spire2.com

We’re happy to announce that a simplified sending process has been released across all accounts. The new one-page sending process allows you to:

• Manage all delivery settings — like from name and address, delivery style, scheduled sending time and more — on one page.
• Change delivery settings at any time without hitting the back button.
• Set up mailings to groups or searches, or based on a triggered event, simply and quickly.
• Confirm delivery settings at-a-glance in the Mailing summary sidebar.

Log into your account and give the new sending process a try. If you notice any trouble, make sure to clear your browser’s cache or hard-refresh the page before continuing.

Sharing has become an easy, yet powerful tool in marketing. Making your content easy to share is critical in the Facebook and Twitter reality we live in because when people share your content online, they are doing your marketing for you. By harnessing the power of share you can better reach more prospects and find more followers.

Sharing your email campaigns has just gotten easier!
Spire2’s E-broadcaster, powered by Emma, has just added a new feature that makes it easy to share your email campaigns with followers on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.  Better yet, this feature also provides you with the ability to track who is sharing your email and with which social network.  Sound interesting? Learn more about how to utilize this new feature with your email campaigns.

Need help with email marketing? Spire2’s experience with email marketing started in the days when saying you helped people with email marketing had to be spoken in hushed tones to avoid being labeled a spammer. A lot has changed since 2003. If you are looking for help in improving your results or getting a program off the ground, give us a call at 630.462.2567.

I often talk to clients about making their marketing more personal. Below is an excellent example of great email marketing. This is the email I received after subscribing to a newsletter:

“Thank you for subscribing to my newsletter. I hope it works out well for you. Every newsletter contains instructions on how to unsubscribe, so if it becomes too much, feel free to cut back.
If you find something you like, feel free to forward to your friends and colleagues.
If you have any questions, please contact me.
Thanks!
Are you also subscribed to my blog? Get it sent to your feed reader of choice, or your inbox by clicking here.”

Notice the friendly and simple tone, the way it communicates that I am not being sold (I can cut back if it gets too much.) Marketing became cold and neutral in the mass marketing era when one incurred big costs to print and distribute a message. Marketing also needed to appeal to the largest possible audience and it needed to last until the 5,000 brochures were used up. A lot of people still make the mistake in thinking they have to sound neutral for it to be “marketing”. This is simply not the case.

With digital printing and electronic marketing, hard costs (printing and distribution) are dropping to zero. If you change your mind or want to correct a typo (my achilles heal… umm I mean heel) there are almost no hard costs. Don’t miss this opportunity; be real and sound real in all your marketing. “People do business with people they know, like, and trust.” Forget most of what you learned about marketing and let your personality shine through. Hey, if you know who I need to give credit to for that quote, let me know.

If someone offered your business a free billboard on a major highway would you say, “no thanks?”

I have been pondering the changing landscape of marketing a lot in the last few months. The bad news: popularity is a key metric of success. The more popular your business or organization is the more successful it will be (of course this really isn’t new.) The good news: the physical cost of becoming popular is going way down — like FREE. You can thank the Internet.

For years now I have been evangelizing the need for organizations to build a house list and start an e-mail marketing program. I have also been preaching the value of making your electronic marketing more personal. Social networking is putting relationship and list building into warp speed, and the cost doesn’t hurt the marketing budget at all.

So, what should you do about this phenomenon? I just finished listening to Chris Anderson’s book, Free: the Future of a Radical Price. I would recommend it to anyone who is responsible for marketing (hey, it is free, and you can download it from iTunes). It will help you get your mind around how the Internet is changing the game of marketing. Second, if you have been neglecting your e-mail marketing, I would get back on track. What can you do, provide, or offer that would entice people to join your list?

So what should you do about social networks? I would start exploring. Keep this in mind– social networking is not advertising, and it is not a passive activity. You don’t just have a Linkedin, Twitter, or Facebook account; you need to use it.  What kind of information would interest your target market? Start sharing it through a social networking site.

In a recent WSJ Small Business Report podcast, a company ran a promotion where they advertised with billboards and Twitter. They used a different promo code to measure the response. The Twitter promo code blew away the billboard and the cost of Twitter… FREE. Careful now, don’t jump to the conclusion that a Twitter account will be the answer to your marketing woes. There is more to the story, but the potential of social networking exists. The Internet is offering you a billboard for free or almost free. How are you using it?

E-broadcaster has implemented a new feature for keeping you informed about the recent activity of your subscribers right from your audience screen. You’ll notice they’ve added the tracking box to your main page that allows you to view who has subscribed or changed their preferences within the last week or month. There is an extended option under “more search options” that allows you to view your audience’s activity in even more detail.

Wish you had a better idea of who is receiving your e-broadcaster? This great new feature keeps you up-to-date with your audience and is a great tool for tracking who is signing up to hear from you.

The idea behind trigger-based campaigns is this: rather than sending to a group of people all at once, trigger emails send automatically whenever one of your recipients does something – like signing up to get your emails, or having a birthday, or clicking a link in one of your campaigns. Triggers allow you to reach people the moment they’re most likely to read and respond – on their schedule, not yours. And they can really complement your broader, audience-wide newsletters and campaigns.

The trigger feature is free – you’ll only pay for the emails you send using it. While some services attach a hefty price tag, we believe triggers are simply another way to send. Why not offer everyone the chance to get even more timely with their emails and make even more of a personal connection with their audience members?

Before, there were around 20 layouts to choose from. Now, there are roughly 40. And they’re organized into several tabs: simple, newsletter, and advanced.

To see the new layouts, do what you’ve always done: log in, head for the Campaigns area, open your brand stationery and hit the change layout button.

We’ll continue to add more layouts (and flexibility) over time. And remember, if you search our standard menu and still haven’t found what you’re looking for, we can always create a custom layout to your exact specifications.

Ever wish you didn’t have to upload a commonly used logos or graphics each time you put a new campaign together? E-Broadcaster’s new image library feature lets you store those images for easy access later.

How to use your new image library: 1. Log in and head over to the Campaigns area. 2. Open a fresh template, or open a saved campaign and select edit mode. In your content layout, click on one of the image slots. 3. Upload an image. Just above the save button, you’ll see the option to save this image in your library as well. 4. The next time you add an image to a campaign, you may select one of your library images or upload something new.

When someone new signs up to receive your emails using your E-Broadcaster signup screen, they will receive a welcome email on your behalf. Starting today when you create a new sign-up menu, that email includes a new link that lets the subscriber actively confirm his or her opt-in. It’s an easy but increasingly important step in the permission process, and it gives you the option of sending future campaigns to everyone in your audience who’s signed up, or to only those folks who’ve taken the extra step of confirming their desire (and ability) to receive them. Over time, you’ll be able to put this new information to more and more use.

Here’s how it works:

-> In the welcome email we send to new subscribers, you’ll notice a new confirmation link and a request that the subscriber confirm his or her opt-in by pasting that link into his or her browser.

-> Back in your audience groups, you’ll notice a new column called opt-in confirmed. (Like other columns, you can choose to display this column or hide it.) When someone new confirms his or her subscription, a check mark appears in that column. View that member’s full record, and you’ll see exactly when (day and time) he or she confirmed.

-> You can find everyone in your audience who has (or hasn’t) confirmed their opt-ins using advanced search and segment. From any audience screen, click advanced search and then use the opt-in status field to find everyone in your audience whose status is either confirmed or unconfirmed.

-> You can also invite current audience members to confirm (or renew) their existing subscription at any time. Let’s say you’ve been building your list for years and feel it’s time to do a little spring cleaning, or let’s say you haven’t emailed your audience in a long time and worry that some folks have moved on. Why not ask them to renew their email vows? Using the editor’s personalize menu, you can drop the new opt-in confirmation link into a campaign (just like you’d personalize your campaigns with first names) and ask that your recipients take a minute to click it. Then send a ‘last chance’ follow-up to the folks who have yet to confirm a week or two later.

Remember that the new confirmation feature will only work when you create a new sign up menu, and that double opt-in is not a requirement – it’s an additional option you can use to find and target the most interested members of your audience. Contact us if you want to add this new feature into existing sign-up windows.

The next time you’re wondering if the E-Broadcaster campaign you’re about to send might wind up in some junk folders because of your content, why not go ahead and find out. With our new Delivery Rating feature, you can proof your campaign for words, phrases and formatting likely to hinder your delivery to some in-boxes – before you send.
 
The next time you preview a campaign, you’ll notice a new option to rate it. Clicking that button runs your campaign through a special filter that looks for the same things programs like SpamAssassin (a popular filtering program) and Outlook do when assigning emails the ’score’ that ultimately determines whether it reaches the in-box or the junk folder.
 
We’ll tell you how your campaign scored according to our filter, and we’ll give you a list of the problematic items we found. Change some of those items in your campaign, and you can update your rating to see the score drop. In fact, you may rate a campaign as many times as you like before send-off.

Remember that different filters have different rules, and there’s no way to guarantee your campaign will bypass all of them. But by keeping your rating low (we suggest 4.0 or less) you can improve your chances out there in the real world.