tag(s): , ,

CakeMail allows you to upload your contacts directly from your Zendesk help desk. This will allow you to send your clients support notices with ease!

All available add-ons will appear in the Marketplace tab. If the add-on has yet to be installed, click on Manage next to an add-on. You will see the following pop up window asking you to Install the application.

To complete the installation, click on Install this Add-On

 

Choose the contact list you wish to import your contacts to. You will be prompted to confirm that you have permission from the recipients to add them to your list

Zendesk will now be available. Select it and enter the Zendesk subdomain, email address and password.

Have a wonderful 2012!

By Isabel Lapointe, on January 4, 2012 - Leave a comment
Tag(s): , , ,


Too much food, too many drinks and, fortunately, a lot of sleep later, the CakeMail team is now back to work! We’re already working on upcoming versions with great new features, along with new documentation, training materials and other goodies to make your CakeMail experience even more pleasant.

Don’t forget to bookmark http://releases.cakemail.com to be updated on all our new features (and bugfixes…) as they’re released!

Wishing you all a great and successful year in 2012, and of course, a huge THANK YOU for being part of our success!

The CakeMail Team

Andrea Says: CakeMail v3.2 Features Auto-Save and Versioning!

By Andrea Saez, on January 3, 2012 - Leave a comment
Tag(s): , , , ,

Don’t worry if you forgot to save your work – our campaign editor now has an auto-save option!

This new feature auto-saves your progress every 2 minutes. Browse all previous versions saved, in case you wish to switch back or undo lots of changes, or continue working on the current version knowing the old ones are there to back you up.

Click Preview to preview the different versions available and Restore to revert to a specific version.

 

Andrea Says – More languages available in CakeMail!

By Andrea Saez, on December 14, 2011 - Leave a comment
Tag(s): , ,

We are pleased to announce that CakeMail v3.2 is now available in English, French (Canada and France), Portuguese (Brazil), and most recently, Spanish – US and Spain! The team has been working hard for weeks, designing, implementing and delivering a personalized CakeMail translation tool which we use to keep things accurate and up to date.

If you would like to offer CakeMail in another language and contribute to a translation, let us know!

Using Unsubscribe and Physical Address Tags

By Kevin Huxham, on December 13, 2011 - Leave a comment
Tag(s): , , , ,

In compliance with Canada’s New Anti-Spam Law (Bill C-28), The CAN SPAM ACT of 2003 and CakeMail’s existing Anti Spam Policy all senders using our service MUST include the physical postal address of the sender in their email, along with an unsubscribe tag. Not only is it illegal to send commercial-based email without a valid postal address, it goes against Sender Best Practice of not showing proper accountability to the recipient.

The receiver should be able to readily contact the sender (by any means possible) if they no longer wish to be contacted via email. Failure to adhere to this policy will result in the termination of your CakeMail account.

In order to protect you (and us!) from this happening, we have modified our existing detection system to alert us so we can properly resolve this issue before it happens. In CakeMail 3.2, the system automatically searches for both an unsubscribe and an address tag. If they are not detected, you will not be able to move forward and schedule your campaign.

The user attempting to schedule the campaign will be notified immediately, and if the physical address is missing, you’ll have the option of entering the information in a pop up. Once the information has been edited, the tag will be added automatically for you in the footer of the email. (You will also be notified that the unsubscribe tag is missing and that process will be automatic as well)

 

To read more about this topic, please refer to our Support Document.

Introducing CakeMail Release Notes

By Regis Freyd, on December 12, 2011 - 2 Comments
Tag(s): , , ,

Did you know we’ve done 27 releases since September 2011? That we’ve fixed a huge number of bugs, and released dozens of small features?

At CakeMail, we deploy every week. Sometimes it’s several times a week. Internally, we share information about each of these releases amongst teams on a release note page in our wiki. It’s great that we’re informed, but what about you? How can you be informed of everything that is going on with the tool you use daily? How can you better support your own users by knowing exactly what changed, what was replaced, and why? How can you know that we’re not just playing XBOX 360 all day long?

We strongly believe that better communication will be beneficial for all of us. This is why we’ve created a new release notes page at http://releases.cakemail.com

Here’s the deal: Each time we release a new version of the application, we will update this page with the latest bugfixes and features. I hope you like it as much as we do!

Release Notes Page

Andrea Says: Manage Your Redirection Links

By Andrea Saez, on December 12, 2011 - Leave a comment
Tag(s): , ,

One of the advantages of using CakeMail is that you can brand and personalize your account – including color schemes, adding a logo, and even managing where contacts are sent after subscribing.

Personalization of a landing page is available after sign up, when a subscriber confirms his subscription, and when a contact unsubscribes.

To manage these settings, access the contact list and  click on Manage Forms > Manage Redirections on the left-hand menu.

You will have the option to keep the current default pages or to redirect to your own.

The Icing News: Future-proof email marketing, Best email variables to test

By Isabel Lapointe, on December 7, 2011 - 2 Comments
Tag(s): ,

Six approaches for future-proof email marketing
Once again, Mark Brownlow makes a good interesting piece on the best things to focus on while creating email marketing. Read the whole article to get all the useful links!

  1. Understand the true meaning of value: avoid one-way value, don’t overestimate value, don’t misunderstand value : the value that count is the value for the recipient, not yours.
  2. Be willing to tweak and change:Each new email is an opportunity to test a tweak, and each tweak can have a surprisingly positive impact.
    * Subject line tests that double open rates over time
    * Changes in link wording that produce over 50% more clicks
    * From line tests that pull in over 20% more clicks
    * Link format tests (button vs text) that increase clicks 67%
  3. Respect the basics
  4. Be unique: Valuable content and offers, permission, creative design, relevancy, timing, personalization, customization etc. are important factors that can take your email marketing amplifier all the way up to 10. What takes it up to 11?
  5. Use common sense
  6. Dig deeper in the numbers


Email Research: The 5 best email variables to test
Marketing Sherpa has done research with marketers asking them what are the best things for email marketers to test (and do they test them?)

  1. Target audience: 42% of email marketers believe testing the target audience is very effective (but only 30% are doing it…)
  2. Landing page: 41% declare testing it is very effective
  3. Subject line: by far the most tested variable (72%) but declared very effective by 35%
  4. Call-to-action: very near with 34%
  5. Personalization: also near with 32% of marketers believe testing it is very effective
Next Page »