Andrea Says: Use Wufoo Webhook Sync

By Andrea Saez, on October 20, 2011 - Leave a comment
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Wufoo Webhook Sync is a brand new feature in our v3.1 interface that we’re excited to introduce! This new feature allows you to automatically sync your Wufoo forms with your CakeMail contact list.

To access the Wufoo Webhook Sync option, sign in to your CakeMail account, access your preferred contact list and click on Manage Forms on the left hand menu.

To use auto-sync, you need to create a form on  Wufoo and link the form to your contact list. When creating your form on Wufoo, be sure that your field names match the fields you created on your CakeMail contact list. The only fields you do not need to recreate are ContactID and Sign Up Date, as these are used for management reasons.

To create your form, drag and drop your fields to the space provided. You may edit fields, add line, paragraph and page breaks, checkboxes, and even make certain fields mandatory.

Once your form is created, access your Form Manager and click on Notifications.

On the Notification settings screen, choose the option To Another Application and select Webhook.

Copy and paste the information you get from us under Grab HTML Code.
Don’t forget to check the checkbox called “Include Field and Form Structures with Entry Data.”

 

The Icing News: Look at Last Year, Share Wisely, Email Marketing Urban Legends?

By Isabel Lapointe, on October 19, 2011 - Leave a comment
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Learning from last year
Return Path specialists suggest that you look thoroughly at your last Holiday Season results before you start planning this year’s campaigns – a great way to improve your results. Here is very useful summary:

1. Did you track the right KPIs? Do your reports give you enough insight so that you can accurately evaluate success?
2. Which types of campaigns worked? Which didn’t? What does “worked” mean?

  • Look at which had the highest open rate even if it didn’t convert well.
  • Then look at your click-through rates. Did the higher open rate correlate with a high click-through rate?
  • Did the high click-through rate correlate with high conversion?

3. Did you do any testing last year? If not, plan on doing it this year.
4. Look at what you didn’t do and try something totally different this year to see if you get a boost.

What Haunts Email Marketers
Rick Buck is inspired by Halloween to share his reflections about what he considers some email marketing “urban legends”: 
certain words or characters that will flag your email as spam and no one will ever see your email again; consumers are more receptive to emails at certain times of day or on particular days of the week
; emailing inactive subscribers will somehow wake them up just in time to contribute to the bottom line.

Social Email Marketing: How to encourage sharing wisely, not randomly
Adam T. Sutton of Marketing Sherpa explains how just adding ‘social sharing buttons’ on the bottom of your email won’t do the job by itself!

The Icing News: Email Remains ROI King, New Hotmail Functions for Newsletters

By Isabel Lapointe, on October 11, 2011 - Leave a comment
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Email Remains ROI King; Net Marketing Set to Overtake DM, Says DMA
Email is bringing in $40.56 for every dollar spent on it this year, according to the DMA. A pretty good score compared to catalogs’ ROI of $7.30, search’s return of $22.24, Internet display advertising’s return of $19.72 and mobile’s return of $10.51.

Hotmail’s new functionalities can affect your deliverability
More then ever, you have to make sure your subscribers love you!
Among the features:
- Hotmail is automatically adding a special category for newsletters
- One-click unsubscribe function directly into Hotmail
- A ‘Sweep’ function: clean up your mail and remove all the old newsletters from that sender, and finally send any new ones that come in to your junk mail until the sender takes you off their list.

Some advice for Launching a New Newsletter to Existing Subscribers

The Icing News: How Email Works (and why it bounces), Building List and Good Forms

By Isabel Lapointe, on October 4, 2011 - Leave a comment
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How Email Works… (and why you have bounces)
An interesting “behind the scenes” look at how email travels and how MTA’s communicate – and why you have bounces.

Marketing Sherpa: Top Email List Building Tactics
A free 12-page report on List Building Tactics.

Eloqua’s Chart of the Week: How Many Form Fields are Too Many?
As you would expect, the less fields required, the less friction for submission. “There is much as 16 percentage points of variation between using 2 fields and 15 fields.”
- The majority of forms: 5 to 10 questions, for an average 40% conversion rate.

Be Cybersafe
October is cyber-safety month. Canadian Government has launched a website on the topic.

Andrea Says: CakeMail’s New Campaign View!

By Andrea Saez, on October 3, 2011 - Leave a comment
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A beautiful new component of CakeMail 3.1 is the updated Campaign view. We’ve redesigned the campaign step-by-step wizard, but even more lovely is a redesign of the campaigns overview. Now you can see campaign data, preview thumbnails and basic results all in one place.

To create a new campaign go to the Campaigns tab and click on Create New Campaign on the left hand menu

You will have the option of choosing from a regular email, auto-responder, recurring campaign, or A/B split test.

Learn more about each type of campaign using the links below:

Regular campaign

Recurring Campaign

Auto-Responder

A/B Split Test

 

CakeMail CakeTest: Apple Cupcakes with Mascarpone & Maple Icing

By Isabel Lapointe, on September 30, 2011 - Leave a comment
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Apple cupcakesPicking and working. Many Apples on the Image ;-)Apple on a tree

After a family apple picking event with the CakeMail team, I definitely had to find a cupcake recipe. I finally found it in an IGA supermarket flyer. Sometimes, the real world can be useful! What interested me was the apple pieces inside and the mascarpone icing which is a nice change from the typical cream cheese.

Here is the recipe.

Makes 12 cupcakes

Cupcakes
1 1/2 cup all-purpose flour (I always used non-bleached flour to avoid all the chemicals)
½ cup brown sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon cinnamon
2 cups apple peeled and diced (use apples that don’t squish when cooking, like Lobo)
½ cup milk
½ cup canola oil
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Frosting
1 pack of 275 g of Mascarpone cheese (about 10 oz)
¼ cup maple syrup

  • Preheat the oven to 350 F. Line cupcake pan with paper liners.
  • Mix the dry ingredients together: flour, sugar, baking powder and cinnamon.
  • In another bowl, mix the milk, oil, eggs and vanilla.
  • Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and beat.
  • Add the apple pieces.
  • Put in the pan.
  • Bake 20-25 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the centre comes out clean.
  • Cool the cupcakes for 5 minutes before removing them from the pans and moving to a rack to cool completely.

To make the frosting:

  • Mix the cream cheese and maple syrup. I used a hand mixer.
  • Frost the cooled cupcakes, and garnish with apple pieces. I used anise stars.

Team comments:

- 2 thumbs and 2 toes up for these scintillating and sizzling cupcakes-the M & M icing is the piece-de-resistance.. Bravo to the pastry Chef!!!!!!!
- These cupcakes are a perfect match for coffee!
- Good way to use those apples we picked.

My verdict:
Texture is very smooth and tender. From the feedback I got from the team it is not an exotic recipe but since it’s almost a muffin and I didn’t put a lot of icing it’s certainly a nice breakfast. But don’t we eat all kinds of cupcakes for breakfast anyway! ;-)

Score: 4/5 cherries

Isabel Lapointe is CakeMail’s Cherry In Chief (and our resident baking expert!). Follow her on Twitter at @CherryInChief.

CakeMail 3.1: New Engagement Data

By Robyn Paton, on September 28, 2011 - Leave a comment
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One of the great new features of CakeMail 3.1 is a new metric we call Engagement.

Now end users can have a better sense of list quality and their relationship with subscribers. This new metric we’ve included in CakeMail 3.1 is available for every contact list in an account, providing a star ranking out of five for each list. The average click and open rates for the last 6 months are combined and given a grade out of 10. Half a star = 1 point. The higher the stars, the better the list. It’s as easy as that!

To view engagement data for your existing lists, log in to your (end user) CakeMail account and navigate to the contact lists tab. The engagement data is displayed in the summary information, or can also be accessed in the full list view.

To learn more about the other new features in CakeMail 3.1, visit the microsite or read through our support knowledge base.

CakeMail 3.1 is here!

By Robyn Paton, on September 27, 2011 - 1 Comment
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We’re very excited to announce that today we have released the latest version of CakeMail. This new version includes extensive usability improvements targeted at end users to ensure a consistently pleasant and productive CakeMail experience. We’ve updated the end-user dashboard, made adjustments to the campaign creation process and revisited contact lists.

The screenshots above give you some idea about the changes we’ve made, but for more details on what we’ve updated and added, visit the CakeMail 3.1 Microsite.

If you’re a current CakeMail client, take a look at our upgrade instructions.

Not a CakeMail client yet? Sign up for a free trial!

You can also read the press release.

 

Andrea Says: What Do All Those Bounce Reports Mean?

By Andrea Saez, on September 20, 2011 - Leave a comment
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A quick refresher this week on the types of bounces that CakeMail reports.

After you’ve sent a campaign, you can track the results in your campaign reports. Basic reports give you an idea of open rates, click through rates, unsubscribes, and spam reports, but more detailed reports are available that let you get a little more granular, especially when it comes to bounces.

Access Detailed Reports by selecting “Detailed Reports” from the sidebar, or by clicking on any statistic in your basic campaign report. Under the bounce category, you’ll see a variety of results. Each of the bounce types are explained below.

Address Change
An Address Change response means a recipient has changed their address and is sending an automatic reply to notify senders of their new address.

Autoresponse
Autoresponses (generally in the form of an out of office notification) are usually sent by a recipient’s email client software. Unlike bounces, these indicate that an email is temporarily unavailable. These notifications are significant when sending time-sensitive information to recipients, as the recipient may not see it until a later time.

Challenge/Response
A Challenge/Response reply is a message sent by special filtering software installed by the recipient designed to accept messages from only senders they know. This type of filter automatically sends a reply with a challenge to the (alleged) sender of the e-mail. In this reply, the sender is asked to perform some action (like clicking a link) to ensure delivery of the original message. If the challenge is not completed, the message is not delivered.

DNS failure
The email server is temporarily unable to deliver your message to the recipient’s email address because of a DNS problem.

Hard Bounce
A hard bounce is an e-mail message that has been returned to the sender because the recipient’s address is invalid. A hard bounce might occur because the domain name doesn’t exist or because the recipient is unknown.

Email blocked
Indicates that the recipient’s email server is blocking email from your email server. You may see the following messages returned to you:

- 550 Message REFUSED by peer

- 552 Blocked by filters

Mailbox is full
The email server is temporarily unable to deliver your message to the recipient email address because the recipient’s email box is full.

Soft bounce
A soft bounce is an e-mail message that gets as far as the recipient’s mail server but is bounced back undelivered before it gets to the intended recipient. A soft bounce might occur because the recipient’s inbox is full. A soft bounce message may be deliverable at another time or may be forwarded manually by the network administrator in charge of redirecting mail on the recipient’s domain.

Transient bounce
A Transient Bounce is a message often generated by the sender’s email server which indicates that a particular message could not be delivered but the server is still trying. Usually, a Transient Bounce can be safely ignored but you may receive the following reply: Warning: message still undelivered after 4 hours. Will keep trying until message is 2 days old.

To learn more about reports, you can view the related documents in our support knowledgebase.

The Icing News: 10 sec. to Convince, Mobile Mentality, Marketing Psychology

By Isabel Lapointe, on September 14, 2011 - Leave a comment
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Here are some interesting articles we’ve been sharing at CakeMail lately.

Make It a Mobile Mentality
When you create a campaign, review everything you do in email while considering mobile at the same time. Interesting summary from the eec.

How Your Email Deliverability is Affecting Your Overall Revenue
If you ever needed a unquestionable argument for good email practices!

10 seconds to convince your reader before he leaves the page
Here are a few interesting findings from Jakob Nielsen’s team’s latest study on usability “How Long Do Users Stay on Web Pages”? Here are the key findings :

  • Users have time to read only a quarter of the text on the pages they actually visit (let alone all those they don’t).
  • First 10 seconds on the page are critical to stay or leave.
  • Only after people have stayed on a page for about 30 seconds does the curve become relatively flat.
  • So, if you can convince users to stay on your page for half a minute, there’s a fair chance that they’ll say much longer — often 2 minutes or more, which is an eternity on the Web.

Marketing Psychology: The behavioral triggers behind success at Amazon, Groupon and FarmVille
Insight #1. Eliminate small frictions: Amazon.com does a great job of reducing friction around the cost of shipping, “which has always been one of the biggest psychological hurdles to buying online.
Marketing Application: Recognize and reduce the friction points in your conversion process, whether they are related to shipping costs or the number of steps in your landing pages.
Insight #2. Group approval can overpower stigma: A group can greatly influence the behavior of an individual:  Groupon’s success is driven, in part, because its deals are only valid if purchased by a certain number of people (or a “group”).
Marketing Application: Testimonials from people in your audience can show customers that people similar to them have positive experiences with your company.
Insight #3.  Personal investment increases value: FarmVille also leverages the power or reciprocation, a behavioral trait in which people feel indebted to those who give them something.
Marketing Application: Encouraging customers to customize a product before purchasing can make them more inclined to purchase it.
Read the whole article from Wired that inspired this: How Online Companies Get You to Share More and Spend More

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