If you’re a user of the popular Highrise CRM, you can now use CakeMail to contact your customers, deals and leads via a new and exclusive Import Contact module.

Email is crucial to facilitating dialogue with your client base, and fundamental to your company’s CRM strategy. The Highrise + CakeMail integration allows you to quickly and easily import your existing Highrise contacts into your CakeMail subscriber lists - allowing you to send targeted, highly-personalized HTML or text emails to your leads and/or customers. Use CakeMail’s comprehensive reporting tools to track who opened, clicked or forwarded, who unsubscribed, and much more. Plus, by activating our new CakeMail and Google Analytics module, you can even track what your customers do on-site after receiving your mailing.

Great, how do I access it?

To access this new feature, as the account administrator simply login to your account and activate the module under the Modules tab. To import your Highrise contacts, select ‘import from Highrise’ under your list import section. You’ll need to add your Highrise login credentials (site name and authentication token) and Voila - you can start sending mailings to your CRM contacts! This module is available free to all CakeMail and Highrise accounts.

CakeMail is far from your ‘average’ white-label email marketing product. Designed and built as an API and email delivery engine first and foremost, the true power of CakeMail lies in its extendability through its CakeEngineTM and CakeModule APIs.

Being able to integrate into any existing application - or have any existing application integrate into it - means our users are limited only by their imagination when using CakeMail as their email marketing product of choice. We’ve seen great integrations with CMS & CRM systems, invoicing applications, ecommerce websites and many more… but noticed there was one thing missing: a place to discuss ideas, troubleshoot code, get inspired, and generally act as a one-stop shop for anything and everything related to the CakeMail APIs.

So what have we done about it? You guessed it: We’ve launched the all-new CakeMail Developer Community. Simply register (or use your existing Ning login) and get cracking. You’ll need 4 things:

• A (free) CakeMail account
• An interface ID & key
• A library of your choice for application development
• A fantastic idea

We’ve documented and hosted everything else you’ll need to start integrating CakeMail with your business, application, or anything else you can think of. And, because we’ve made it a community, you can meet, chat with, and generally have fun with other developers, integrators, and CakeMail aficionados around the world.

Looking for something more (like extra revenue)? You can also apply to become a CakeMail Certified Developer or Certified Integrator, meaning you’ve been certified by us as having the requisite knowledge to build for or integrate with CakeMail’s APIs. Get new work from the community if you’re a freelancer or agency, and if you’re looking for technical help, now you know who to ask.

Don’t be shy - come say hello!

Great, how do I access it?

As the account owner, go to the Modules tab in your account to activate the module - it will now be available to all clients under that reseller account.  Then, simply create a new mailing and check the ‘Google Analytics’ box during creation.  Once checked, all of your mailing’s links will contain a unique source code - specific to that particular email send - that will allow you to measure what your email recipients did on your site after receiving your mailing through your Google Analytics account.  How many recipients visited your homepage versus your deep pages? Which recipients actually ended up converting?  Knowing this crucial analytical information helps you and your clients refine future campaigns to maximize return on investment, and thanks to CakeMail, it’s now only a click away.

Stay tuned for a ton of new updates coming to CakeMail with our v2.3 release, and until then, happy analyzing!

Thanks to those clever folks at CAP Production, the Kentico <–> CakeMail integration allows agencies to offer a wide array of CakeMail’s functionality from within the Kentico interface.

Clients can create and send newsletters from their Kentico site’s content, or synchronize user accounts with CakeMail’s diffusion lists.  But those ideas are just the tip of the iceberg - thanks to the flexibility of CakeMail’s CakeEngine^TM API,  you’re only limited by your imagination of what you can do with the Kentico <–> CakeMail integration.

To learn more about what integrations you can offer in your Kentico sites, contact Emmanuel Fayet (efayet@capprod.com) of CAP Production.  While you’re at it, why not give CakeMail a spin if you haven’t already, and see what all the fuss is about.

Extend your own application with CakeMail
Are you a developer with a great idea?  Visit our API section to download the library of your choice, and learn more about integrating with our platform to see how you can offer true white label email marketing in your own application, platform or product.

Project Honey Pot was created in 2004 by Unspam Technologies, Inc and they have built a community of tens of thousands of web and email administrators in more than 170 countries around the world to help track online fraud and abuse. They also work with law enforcement authorities to track down and prosecute spammers. Recently, they received their 1 Billionth Spam message to one of their trap addresses and to commemorate this milestone they decided to release the data they have accrued over the last 5 years.

There are many fascinating things in this study, for example.. Did you know Monday is the busiest day for Spam and Saturday is the slowest? Assuming the average size requirement for a spam email is 4KB, over the last 5 years the total storage requirement imposed on the Internet by just the spammers sending the top-20 spam campaigns was over 2.5 petabytes! If you don’t know what a petabyte is, it’s BIG (roughly 2.6 million Gigabytes). Lastly, it’s interesting to note that in 2008 there were virtually no Facebook phishing messages, but today Facebook is the second most phished organization in the world and predicted to be #1 in 2010.

For the complete study, click here.

Project Honey Pot is still a little behind McDonald’s, who apparently served their 1 Billionth hamburger back in 1963 and although the menu has changed a bit, today’s estimate has them well over 100 billion! Let’s hope Project Honey Pot is successful and we don’t see the same kind of growth with spam!

Bye for now and Happy Holidays,

Kevin

CakeMail just released version 2.2 of the CakeMail User Interface.  Here are
the great new features included in this release.

Advanced Segmentation

You can now create advanced segments based on actions reported in prior
emails! Segments are no longer limited to simple field values. Now you can
segment your list based on actions - If a mailing has been opened or a link
has been clicked - Making subsequent mailings and follow-ups a lot more
effective.

Locked Templates

You can now lock areas within your System Templates.  End-users can
only edit what they are allowed to, giving the administrator absolute
control over messaging and branding.

Social Sharing

Allow your recipients an easy way to share your mailing content with their
social networks. Now you can add social networking icons to your email
content, making it easy for recipients to share your newsletter with their
favorite social networks like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn… with a click
of a button.

New Interface Language: Finnish

The CakeMail User Interface is_ now available in Finnish_. CakeMail is now
offered in 11 easy-to-configure languages: German, Greek, Spanish, Estonian,
French, Dutch, Romanian, Russian, Thai… and English.

- The CakeMail Team

Several key clauses of Bill C-27: Electronic Commerce Protection Act were passed in this week’s Standing Committee Meeting which will reconvene on Monday to bash it out again. Here’s a rundown of the main requirements put forth that will affect all commercial emailers:

• Prohibits the sending of a commercial message to anyone without the recipient’s prior consent and this includes messages asking for the recipient to “opt-in”. Commercial-based messages may be sent if the sender has a prior business relationship with the recipient, but only if that period does not exceed 2 years.
• Unsubscribe requests must be processed within 10 business days, which is consistent with CAN SPAM and was met with some opposition by the Bloc but eventually passed.
• Mandatory content that includes information enabling the recipient to readily contact the sender (ie: full mailing address with postal code and phone number), also consistent with CAN SPAM.
• Penalties for violations are still yet to be ironed out but the CRTC has given power to impose a penalty of $1,000,000.00 for individuals and as high as $10,000,000.00 for any other person. It also gives the right for individuals to sue spammers.

If you would like to listen to a recording of this week’s meeting, click here.

It is difficult to say when and in what form this new piece of legislation will finally be put into law, but one can only hope it does not come out a shadow of its former self. These are important times and if you would like to join Neil Schwartzman and the other fine people at CAUCE (The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email) with me in joining your voice in support of Canada’s C-27 Anti-spam Legislation please click here to sign their petition.

Stay tuned… and bye for now,

Kevin

• Company or person name
• Contact Info
• Website
• Your service offering
• Your experience with the CakeMail APIs
• The programming languages you are familiar with

By doing so, you are accepting to be cited as a reference whenever a client asks for a type of service we think you can be a good fit. We also may add you to an upcoming resource directory on our website. Finally, you are also opting-in to our Developer newsletter where you will get notified of anything API-related. All good stuff.

First off, a lot of people think blacklists are the bad guys, when in fact it’s the exact opposite. The feedback they provide is not only valuable to help ISPs keep spam out of your Inbox, but they can also alert you (the sender) to potential problems as well. You should think of it like your child’s report card in school, if your child fails a class wouldn’t you want to know about it so you can help them?

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like Yahoo or Hotmail use these services to help determine if the email you are sending them is Spam. If they receive spam from you or too many people complain, they will send your email to ‘Junk’ or just delete it. These services let you know if anyone on your list did not remember signing up and/or they are not happy receiving your emails anymore (perhaps because they requested to be removed). All of this helps protect your delivery and allows you to judge the quality of the list so you can take action.

What Can I do?

If you have been listed, you first need to look at your mailing list (or segment) and decide whether or not it is still worth using. Strengthen your sign-up process and make sure it’s crystal clear. If you have no relationship with the people on your list, or you are using a publicly available or purchased list – it should be discarded. If the list is legitimate and made up of people who have opted in to receive your email from you directly, then perhaps it is time to reconfirm they want to stay on your list. If the list is old, or you haven’t used it in a while (+6 months), or people are no longer interested in receiving your email – the list should be “cleaned”. This is done by sending an email asking if they want to keep receiving emails from you. If they do not reply, they should be removed. You can also put a link in the email asking them to click if they want to stay on your list or better yet, visit your website to sign up again! The people who are left would remain and anyone that didn’t reply or click should be removed. Depending on how often you send emails and how big your list is, this should be done every few months.

Bye for now,

Kevin

To really engage with buyers, Magento has a newsletter function that can be used to send promotions and updates. And now, keeping connected to customers is easier than ever, with the Magento Newsletter Connector Module.

Connectors are a new kind of CakeMail Module that work with third-party applications to make them work hand-in-hand with our mailing platform. To use the new connector, you simply enable it within Magento’s admin interface and tell it how to connect to your CakeMail account.

The connector was created by Ebizmarts, a development group focused on open source e-commerce technologies. Thanks to them, if you’re a Magento user, it’s easier than ever to keep in touch with your customers and buyers!