Since July 09 Gmail has been enabling images for their users if they have replied back to your email at least two times but only if you are authenticating your email with SPF or DKIM. This is more like a ‘contact reputation’ where if you do reply to the person email, you most probably know them or accept what they are sending you. Sound logical!

So it might be a good idea for you to start authenticating your domain and consider getting your Gmail subscribers to reply to your email through survey or to request for more information about your products or services.

You may also consider creating a smart list for all your Gmail account subscribers and consider giving them discount coupons or something that might attract them to click on their reply button.

This way, you can get your beautifully designed email campaign showing up with images as you intended.

That’s not to say you can’t mention your company or direct readers to your web site; you can and should do so, especially if you’re discussing a situation where your product or service could come in handy. We practice this even on our blog; from time to time, you may come across statements like “this feature is available on sendcube, so give it a try.”

Some marketers observe the 25% rule – that is, an email newsletter should not contain more than 25% of promotional material. But every target group is different, and if you’re a sendcube user, we recommend that you run an A/B Split Test with different versions of your content to find out what your audience is comfortable with. (Notice that we’re slipping in some product information right now.)

To ease your content load and cover more ground, consider a joint editorial effort with a related company. For example, if you’re marketing a bridal boutique, you could produce a newsletter with a wedding consultant, a jeweler or a hair and make-up service provider. But please note that we mean joint editorial, not joint subscribers.

Another source of inspiration is your competition – examine your rivals’ newsletters for strengths and weaknesses, and find a way to differentiate your newsletter from theirs. And look beyond your industry for ideas. Pick up a magazine (preferably something from the easy reading variety), or scan the email newsletters that land in your mailbox – take note of headlines and articles that capture your attention, and identify elements that you would like included in your own newsletter.

Looking at the sample email above, you can see that Gmail is ignoring the paragraph spacing. We hope this is just a temporary bug and Google will resolve them soon but for now, to workaround this issue, we have to declare a paragraph style, margin height to be specific on every paragraph tag:-

<style type=”text/css”>
<!–
p {
margin-bottom: 16px;
}
–>
</style>

<p style=”margin-bottom: 16px;”>This is the first paragraph</p>
<p style=”margin-bottom: 16px;”>This is the second paragraph</p>
<p style=”margin-bottom: 16px;”>This is the third paragraph </p>

You can decide on the amount of spacing you want between your paragraph. For this sample we set it to 16px. Once you have done that, Gmail will start showing your paragraph correctly.

We have tested this with other email clients to ensure that adding margin height does not cause any issue and the good news is, it doesn’t. Below are the list of email clients we tested on:-

1. Gmail (Older version)
2. Live Hotmail
3. Yahoo! Mail
4. Outlook 2000
5. Outlook 2002/XP
6. Outlook 2003
7. Outlook 2007
8. Lotus Notes 6.5
9. Lotus Notes 7
10. Lotus Notes 8
11. Apple Mail 2.1
12. Mobile Me
13. Apple Mail 3
14. Gmail
15. Yahoo! Mail Classic
16. Thunderbird 2.0
17. Thunderbird 3.0 Beta 2

If you have a better way of handling this issue or if you know of any other issues on Gmail and have found ways to resolve it, do share them with us.

So, what does this Multi-List Form do? Simply put, it allows you to show multiple lists (or newsletters) in one form thus allowing your subscribers to subscribe to one or all of the lists at the same time. Cool, right? Not only are you providing convenience to your subscribers, you also get the opportunity to advertise your other newsletters to your subscribers. Neat!

Now, creating your multiple list form is easy and you can follow our step by step guide on how to create your multi-list form under our Resources section. Once you have completed setting up your mutliple list form, don’t forget to customize your Multi-List Messages and make your subscribers feel welcome! Do check it out.

Give your potential customers a test drive in sendcube

What better way to convince your would-be customers that sendcube is the right tool for them than to let them take sendcube for a spin?

You can now create trial user accounts for these prospective customers. Each trial user account gets 50 free credits on us, that your customer can use for a period of 30 days. Here’s how you can create a trial account:

Go to Account | My Users | Trial Users. This is the new section* that we have created for you to manage your trial account users.To create a new trial account, click on the “Create New Trial User” button. What comes up would be the familiar user creation screen. Simply fill in the necessary information and hit the “Create User Account” button. The trial account will be created and a system-generated password will be sent via email to the new user. As you can see, this process is kept as simple as possible, and as similar as possible to how you are already creating normal accounts, so the learning curve is almost nil.

You can also easily upgrade a trial user account to a normal account when the user decides to sign up for your service. You just need to head back into the Trial Users screen and click on the “Edit” button under the user’s name. On that screen, simply choose how you want the user to access the system and specify the credit limits when you upgrade the user from trial to normal.

Right now, the only way to create these trial user accounts is through your own account. In the near future, we are going to make it possible for you to integrate this process into your website, so that your visitors can sign up trial accounts by themselves without requiring you to set up for them individually. So, do stay tuned!

* If you are using our trial account, you will not see this new section, because by default all your users will already be trial account users.

Direct your users to your own support website

Do you already have a support website or knowledge-base that you have set up to help your customers get around sendcube and email marketing in general? If you do, then this is a piece of good news for you! You can now customize the “Get Support” link that your customers can click on in the top right hand corner of all the sendcube pages to point to your own support website, instead of just showing them your company’s support information.

Setting up your support website URL is a simple process. Just go to Account | My Users | Support Settings, type in the URL to your support website, hit Submit and you are done!

For those of you who do not have your own website to link to, that’s fine. Things still work the same as before and you do not have to change anything.

Display your own RSS feed

As a sendcube customer, you see an RSS feed of this blog, cubevibes, on your Dashboard screen. Wouldn’t it be lovely if you can show your own RSS feed to your own customers? Well, now you can! Just head to Account | My Users | My RSS Feed and provide the URL to your blog feed and hit “Save“. If you have provided a valid feed URL, you will get a preview of the feed that your users will see on their own Dashboard screens.

So, if you already have your own blog, this is just going to take you one minute to set up, and you can instantly keep your users connected to your news and updates. Pretty sweet, we think.

And this is only the beginning, folks!

We are very excited about this release because it marks the beginning of even more reseller goodies to come, such as custom domain names and the ability to set your own pricing and collect payments from within the sendcube application. We hope you will like what we have done for this release, and hope you will stay tuned for more upcoming releases.

As usual, we welcome any feedback or suggestions. So, feel free to leave your comments about this release or what you would love to see in the future.

If you are a sendcube customer, you do not need to do anything. Our beloved delivery team had taken the necessary steps to sign up to the new FBL and this is now all in place.

Most of the campaigns that go out do not add the “Forward This Email” function in their email campaign. This would be one wasted opportunity for you to be able to capture new subscribers or at least to create some form of viral marketing for your campaign.

We have made adding this link process as simple as possible and you should consider using it. After all, whether or not your subscribers actually forward to their friends, having that link will have provided them with the convenience to do so, if they want to.

To add your “Forward This Email”, simply click on the Personalize button and choose “Personalized Link” followed by “Forward This Email”, and the link will be added to your campaign. That is simple right?

So next time you want to send your campaign, do remember to include a “Forward This Email” link and open up the opportunity to spread your campaign and get more subscribers.

First, before you can do this, you have to ensure 2 things:

1. Set up Google Analytics to start tracking on your website. We are not going into details on this but since we are nice guys, we will give you a link to Google Analytics tutorials. The tutorials was done in 2007 but good enough to get you started.
2. Enable Google Analytics in your sendcube account.

To enable Google Analytics in sendcube, simply do the following:

1. Log in to your sendcube account and click on Account tab.
2. Next, click on My Account tab follow by Campaign Settings.
3. You will see an item called Google Analytics.
   
4. Click on the checkbox labelled Turn on Google Analytics for my campaigns to activate Google Analytics for your campaign. Then, click on the Save Changes button and you are done!

Now, when you start your new campaign, you will see one additional step, that is Google Analytics.

Proceed with setting up your campaign as normal until you reach Step 3, which is Google Analytics?. We understand that not all campaigns require tracking with Google Analytics. That is the reason why we give you the option to enable it individually when you need it. To enable Google Analytics for your campaign, click on the checkbox labelled  Enable Google Analytics for this campaign.

Upon clicking on the checkbox, you will see the following screen.

By default, we will take your campaign name you entered previously, but you are free to change it, simply enter the new campaign name in the Campaign name field. Do take note that changing this field will not affect your actual campaign name set previously.

On top of that, we added the following information:

1. Source: startedm - This will allow you to know that the traffic source is coming from startedm
2. Medium: Email - This tell you that your traffic is coming from email
3. Keywords: Links title or Alt text - If you put title tags in your links or alternate texts in your image links it will be captured by Google Analytics for more detailed reporting.

Once you have set all this up, proceed with your campaign setup as normal. sendcube will now know that you would like to extend your tracking to Google Analytics and will automatically add additional codes to all your links in your campaign.

That’s it and you are done!

In my next posting, we will be looking at Google Analytics and where you can view your reports. For now, happy email marketing and don’t spam!

What is a feedback loop?

A feedback loop (FBL), sometimes called a complaint feedback loop, is an inter-organizational form of feedback by which an internet service provider (ISP) forwards the complaints originating from their users to the sender’s organizations. - Wikipedia