We are very pleased to announce a new feature has been added to your Account.

Our Feature Request email was very well received a few weeks ago and it has kept our development team very busy. Due to popular demand the feature we now have - is a default value for a subscriber attribute!

Before this feature was added to your Account

Prior to this new feature - the personalization of your messages for example “First Name” would present an empty space if the subscriber did not have a value for “First Name”

For example:

If you had “Dear [First Name]” within your email message (as seen in figure 1) and the subscriber did not have a value for the “First Name” then the message would go out with “Dear ,” as seen in (figure 2).

Figure 1

Figure 2

From today onwards our new feature applies. If a subscriber does not have a value in an attribute you want to use within your email then a default value can be added!

Figure 3

In the example above the email message contains the default value for the “First Name” attribute and was used because the subscriber did not have a value in the “First Name” attribute.

To set a default value for an attribute update the “Default” field within the subscriber attribute form.

Figure 4

Its that easy!

We are please to announce that you can now upload your subscribers within Excel spreadsheets!

I know this enhancement will please a few clients who find using a CSV file a bit too nerdy.

The process for bulking uploading subscribers is still the same. The system is smart enough to know if you are using a CSV file or spreadsheet. It even supports that latest version of Excel which uses *.xlsx.

We have also provided a facility where you can send yourself a bulk import report via email with the results of your import. This report might come in handy later on when you need to reconcile your subscribers.

The bulk import report provides a whole heap of information about the import including any invalid records located during the import.

During the ’silly season’ you and your business may be “Out of Sight” for some of the time but you need not be “Out of Mind” and we’re referring to the minds of your customers, advocates etc.

Set and Forget – Emailing

Maintaining the regularity of your email communication over the holiday period need not be a struggle even if you are not physically around to create your message at the time you wish your subscribers to receive it.

With the ‘set and forget’ approach you can create the message (or like most of our clients get our team to create your message) and embargo its release for delivery to your mailing list on the day and time of your choosing.

You can image how much this functionality has changed our clients lives insofar as they have the choice of when they wish to create the message and when they want it to be received by their subscribers.

Email messages can be pre-set for release anytime in the future so this is not ‘just for Christmas’……..but a strategy you can apply anytime throughout the year.

I recently met someone who told me that they are getting up at 4am to create and deliver their email messages.  I believe the reason for the early delivery requirement was due to their mailing list containing quite a few northern hemisphere subscribers - so they wanted to ensure their emails would arrival in their recipients Inbox during the business hours.  Umm there is a better way to do this I told that person…..Mobilize Mail!

Set and Forget – no more early starts and no more red eye.

Do you know the meaning of terms like: Above the Fold; and CTOR? We have commenced a Glossary of commonly used terms in Email Marketing.

Access to our Glossary – click here

If you have more than one subscription form on your website you can track which form was used and by whom with a simple addition to your subscription form.

Follow the steps below:

1) Create a new field in the attributes section of your account and name it something like “source” or whatever is meaningful to you. Make sure the type is “hidden”. Note the special tag name for the new field which will start with “attribute”.

2) Now open the internal subscription form you would like the new tracking field to be added to and select the new tracking field within the subscription form record. Save your changes.

3) Next access the associated external subscription form and click the “Regenerate HTML Code” button. Copy the new HTML subscription code.

4) Place this code on each of the pages on your site, and give the hidden field a value. For example, the front page could use value=”frontpage” and the contact page could be value=”contactpage”. Locate the “source” field by its name which you recorded the name in step 1. For example input type="hidden" size="40" name="attribute10" value="front page"

5) Every time someone completes the subscribe forms, they’ll be added to your list and the hidden form value will passed into the “source” field.

If you want to analyze what subscription forms were used export the subscribers and include the source field. You can now add the data to a spreadsheet application and sort by the source column.

Mobilize Mail supports two types of subscription forms:

1) Internal, the subscription form is housed on Mobilize Mail and is a great idea for customers who do not have their own website but want a subscription form to send people to.

2) External, the subscription form can be housed on any website. External styles are normally used when customers wish to have a subscription located on their website.

With both subscription form styles we allow full customization of the form including styling, images and additional HTML.  For some strange reason most other email service providers (ESP’s) only allow you to change basic colours and upload a logo – boring!!

Take a look below at two customer’s subscription form styles both of which are internal (housed on Mobilize Mail). The first thing you will notice is that they are completely different which is great news as no one wants to be trapped by the boring and oppressive templates that other ESP’s force you into.