Serving Up Outside Ads in Your Email Campaigns

Imagine, if you will, you're 'Joe's Pie Shop'.

It's almost swimsuit season, so business could be better. Time to amp up your marketing outreach and remind customers why your pies are worth the thighs. What do you do? You turn to a targeted email campaign.

You want to reach out to customers to elicit a reaction - a click to product, information, or a customized traffic lane on your website.

After devising an extremely clever and meaningful subject line that grabs their attention, recipients open, determined to dig deeper into what this communication's all about. Then, they're greeted by ...

SERVE IT UP RIGHT! Check out fancy, forever servewear on perfectpietools.com. 

Customer: "What? You have pie AND you're offering a value-add to enhance my pie eating experience? You're the best, Joe."

Well, at least that's the preferred reaction. But the flip side is that your customers' spammy senses could start tingling - damaging your reputation and the overall effectiveness of your email campaigns. Even if you're benefiting from a financial or product trade with this partner, that short-term benefit can get old, very fast, with potential, long-term customer relationships.

The good news is that if you present outside advertisements or endorsements in the right light, mutual success (for you, your partner and above-all your customer) is easy to achieve.

Here are some common sense tips:

1. Be relevant. You're a pie shop. So, skip the ads for gas stations. Unless, of course, you're empathizing with customers about tough economic times. Notifying them of a pie sale - and sharing an ad to the cheapest gas in town (to get to your place) is thoughful. Even better: Presenting an ad for $.50 off vanilla ice cream for Joe's Pie a la mode.

2. Be honest. Why the ad, Joe? If there's any confusion about why there are ads in your emails, address it with customers head-on. "We're including these ads to help keep our pie costs low" or "We provide ads for our community partners as a service to you". However you spin or explain it, your customers will appreciate your honesty. Here's an example from the web that still holds relevance for email: Pandora.com is a successful, live music streaming website - and they're not afraid to share with customers why they need to include ads.

3. Protect your reputation. Congrats - you're hitched to your advertiser in reputation. Now that your brand is tied to another's, beware. If that partner isn't as attentive to retaining ethical marketing as you are, what they do can hurt your business.

4. Exercise moderation. Don't overdo it. Consider there are times your customer simply wants some alone time. That means one-on-one communications between you and them. Email campaigns that includes outside ties or advertisements can be perceived as anything but personal, especially when it happens frequently. Customers may even feel 'sold out'.

5. Go full circle. Cross-branding like this is also an easy way to upsell back to your own products or services. If a tool makes it easy to serve up your pie, why not offer a discount on pie plates to complete the "set"? In this way, all products on the table present a relevant, cohesive offer that makes sense to a recipient. The information evolves from pure ad form to one of a trusted adviser who offers insight based on what you know your customers want or need. How well-thought out of you, Joe!

Have a question or comment about this blog? Looking for more insight to make your email marketing the best it can be? Contact us any time. We'd love to hear from you.

Until then, have a great rest of the week!

New Feature: Preserve the Message-ID in Transactional Emails

JangoMail now has a new checkbox on the Settings --> SMTP Relay page, that allows you to preserve the original Message-ID of an email sent via the SMTP relay. By default, the Message-ID is overwritten by the JangoMail system Message-ID.

Here is an example of a JangoMail system Message-ID:

Message-ID: <254970262215471@jngomktg.net>

It's a unique number followed by @jngomktg.net. We have received a few requests from JangoMail clients to preserve the original Message-ID of the message transmitted through the relay instead of overwriting it with the JangoMail system generated Message-ID. For example, an email sent using Mozilla Thunderbird has a Thunderbird-generated Message-ID that looks like:

Message-ID: <4DB66014.1070804@silicomm.com>

In this example, Mozilla Thunderbird's Message-ID contains a unique string of alphanumeric characters and uses the domain of the receiving email address. If you check the Preserve Message-ID box, this will also be the Message-ID in the final email delivered to the recipient. If you leave this box unchecked, this Message-ID will be replaced by the JangoMail system Message-ID.

Calling the API directly

If calling the transactional email API directly via the SendTransactionalEmail method, you can specify a custom Message-ID in the Options parameter using the CustomHeaders attribute:

Options:

OpenTrack=True,ClickTrack=False,NoClickTrackText=True,SkipUnsubCheck=False,SkipBounceCheck=False,UseSystemMailFrom=True,CustomHeaders=Message-ID:<4DB65FC8.8050705@silicomm.com>

Why is this useful?

The new Preserve Original Message-ID setting grants you full control of the Message-ID header value. This is useful if you have a custom reply management system in place, such that responses and bounces can be tagged with their original Message-ID.

New Feature: Google Analytics integration now works with transactional email

Google Analytics integration is now available with transactional email sent through the SMTP relay or through the API.

If you're already sending mass emails through JangoMail and using Google Analytics, then you need not change anything for your transactional email to also start working with Google Analytics. The only difference between the way in which mass emails are tracked versus transactional emails, is that the "Subject" becomes the "Transactional Group Name" and the "CampaignID" becomes the "Transactional Group ID".

For example, if you're using the default Google Analytics settings in your account, as shown below:



Mass emails with click-tracked links will take the recipient to a URL that looks like this:

http://www.browniekitchen.com/?utm_source=JangoMail&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Welcome+to+Brownie+Kitchen+(789829313)&utm_content=ajay.goel%gmail.com

Transactional email with click-tracked links will take the recipient to a URL that looks like this:

http://www.browniekitchen.com/?utm_source=JangoMail&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Welcome+Group+(22514)&utm_content=ajay.goel%gmail.com

Notice that the difference is that with transactional email, it's not the Subject of the email that gets recorded in Google Analytics, but the Transactional Group name to which it belongs. This determines what the campaign is named inside your Google Analytics account. For mass emails, it makes intuitive sense that the campaign would be named by the mass email's Subject line. For transactional email, it wouldn't make sense to use each individual email's Subject line, because if you send 1,000 transactional emails, all with different Subject lines, you'll end up with 1,000 different campaigns in your Google Analytics account, and making sense of the data would be impossible. That's why transactional emails will be categorized by their Transactional Group Name and not their Subject.

You may use any combination of these values in the four Google Analytics variable fields:

%%EmailAddress%% = the email address of recipient
%%Subject%% = the subject of the mass email campaign
%%CustomID%% = a custom identifier chosen by the user for mass email campaigns
%%CampaignID%% = the JangoMail identifier for a mass email campaign
%%TransactionalGroupName%% = the Transactional Group Name of a transactional email
%%TransactionalGroupID%% = the Transactional Group ID of a transactional email

%%Subject%% and %%CampaignID%% are used for mass emails and %%TransactionalGroupName%% and %%TransactionalGroupID%% are used for transactional email. However, if you are using %%Subject%% and %%CampaignID%%, and you send transactional email, then %%Subject%% will be treated as %%TransactionalGroupName%% and %%CampaignID%% will be treated as %%TransactionalGroupID%%. That means that if you're using your account to send both mass email and transactional email, you can leave the defaults in place for utm_campaign:

utm_campaign: %%Subject%% (%%CampaignID%%)

This setting will allow Google Analytics integration to work with both your mass email and transactional email messages.

More Reading:

For more information on our Google Analytics integration including screenshots of what your campaigns will look like inside Google Analytics, please download the PDF guide to JangoMail's integration with Google Analytics.

New method to specify Transactional Group using the SMTP service

We've introduced a new method to assign a transactional email to a Transactional Group. Along with specifying the Transactional Group in the Subject line, you can now also specify it in a custom X-Header.

If you're using the JangoMail SMTP server to send transactional email, you're likely familiar with the concept of Transactional Groups -- categories to which you can assign various types of transactional emails. For example you may have the following Transactional Groups set up in your account:

1. Order Confirmations
2. Renewal Reminders
3. Thank Yous

Previously you could assign an email to a particular Transactional Group by specifying the Transactional Group's name in the Subject Line surrounded by curly brackets. For example, if I sent an email with the Subject:

Subject: Thanks for your purchase {Thank Yous}

...then this email would get assigned to the Transactional Group called "Thank Yous", and the email would be sent with the curly brackets and the part in between stripped out.

Now, there's an alternate way to assign an email to a particular Transactional Group...you can specify an X-header with the Transactional Group's ID. If you're sending emails through relay.jangosmtp.net programatically, such as through .Net or PHP code, and if you have the ability to add an X-header to the email message, you can use this method. The format is as follows:

X-TransGroupID: TransactionalGroupID

For example, if the Transactional Group "Thank Yous" had an ID number of 78929, then you would add the header:

X-TransGroupID: 78929

Specifying an X-TransGroupID header overrides any Transactional Group designation in the Subject Line.

You can retrieve the ID number of a Transactional Group by going to the Transactional Reporting section of your account, where the various Transactional Groups are listed, along with their delivery statistics and their ID numbers.

New Transactional Email API Methods

We have just released 3 new Transactional Email API Methods for the JangoMail Email Marketing API.

These new methods allow you to retrieve opens, clicks, unsubscribes, bounces, and complaint statistics for a single transactional email in your account:

*Reports_Transactional_GetSingleEmailStats_Dataset
  Retrieves statistics for a transactional email. Returns a .NET DataSet.

*Reports_Transactional_GetSingleEmailStats_String
  Retrieves statistics for a transactional email. Returns a string.

*Reports_Transactional_GetSingleEmailStats_XML
  Retrieves statistics for a transactional email. Returns an XML document.

Bug fix: Using the unsubscribe link in transactional emails

We have fixed a bug that prevented the unsubscribe link from working properly in transactional emails, including emails sent with the trackable SMTP relay.

To insert an unsubscribe link into transactional emails, do so the same way as you would with a regular email broadcast campaign, using a snipped of HTML code:

Just link to this URL:

http://x.jango9.com/u.z?***uniqueid****

and be sure to replace x.jango9.com with your account's actual Tracking Domain. The system default Tracking Domain is currently x.jango9.com.

If you link to the above URL in a transactional email, the ***uniqueid**** will be replaced by the JangoMail email engine with a string unique to your recipient. Then, then the URL is clicked, the recipient will be added to your account's unsubscribe list, preventing said person from receiving future emails from your account.