Command Center: Bob Discovers the JangoMail API

By: JangoMail Development
Bob's business is growing. Bob's sales staff needs to use email to make more connections with leads, and to promote more sales to existing customers. Bob's sales staff, however, isn't so great at learning new things. Bob already has his own software to run his business, and his sales staff doesn't like going outside of it to use other tools.

Bob needs his sales staff to use JangoMail's tools, but he wants them to do so directly from his own sales software. After all, his IT and development staff have worked hard to make his software work very well for his purposes.

That's why Bob uses the JangoMail API. API stands for Application Programming Interface. The JangoMail API lets Bob's developer connect his software directly to JangoMail.

Now Bob's sales staff can create messages, build contact lists, and send campaigns directly from Bob's own software. Bob's sales software, with JangoMail's API, brings more power, success, and money to Bob's organization.

But wait, there's more! The JangoMail API gives Bob's software access to reporting, transactional and campaign sending, contact management, account management, and many more features. Almost everything you can do within JangoMail can be done through the JangoMail API. Check for bounces. Count your opens. Do it all!

If you act now, we'll also include the ability to make requests through SOAP, HTTP GET, or HTTP POST. We'll even let you pull the data as string, .NET dataset, or XML.

All of this, AND MORE, for the great low, low price of nothing in addition to your normal subscription costs. That's right, access to the API is free for JangoMail customers. Yes, even free trial customers.

Want to know more about how the JangoMail API like Bob does? Click here to read more. You'll be cool if you do it, just like Bob.

Command Center: JangoMail Social Media and Facebook

One of JangoMail's advanced capabilities is its integration with Facebook and other social media.  JagoMail's Enterprise level email campaign manager can auto-share email campaigns with social media and Facebook.  This feature increases the audience reach of a marketing campaign or message beyond email.

Email campaigns can also be shared with Twitter and Google Plus.  Facebook and Twitter share statistics can be viewed directly on the JangoMail reporting dashboard.  This information provides a way to quantify social effectiveness, as users spread a campaign across social networks.

Leverage the power of social media to increase marketing effectiveness by embedding a Facebook Like button directly in an email campaign.  Clicking the Like button brings the recipient to a campaign page with a Facebook Like button to like a campaign.

JangoMails integration with social sharing sites also includes granular reports for social tracking of visitors.  The reports will detail who visits a page and from where and how many visitors and numbers of shares.

The new JangoMail social reporting statistics include:

• # of Unique campaign page visitors
• # of Visitors from Facebook
• # of Campaign shares on Facebook
• # of Campaign Likes on Facebook
• # of Visitors from Twitter
• # of Campaign shares on Twitter

Connecting Facebook with JangoMail's seamless social integration features will help to broadcast an email marketing campaign faster and with greater ease.  The net result is increased traffic and more customers.

Customer Spotlight: iwerk

By: Melonie Mottice
Senior Marketing Strategist

Welcome to our first Customer Spotlight!  Each post you’ll have the chance to read about one of our customers that are making huge email marketing strides using JangoMail.  Learn what features they use most and what you can do to improve your own campaigns.  This week, I’ll introduce you to iwerk, a software development and technical services company.

I had the pleasure of interviewing April Young, iwerk’s Delivery and New Business Manager.

Company: iwerk Industry: software development and                 technical services Website: www.iwerk.com Contact: www.iwerk.com/connect Favorite Features: custom reporting,                sub-accounts, and automation

Here’s a little background about the company: iwerk, is a software development company specializing in customer software development since 1991.  From websites to large database applications, the company operates as a digital arm, offering their clients full technical services.

A lot of iwerk’s clients are marketing agencies that need help with online promotions.

“Clients come to us because they’ve filled in a large project and they don’t have the resources to build it, so they make it pretty, and we make it work,” said April.

That’s where JangoMail comes in.

“Email marketing is a very integral part of our projects and JangoMail has been amazingly dependable,” she states.  “These are not small clients, these are big brands and everything has to function.”

April and her team use JangoMail’s transactional and broadcast service.

They work with a lot of clients that have specific needs that many other email service providers will not accommodate.

Here at JangoMail, however, we were willing to work with them.

When shopping for an ESP, April explains that finding one that could accommodate the needs of her clients was a challenge, until she started working with JangoMail.  In addition to our sub-accounts feature, custom reporting and automation were necessities.

“Usually one dev. (developer) is working on one project, and one is working on the other, so it’s very nice to be able to give them separate logins,” she said.

April’s clients do a lot of reporting.  She grants them access to the JangoMail dashboard so they can pull whatever numbers and stats needed each week without interfering with another account.

In order for any email campaign to be successful, JangoMail users must use quality lists that people register or opt-in for, not cold marketing emails.  JangoMail has a strict anti-spam policy to maintain the sending reputation of our clients, which is key to any successful email campaign.

In April’s case, the proof is in the pudding, well, campaign reporting.  She has some of the highest open rates we’ve tracked to date.

“We’ve had promotions where the email really is the next step in the registrant’s journey,” she adds.

Once a person registers for a contest or promotion, they receive an email with a confirmation code and they are redirected back to a website to enter the code in.  Without that automation, the promotion will not work.

To learn more about April and the iwerk team, check out their website at www.iwerk.com.  You can also contact them directly here.  They have offices in Detroit, Dallas, and Fort Worth.

On Track With Jack: Email Over Snail Mail

Hi Jangolopes!

Brrrrr...I thought the Ice Age was long gone, but I'm not sure after this week. Hibernation sounds pretty good right now, but with postage going up at the end of the month, there are so many emails to send! Turn the heat up on the polar vortex and read my tip of the week:

Choose email over snail mail.

At the end of the month, first-class stamps will cost 49 cents - a figure that has caused many businesses to ramp up their email efforts instead of spending extra money on postage. I encourage you to do the same, especially since email is more effective regardless of the cost of stamps. Here's why:

Speed: Email is really fast, like lightning fast, and your message is delivered to your subscriber within minutes. You can reach anyone from around the world instantly.

Convenience: You can send any message at the touch of a button, 24/7. You can schedule messages ahead of time and set up Autoresponders when you're away. Additionally, email is convenient for subscribers. They can easily respond and take your message wherever they go - on their phone, computer, or tablet.

Privacy and Security: You can send and receive different types of messages in a secure setting to people who want to hear from you. Their information is securely stored and kept private.

Sharing Capabilities: Share different types of emails easily with friends and family. What did we do before Forward to a Friend links and Social Share buttons?

Deliverability and Analytics: Monitor all your efforts through reporting to shape your future campaigns. In a short period of time you can: confirm the status of your message and view the clicks, bounces, and open rates. You can also work with segmented lists to target your audience.

To recap: Choose email over snail mail. The JangoMail team is standing by to help you incorporate more email into your business plan. We have all the tools and special features to make you successful in reaching more subscribers.

Has it been awhile since you logged in? You may have noticed our new user interface and Smart Templates. We're only a phone call away and support is free!  Get in touch with our live call center at 1-855-709-4099 and ask for a demo.

Sincerely,

Jack the Jangolope
Department of Awesome
JangoMail

About Jack

Jack the Jangolope is our JangoMail mascot.  Each week, look for Jack's emails for marketing advice, trends, and quick tips on how to grow your email marketing plan to the fullest!  Hop into email marketing each week with Jack's helpful tips!

What is a Jangolope? Find out HERE

We want to hear from you. Remember, at JangoMail it's your email, your way.  Have a topic you would like Jack to cover?  Email us at marketing@jangomemail.com with the subject line: On Track With Jack.  Follow Jack on Facebook

Subscribe to On Track With Jack

Got a few cooks in the kitchen? Bring it - you've got JangoMail.

Managing multiple clients or in-house departments is child's play using our cutting-edge email marketing features. Some of our clients' favorites include the ability to create any campaign, capitalize on results reporting, and share out to as many or as few team members and partnering agencies as you want.

Here's how to do it:

Create sub-accounts
Easily create sub-accounts for your clients underneath a master umbrella account. With your consent, internal or external marketing, design, public relations and digital agencies can take full advantage of our highly flexible client sub-account capabilities. This feature allows you to maintain multiple JangoMail accounts; each distinctly modified to best service the unique needs of each entity.
It’s a smart deal for your business, too. All accounts are billed together, so you’ll get the lowest cost per email of the combined total sending volume.

Create multiple logins

You can create unique login credentials (username and password) for your account, without requiring the creation of additional accounts.
Any authorized user can have access, with the same permissions as the main username/password. For added protection, only the Administrator's login has API access, and the authority to initiate mass emails through an external email client or FTP to the JangoMail server.

Reporting only logins
Not everything is for everyone’s eyes – or usage. JangoMail lets you create separate logins for your account that allow a specified user to see and utilize reporting functions. However, they don’t have the ability to access other functions of the site that you’d rather keep proprietary.

Private Label

Keep JangoMail behind-the-scenes, so your business can steal the show. JangoMail features private label capabilities, which allow you to create a 100% domain-branded private label solution that re-brands JangoMail as your own personal email advertising application.

List sharing
If your master account contains sub-accounts, JangoMail lets you share out email lists across any of those sub-accounts. Those sub-accounts can then share email lists between other sub-accounts. Information is only proprietary as dictated by your master account, allowing sub-accounts free access to a variety of email lists.

Unsubscribe/Bounce sharing
For your accounts that have sub-accounts, unsubscribe and bounce lists can be shared from your master account to any sub-account you choose. Sub-accounts can also share out unsubscribe and bounce lists between other sub-accounts.
Information is only proprietary as dictated by your master account, allowing sub-accounts free access per your direction.

Locked templates
Some email campaigns are meant to be shared out by recipients. However, our Locked Template feature allows you to maintain the integrity of some information with that particular email – whether it’s brand-related or an exclusive offer.

FTP
Your JangoMail account also comes with an FTP account (FTP to client.jangomail.com) to upload images and other files (PDF, XLS, DOC, etc.) into your account Assets, a library for your referenced files. For added peace-of-mind, all files are copied to both our primary and backup server locations during the upload process.

How cool is that? Tell us what you think about this or any other JangoMail feature. And if you don't see something you'd like or need, hit us up any time for ways to make it happen. Until next time, have a great week!

API Change: Timestamps returned from the Reports methods now in include time zone

In our latest update to the API, we decided to make a change in the way timestamps are returned. Previously, a call to Reports_Transactional_GetOpens_String for instance might return data like this:

example_address@nowhere.com
75.149.211.42
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US;)
09/14/2011 4:26:00PM

That's OK... but what timezone is that? The time being returned is ambiguous. Is that in the user's local time? JangoMail time? Furthermore, the timestamp is formatted as per the custom in the US - not very good for our international customers.

Therefore, we've decided to fix the issues listed above. From now on you should now get back timestamps that include a timezone and are formatted in a manner useful for an international audience.

Using the example above, you'll now see this:

example_address@nowhere.com
75.149.211.42
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US;)
2011-09-14T19:26:00.00+00:00

That's much better! It's clear that this timestamp is in UTC, and it's in a much more internationally friendly Year-Month-Day format.

Your reporting data will now last longer

I've spent the last few days analyzing and re-tooling our algorithms which purge data from your account after its reached a certain age.  In the past, we've had some hard rules, like mass email campaigns are deleted after they're one year old, and the list of addresses that opened are deleted 90 days after a campaign.  While this kept the size of our database manageable, it was frustrating to lower volume users who needed the data longer than we made it available.

We've now changed our data retention scheme such that the less data there is in your account, the longer it will last.  Specifically, the following rules for data retention will apply:

1. Email Campaigns: Users with over 10,000 campaigns in their account will have their campaigns deleted after the campaigns are one year old.  Users with less than 10,000 campaigns will have the campaigns preserved indefinitely. Only about 1% of JangoMail users have more than 10,000 campaigns in their account.  Email campaigns include the content of a campaign and the summary stats for that campaign, such as total opens, unique opens, total clicks, etc.
2. Detailed Recipient Data: Users with over 10,000 campaigns will have this data retained for 90 days.  All other users will have this data retained for 180 days.  Previously it was 90 days.  This includes the final recipient list for an email campaign.
3. Detailed Open Tracking Data: Users with over 1,000 campaigns in their account will have detailed open tracking data purged after 90 days.  All other users will have detailed open tracking data purged after 365 days.  This data includes the email address that opened, along with the time, IP address, email client, and location.
4. Detailed Click Tracking Data: For all users, detailed click tracking data will be available for 180 days.  Previously it was 90 days. This data includes the email address that clicked, the URL, the position, HTML or Plain Text message, the IP address, browser, and location.
5. Detailed Web Site Activity Tracking Data: For all users, detailed web site activity tracking data will be stored for 365 days.  Previously it was 180 days.  This data includes the page on your website a recipient visited after clicking a link in an email, along with the IP address and browser used, along with any custom tagging applied to particular web pages. PDF on activity tracking
6. Transactional Email Data: For users with more than 100,000 total transactional emails, this data will be available for 120 days.  For users with fewer than 100,000 transactional emails, this data will be retained indefinitely.  This includes the recipient address, from address, from name, subject, size, and other properties of transactional email but does NOT include the body of each transactional email.  We never store the content of individual transactional emails.  This also includes detailed open and click tracking data associated with transactional email. Web page on transactional email
7. Email Lists: All of your Email Lists are maintained indefinitely while your account is active.
8. Unsubscribes, Bounces, Complaints, and Survey Data: This data remains indefinitely while your account is active.
9. Incoming Email Data: Incoming email messages, such as replies, bounces, manual unsubscribe requests are stored for 7 days, and is unchanged from before.  This includes the full content of all replies that are gathered after an email campaign is sent.  This includes the content of the bounced message and the content of the unsubscribe request, but this does NOT include the actual bounced email address and the actual unsubscribed email address, which are both stored indefinitely.
10. Autoresponder, recurring, confirmed opt-in, trigger, and forward-to-friend campaigns: This data is stored for 30 days, and is unchanged from before.. 

We know that having access to historical data is important, as it allows our users to send campaigns based on historical data.  We're always working on ways to improve our data storage and efficiency, and if you have any particular storage needs related to your account data, let us know, and we'll do our best to accommodate you individually.

Leverage your Reports into better email campaigns

At JangoMail, we’re all about email, of course. Compose your message, build in all the bells and whistles of personalization, send quickly and efficiently, and then watch the results come into your Reports.

Reports, on the surface, contain really great information. At a glance, and in real time, I can watch my campaigns go out and see the tallies of opens and clicks mount up. More opens/clicks, the better my campaign is doing, right?

That is a part of the picture, but only a part. Taking it one step down the road, you can complete the picture by really analyzing how these results can be leveraged into better email campaigns, with greater ROI.

The same lists, with better return? That’s what we’re all looking for. There is a lot of data there for the taking, so I’m going to do a few posts on what you can glean from your current campaigns to make future ones even better.

Let’s start with the basics. We all like to look at our open and click reports over time. Are they improving? How did the latest email do? But how many of you actually do something to try to improve your open and click rates?

Are your Opens low?

Look at your subject line and find out what works best for you.

• Is it short and concise? Is it longer and descriptive? Is it so long that it gets cut short in some email readers?
• Do you include your company's name?
• Do you include your recipient' name?
• Do you keep your subject line consistent or change it up?
• Do your subject lines vary based on your customer demographics? One company doubled open rates by catering their subject lines to a recipient group's age demographic.
• Does it look spammy to you? Would you open it?

There's no one way to best format your subject lines, so test different formats. You'll surely notice that your recipients find certain subject lines more appealing than others.

Segment out your inactive customers. 

• Did they ever open? Find out what made them open your email. 
• Look at the data you have. Send an email catered to each customers' preferences and demographics.
• Send a reactivation campaign. Ask them their preferences. Would they like less email? Something different? Encourage them to unsubscribe if they no longer want to hear from you.
• If your inactive customers remain inactive after a number of attempts, it may be wise to remove them from your email list.

A note about Open Tracking -

Open Tracking works by tracking the display of an invisible image. Many email programs turn that off by default. If your message contains no other images that your recipients would want to see, they have no reason to enable images, possibly throwing off this metric. Plain text readers can't report opens either, so always evaluate this, along with Click Tracking, to look for trends over time.


Are your Clicks off?

Work on a strong CALL TO ACTION.

• Are you telling your recipients to click?
• How many call to actions do you have? Try to minimize the number of calls to action so that it's clear where you want your recipients to go.
• Do you have social media buttons? Encourage your recipients to join you in the social sphere. One study found this to increase click through rate by 30%!

This process should get you in the habit of using reports to improve your email campaigns. Test constantly! There are few guaranteed best practices. Find out yourself what works for you.

Next I'll talk about using geotracking and browser data to improve your emails.

New Reporting Features: Click anywhere, filter instantly

We have launched a major reporting enhancement that makes it much easier to segment reporting data and send on-the-fly email marketing broadcasts to segmented data with one single click.

The instant segmentation applies to data in these reports:

• Mass Email Opens
• Mass Email Clicks
• Mass Email Web Site Activity Tracking
• Mass Email Unsubscribes
• Mass Email Bounces
• Transactional Email Opens
• Transactional Email Clicks
• Transactional Email Unsubscribes
• Transactional Email Bounces
• All Bounces
• All Unsubscribes

Clicking almost any data point in one of these reports will result in an instant filter being created. The filtered data can then be used to send a new email campaign right away, or to create a new Email List.

Example 1, Filtering Click Tracking

For example, in our customer Popcorn Palace's account, here is a recent click tracking report:

After clicking on a URL in the click-tracking report, the filter is created, and a new report is generated:


Example 2, Filtering Web Site Analytics

In this example, we'll create an instant filter on the Web Site Activity Tracking report, a report that tracks a user's movement through your web site after clicking a link in an email campaign. In this example, we're going to use our own JangoMail account -- the one we use to email our own customers and prospects.

From the main Reports screen, click the number under "Page Views".

This gives you a list of all recipients and the web pages on your site that they visited. To filter down to just the recipients that created a Free Trial Account, or landed on https://www.jangomail.com/FreeTrial-Action.asp, click the URL anywhere in the report.

More Resources

For more information on the two new icons, Send new campaign, and Create Email List, available throughout Reports, see this blog post.

You can also filter an Email List directly from within the Email Lists tab. For more information, see the tutorial Advanced Filtering of List Members.