GroupMail Blog

Christian Harris from ITReviewed.net did a pretty comprehensive write up on GroupMail and some benefits to using email marketing to promote businesses of various sizes.

E-mail marketing has proven very successful for those who do it right, but you need the right tools to do it. GroupMail is one such program.

Even though he thought having 4 different editions of GroupMail was over the top (and I tend to agree to a large extent), he did do a good job summarizing the breakdown in functionality in each and suitability for varying requirements.

Whether you are a small, medium or large business and you want to run an e-mail marketing campaign, GroupMail would be an ideal choice. The software looks nice, is easy to use, and has all the essential features.

In concluding he pointed out some of the pros and cons of GroupMail versus going with a web based solution, but overall a pretty fair assessment of GroupMail and its capabilities, but don’t take my word for it go over and read his review.

If this message appears when you run a Spell Check on your GroupMail Message, you need to disable UAC on Windows Vista.

For instructions on doing this please visit http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd296719.aspx

There are a few options for creating a message in GroupMail.

1. You can create an HTML message in GroupMail’s own WYSIWYG message editor. This is similar to standard email client editors and allows you to insert tables, images, hyperlinks, attachments and text/page formatting.
2. You can use one of GroupMail’s email templates and add your own content. To use a template, click on Messages in GroupMail and click the Templates tab to select your template. For more information, read How to Use GroupMail’s Email Templates.
3. You can create your HTML message externally using an HTML editor and import it into GroupMail. To import an HTML Document, open a new message in GroupMail and click File/Import/HTML Document. Here is a list of HTML Editors. Avoid using MS Word or other Word Processing software to create HTML for use in email as some of the formatting won’t be retained when it is used in different environments. Also, ensure that the image paths used in the HTML document that you are importing are either full, local paths on the computer where GroupMail is located (i.e. c:/image.jpg) or full, remote paths (i.e. http://www.yourdomain.com/image.jpg). You can check the image paths after importing the document into GroupMail by right-clicking on the image and selecting “image properties”.
4. You can embed a web page in the body of your message. Again, open a new message in GroupMail and click File/Import/Web Page.

You can also add a plain text message part for each of the message types above. To add a plain text part to your HTML message, click the Plain Text Message Part tab at the bottom of the message editor in GroupMail and add your text-only part here. Adding a text-only part to your message will help to improve delivery rates and lower your spam score. For more information, read How to Create a Text-Only Part of Your HTML Email.

If you want to share your GroupMail message with other GroupMail users; open the message and click on File/Save As/A Document. This will save your message in GroupMail format which can be sent to another GroupMail user. When they click on the attachment, the message will launch in their GroupMail message editor.

You can also save your message as a draft or a user-generated template to use again. Just click, File/Save As/A Draft or File/Save As/A Template respectively. You can also edit a copy of previously sent messages in GroupMail. Just highlight the sent item and click the Edit Copy of Message link from the left side of the screen.

Pretty flexible, eh?

We have been doing a lot of work on GroupMetrics for the past while, in short making it more robust when hit in quick succession with numerous large campaigns and incorporating much of the feedback we’ve received over the last couple of years from people using it.

Here is a sneak preview of the new interface, showing opens over time, overall campaign results and the clicks on individual links.

The numbers are based on an actual campaign sent, so for me it is interesting that a couple of months after the send there are still people opening and clicking on links in the message - at least I’m not the only one behind on my email !

Once the new version of GroupMetrics is completed and put live (in next couple of weeks), we intend to have an update of GroupMail available shortly afterwards that will make it really easy to optionally incorporate open and click-through tracking in your campaigns (up to now this involved having to manually insert the open and click tracking code in your messages which is a PITA).

I guess even if incorporating open, click-through and goal tracking in your email marketing campaigns is not important to you at least it will help you brush up on your world geography !

So what do you think ?

There have been reports that certain providers are having problems if you use IE8 to read your emails - it seems the links that are encoded in the email do not work.

We’ve been doing some testing with GroupMail, and we don’t seem to be having any such problems - however if you notice anything strange after IE8 is installed, let us know.

Aside: It seems to be a big improvement on IE7, but still not nearly as quick as Chrome in my opinion. You can download IE8 here if interested:

Download IE8

Happy Easter!

They say a picture says a thousand words. So what does a video say?

Just added another video tutorial to the library. So, if you’d like to actually see us working with GroupMail rather than reading the GroupMail tutorials available on our website, here is a list of GroupMail video tutorials available.

• How to Configure Your GroupMail Sender Account
• How to Import Recipients into GroupMail
• How to Personalize Your Messages with GroupMail
• How to Create a Newsletter Opt-in Form
• How to Distribute Your Online Surveys with GroupMail
• How to Configure GroupMail’s Subscriber Add-on to Process Unsubscribe Requests

We hope that you find them useful. Please send any requests for video tutorials to us, either in the comments of this post or in an email to support (at) infacta (dot) com.

Ryan was good enough to put together a few email templates for St. Patrick’s day

 

 

 

These can be downloaded from here. To use them in GroupMail, extract the files from the downloaded zip, and in the Message Editor choose File->Import->HTML Document.

Personally the thoughts of drinking pints of green liquid doesn’t really appeal to me (tomorrow or any other day for that matter) , but regardless of whatever you get up to for St. Patrick’s day, I hope you have a good one !

If you include a logo or graphic (like ours below) at the top of your newsletter, it’s a good idea to also include a hyperlink to your website (sometimes the simple tips are the best you know )

Once people receive your newsletter/email they may be looking for a simple way of getting to your website to find more info etc., and this link makes it easy.

Another advantage is if your images are blocked by your reader’s email client, at least the link will be available at the top of the email.

On a recent newsletter we sent out, 4% of people who clicked on a link, clicked on our logo to get to our homepage.

Last year the GroupMail releases were a bit scarce on the ground (sum total of one), needless to say that was not part of the plan with people waiting for various new enhancements and fixes, but nevertheless that was the end result.

Long story short, let’s just say a number of things we worked on didn’t turn out as planned resulting in too much time being spent trying to stuff an ever growing list of changes into an increasingly not likely to happen update (in a square peg - round hole type of way).

So we cut our losses, rolled back a few changes and got the additions/fixes we were happy with out the door in the .72 update in January, and have have another release available this month.

Here’s a brief summary of the changes/fixes in these updates

• Four New Starter Email Templates
• Support for importing from and connecting directly to Thunderbird 2.0, Windows Vista contacts and Opera 9 Address Books
• Exclusion List Manager better handles larger lists
• Updated Backup/Restore Add-On
• Upgraded SMTP to Outlook Gateway
• Updated email sending components
• Better handling of Opt-In duplicates in MySQL, SQL Server and Access database systems
• View & Manage Recipients display not updated when attempting to view in excess of 33,000 - fixed
• Support for All Users windows profile
• Fix for linked images incorrectly being embedded when Subscriber Add-on auto-response, opt-in and opt-out confirmation messages were sent
• Better handling of unique key violation errors when calling stored procedures and connecting to ODBC data sources
• A number of bug fixes in the File Import from CSV/delimited file formats
• Filtering using multiple categories in Microsoft Outlook Address Book was not working in certain situations - fixed
• Group Export (to delimited file format/CSV) now enabled in GroupMail Free Edition

The latest version is available for download here.

So the plan is to try and maintain the regular updates going forward, keep checking in to follow the progress.

Ok, so you followed our advice in the previous post and you want some more tips - we’ll, your wish is our command…

Email Accreditation

A little more techy, but Email Accreditation is becoming very important for email delivery - one solution called SPF (Sender Policy Framework) is very effective and we use it ourselves here in Infacta.

If you are sending through an ISP, ask them about it, if you run your own mail server update your DNS records (More info). In addition, services like Habeas allow you to prove that your email is legitimate.

Blacklists

It’s also important to check your domain name (e.g. group-mail.com) against some well known blacklists. A good site for testing is dnsstuff. If any of your details are listed on a blacklist, get in touch with them and see about getting removed before sending your email. (Your ISP or Network admin may be able to help here.)

ISPs

Some of the larger Internet Service Providers (ISP) publish guidelines about getting emails delivered to their customers; here is some information on AOL, Yahoo and Hotmail.

- MSN Hotmail info here.
- AOL Mail info here.
- Yahoo Mail info here.

(If you know of anymore of these guidelines, please link to the web-page in the comments below)

These tips will take you a little longer to implement, but they’re all free and they’ll make a big difference in getting your emails delivered - good luck!

Rob
GroupMail Team