The Hotmail to Outlook Shift Means Minimal Pain for Email Marketers

The boards are buzzing (and some Hotmail users are groaning) about the automatic move to Outlook.com.  But for email marketers, is it hip or hassle?

Think of this Microsoft move as more of an overdue upgrade than a blocker. And we have some info and tips to help ensure the continued success of your email marketing as some of your customers potentially transition to Outlook.com.

Here’s a couple things to be aware of …

New: Multiple, alternate email addresses
Outlook.com allows your customers to create alternate email addresses without signing up for additional accounts (five a year, or up to 15 at any one time) like Google requires.

• What it means:

This can lead to some confusion about unsubscribed addresses. If a customer opts into your email communications with one address (for instance, "me1@outlook.com") and then creates another address linked to that account (for instance, "me2@outlook.com"), they’ll receive your emails at both addresses. Customers can also redirect merchant emails to specific folders (for instance, spamlike@outlook.com), where your messages may not get the exposure you’re hoping for.

• What to do:

Re-check all of your active campaigns for a spam score. You should be doing this anyway, so it’s not something beyond the norm.  Note: Even though Microsoft doesn't list any changes to spam filtering, the Bayesian databases from Hotmail may be merged with the rest of the Outlook cloud's databases.


New: Filters for better focus
Outlook.com has special filters for viewing certain types of messages.

• What it means:

For instance, your customers can now select “Shipping updates” for quick access to emails with UPS, FedEx and other tracking numbers for products they’re expecting from you. This will definitely be a bonus for your transactional emails.


New: More time to rethink deleted emails
Deleted messages (emptied from trash) will still be available for an unspecified time, which can help with finding an accidentally deleted email.

• What it means:

Whether it’s by accident or intended, your customers will have more time to rethink shifting your messages to the Trash bin. And before they make a final scan of its contents, your meaningful, targeted subject line could make the difference in their taking another look.


New: Larger file views
Outlook.com links with Microsoft’s online storage service, SkyDrive, to handle large files.

• What it means:

This now makes it seamless for your recipients in Outlook.com to get really big attachment files without having to go to an in-between web page to click a download link. This is sort of akin to how Gmail users can view embedded YouTube videos in their messages. JangoMail allows you to send large email attachments, but it is much more expensive, so we still recommend using a link in your email rather than a large attachment.


Some deliverability tips ...

• If your email has instructions on how to whitelist your email, you'll need to update this to include the new Outlook.com. An Outlook.com user can click the "Add to Contacts" link to add you as a trusted sender or click the "Wait, it's safe!" link in the Junk folder. 
• You’ll also need to test your emails for all existing campaigns to ensure that the formatting appears the same in Outlook.com as it did in Hotmail.

Other things to be aware of …

• Outlook.com could potentially mean better email deliverability, since address books will be shared automatically across Microsoft products.
• For transactional relay only users: If you have any rules running in your database to correct malformed email addresses, you'll want to add rules for Outlook.com.
• Like Gmail, Outlook.com will have "conversation" mode. So, if your marketing emails have the same subject line, newer emails will eclipse previous versions.
• Anticipate a tighter integration with Facebook – and potential for redundancy. If a sender address matches a friend’s on Facebook, then the latest posts or other information may appear in your recipient’s Outlook.com sidebar.
• Like the Outlook desktop app, Outlook.com has a preview pane. This feature won’t be enabled by default, but be aware it could be activated. This may potentially lead to very negligible, lower open rates, as it removes a step between arrival and open, which in turn discourages users from clicking on the "show images" button (since, in most cases, they can see all the pertinent content already).

As always, the JangoMail team is here to answer any questions you may have about this or any other topic. Hit us up – we’re here to help!


For more info from around the web, try these:
Beta News: Get Ready to Move from Hotmail to Outlook
NBC News: Microsoft's New Outlook Mail is a Welcome Hotmail Replacement
CNN: Goodbye Hotmail, Hello Outlook

12 Cool New Features You Should Know About

Fun fact: A Jangolope is a special breed of Jackalope known for its strength, speed, dexterity, reliability, brains, and fortunately for you— email deliverability.

In fact, the good fortune continues because we have a whole bunch of awesome features to announce this week. This is the biggest list of updates we've published in a single post in JangoMail's history. What have we been doing?

1. Clear Your Bounced Addresses

Bounces occur when you try to send an email to an email address and it doesn't go through. Bounces can happen for many reasons, including:

• The recipient email server could be permanently down
• The recipient email server could be temporarily down
• The recipient email server could be in a transitional state
• The recipient's email address could be temporarily locked (mailbox full, temporarily suspended etc.)
• The recipients email address could be unavailable (user's email doesn't exist, permanently suspended, etc.)

A "hard" bounce means the receiving server told us the address doesn't exist. JangoMail will stop sending after a single hard bounce to an address.

However, many of the potential reasons for a bounce are temporary. For these "soft" bounces, we stop sending email to an address after three different messages bounce by default (modifiable under your account Settings). This is sufficient for most users; but if you want to maximize your potential reach, it may make sense to clear some or all of your bounced addresses periodically.

To clear your bounced addresses, go to "Settings-->List Management-->Clear Bounce Addresses" make your selections and click "Save."

Choose a list (or all lists), choose a time frame, and click "Save" to clear your bounce addresses and reattempt sending to those addresses in future campaigns.

2. Save a Database Extraction to a JangoMail List

At JangoMail you can send campaigns to members with two basic methods.

1. The first is to build and store a list within your JangoMail account. You can do this manually (member by member), with an opt-in form, by importing members from a file, or via our API.
2. The second is with a "Database List." We support many types of databases you can connect to: Local databases, SQL databases, MySQL databases, Magento, Salesforce, and others. When you choose to send to these members, we connect to your database live and pull the email addresses and data to use straight in your campaign. These are pulled "fresh" each time you query your database to get recipients who meet your sending criteria at that moment in time.

Now we've added a hybrid of these two: a way to save the data from your database extraction straight into a normal JangoMail list— so you can use it for any of the features normally restricted to stored lists— such as list-based API requests, List Scrubs, AutoResponders, and more.

 

3. Sync JangoMail List Data From a Database*

To make the above feature (#2) even more useful, we added an option to keep the data in your JangoMail List in sync with your website database. When you save your database extraction to a list on JangoMail, you can also elect to "keep this data synced."

Keeping your list synced with your database will cause the list members to be replenished every day, with a successful extraction from your database, ensuring the list of members is always the latest and freshest available.

Note: If you enable list syncing, any manual edits you make to the list (editing members, deleting members, adding members, list scrubs, etc) won't be saved as they will be overwritten daily. Make those changes on the source (your database) if you wish for them to reciprocate onto your JangoMail List. Again, we pull fresh data from your database every day with a new extraction. This does not "push" data back to your database. Check out our documentation here for options to synchronize campaign result data back to your database as well.

You may also change this sync setting for database lists via List Settings
 

*This feature is not available for local databases.

4. Reporting Actions by List

We created a new "Actions by List" tab on the campaign reporting page that lets you view reporting statistics (recipients, opens, clicks, bounces, and unsubscribes) broken down by each list in your campaign. This tab only appears for campaigns with multiple lists. Use it to compare the performance of your lists.

View list performance data in a sortable chart or via graph–with one graph generated per list in your campaign

5. Reporting List Performance

We created a "List Performance" tab on the campaign reporting page that lets you compare the performance metrics of each of your lists in the campaign–scaled by the number of recipients. This is extremely useful if you want to compare which of your lists in a campaign are performing better–not just by how many opens or clicks (because these numbers are biased by the number of list recipients) but by the ratio of list-opens to list-recipients for example. You can now determine which of your lists and sources are performing best, which form of lead acquisition you should focus more or which you should drop.

Compare list performance in a sortable chart or via generated charts for each of the major stats: recipients, opens, clicks, bounces, and unsubscribes.

Look forward to more of these awesome reporting stastics, as we have a few more in the queue. You can help make them appear faster on special request.

6. List Columns -- Hide with Right Click

Have a List with several fields? Right-click on a column header to hide the column temporarily and make it a bit easier to navigate.

Don't worry, the data didn't go anywhere. To reload your full list again, simply refresh the page.  Look forward to a more comprehensive solution and more nifty additions like this to make their way to the user interface soon, as we strive to make your experience as smooth as possible.

7. Resume a Campaign From Messages

Pause a campaign so you could make changes? Edit and save your changes, then resume the campaign with finesse, from the the message page itself by clicking the "Un-pause this campaign" link at the bottom of the page. You no longer need to jump to reporting to select Resume (Note: Make sure to save your changes before resuming.).

8. Spam Check Details

Have you made use of the Delivery Tests tool on the Messages page to test your campaign across different spam detection software? Now we are revealing extra information that is available from the spam tests–should any be available–simply click the "yellow warning sign" on the test screen when one appears.

 

9. List Filtering Updates

Filter your lists much?  We've added some extra comparison operators to make building a custom query to filter through your lists much more simple. Use the "Simple Query Editor," select a field, an operator and a date and run your query to grab your lists.

10. Filter Member History

If you're browsing a member's campaign history, you can now filter by a specific time-frame. Choose from as little as a week or 5 other intervals up to 1 year.

11. Delivery Tests and Mail Client Previews

Our Delivery Test and Mail Client Preview Tools allow you to test delivery and preview what your email will look like in different mail clients such as Outlook, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, Gmail, and more. Because there are a lot of tests on many platforms, it can take some time to process across all of the different clients.

Now we've added timers that give you an estimate of approximately how much time is remaining to render the delivery check or preview. A finished test shows the green "checkbox icon" that you can click to see the preview. If there are problems with your test, you'll know about it as well with a red icon and details of what went wrong with that client.

12. Campaign Identifiers on the Messages Screen

Campaign Identifiers are optional fields for messages that allow you to uniquely name your campaigns. We've added this field to the Messages page so now you can browse, sort, and search your campaigns by the Campaign Identifier field.

Until next time.

We hope you enjoy these new features, the new look of JangoMail, our mascot Jack the Jangolope, and the way we continue to evolve as we bring you a truly original email marketing experience. If you have any questions, comments, concerns, suggestions, requests or desires, please reach out to us.

Press Release: The Re-Imagined JangoMail.com Goes Live with Big Results

JangoMail.com has a new look that is earning widespread attention from its new and existing clients

DAYTON, Ohio-- JangoMail (www.jangomail.com), a trendsetting leader in permission-based email marketing, launched its all-new website this month. The new site features customized navigation and highlights features based upon their clients’ unique Marketing or Development needs, and is already seeing positive results.

“We designed the new JangoMail.com to focus on our ability to let our customers make the messages they want, their way,” says Ajay Goel, JangoMail President. “We built the navigation to help our dual audience of marketers and IT developers quickly find the features that they most desire,” he added. “And it’s working very, very well.”

The website’s client list seems to be equally enthusiastic about the new look and function. The average number of page visits per user on JangoMail.com has increased 59% since re-launch. JangoMail.com’s bounce rate is half of what it was prior to re-launch, and the average time on site has doubled.

The site’s new look and function focuses to create a clearer path to the large variety of features offered at JangoMail. Based upon a user’s role as either a Marketer or Developer, they can much more easily navigate the website to locate specific tools and features relevant to exactly how they need to utilize JangoMail as their email marketing service. The interface is more efficient, customized and presents a dedicated service to each of these unique groups of clientele.

The JangoMail.com site also boasts a new mascot in the form of the eye-catching, “Jack the Jangolope” throughout their website and marketing outreach. “If your email needs to be a rabbit with antlers, we won’t try to force you into picking either the cute bunny model or the antelope model. Get exactly what you want with our extreme customization,” says Goel. “Jack represents evolved email made your way every time.”

About JangoMail
JangoMail leads the permission-based email marketing industry, offering services for transactional and marketing emails. Over 4,000 organizations on six continents rely on JangoMail and its transactional service JangoSMTP to stay in touch with their customers and prospects. JangoMail offers flexible pricing and unique features for entrepreneurs and businesses of all sizes and industries. Customers include Washington Gas Energy Services, the Children's Hospital of Atlanta, New York Road Runners, Spirit of America, the San Jose Police Department, and Reuters. To learn more, call 1-888-GO-JANGO or go to https://www.jangomail.com/ and http://www.jangosmtp.com/.

The new JangoMail.com is live!

Our new JangoMail website is truly all about YOU.

Since we started out, it’s been our only mission to do what we do best – by listening to you, our customers. We’ve always asked for input, feedback, and for you to be brutally honest about what we can do better. And when you responded, our design team went straight to work.

The result is a JangoMail.com that’s easier to read and navigate … featuring more comprehensive data about our growing list of intuitive features. The snappy, new color scheme is pretty neat, too.

 

JangoMail now features your very own customized, segmented content area, too. Whether you’re a Marketing or Brand pro who wants an off-the-shelf solution, or a Developer or IT guru looking to get your hands on some raw code.  You’ll find everything you need to know to make the most of your email marketing.

 

Plus, we’ll show you the popular features your peers are using right now. (And you might want to take advantage of, too.)

Who is Jack the Jangolope? Like the now confirmed existence of our new mascot, JangoMail has proven that myth can really become reality when it comes to the once unattainable tools for highly successful email marketing. In other words, if our customers can dream it – our team will do its very best to create a tool, technology or feature they need to succeed.

Like our new homepage asks: Are you ready to make your email marketing the stuff of legends? Take a look around. Let us now what you think. Contact us if you have any questions. We may be taking a few minutes to catch our breath after working on our new website. But, you’d better believe we’ll still be on the lookout for your continued feedback to keep making JangoMail the best if can be for you.

Special thanks to our JangoMail development team for making our new website a reality!

Welcome, New Year. Here are some new features

Happy New Year! You may have heard in the last post that some big additions are on the way to welcome you into the new year.

That will just be the start for 2013. We're on course to bring you many new things to revolutionize the way you do email marketing. We thought we'd kick off the new year by letting you know about a couple of new features we released that you can begin enjoying now.

Journaling Addresses

We added a feature to JangoMail that we call "Journaling Addresses." These are email addresses you can add to your account that will receive a receipt (copy) of every outgoing email that is sent through the relay, our website, or with the API. With journaling addresses, keeping an accurate history of all outgoing communications for internal audit purposes couldn't be more simple.

To add Journaling Addresses to your account:

Go to Settings --> Authoring --> Journaling Addresses.

Add your journaling addresses. Make sure to specify if the journaling address should apply for your broadcast sending, your transactional sending, or both.

Journaling Addresses receive a copy of every email that is transmitted with all headers intact in the way they were originally crafted by you before initiating the send. For example, if you sent an email to a recipient with 4 cc's and 4 bcc's, you will see all of these recipients under the proper heading (to/cc/bcc) in the email sent to the journaling address, so you can have a real, traceable audit of all emails that were sent.

Note: For now, we have a hard limit of 5 journaling addresses that you can use for broadcast sending. This could change in the future, especially with your request.

Multiple CC and BCC Addresses

We made some modifications to how bcc and cc's work. Plain and simple, we added the capability for you to specify multiple cc's and bcc's in your email via the SendTransactionalEmail API Method, the SendMassEmail API Method, the web interface at JangoMail.com, or even with transactional email passed through the relay--And we made sure that they're displayed exactly how you want them displayed for every end-recipient.

To add cc and bcc addresses with an email on the JangoMail website:

Simply separate multiple addresses in the CC and BCC fields with a comma.

To add cc and bcc addresses with the SendTransactionalEmail or SendMassEmail API methods:

Specify cc's and bcc's via the "option" string parameter. Use a comma between each option (cc and bcc) and a semicolon between each email address, as in this example:

cc=cc1@mattmock.com;cc2@mattmock,bcc=bcc1@mattmock.com;bcc2@mattmock.com

See the SendTransactionalEmail help page and the SendMassEmail help page for more information. 

To add cc and bcc addresses via the transactional relay:

Compose your email normally with your email client, via your website, or your web application, specifying the cc/bcc addresses as you normally would. Send your email via the relay server at relay.jangosmtp.net as you normally would, and leave the rest up to us.

 

Limit of 5 Addresses

For now, we have a hard limit of 5 cc and 5 bcc addresses that you can specify for all broadcast mail (not including transactional mail or mail sent with the SendTransactionalEmail API method). This limit could be increased in the future especially with your request.

Keep Your Eyes Peeled

Watch out for our new friend, Jack the Jangolope who will be making his public appearance shortly as our new mascot. As we look forward to the many new advances the new year will bring, we thank you for being our loyal customers.

JangoMail is getting a makeover...

We've been working hard to give JangoMail a little pizazz. Our new look is almost ready to unveil.

Want a sneak peek? Say hello to our new mascot: Jack the Jangolope.

We've Been Cooking

Hey JangoMailers. We hope your Thanksgiving holiday treated you well! We thought it would be a good time to update you on the latest foodstuffs we've been coddling. What's that you say? Oh right, our email marketing software -- we made some new enhancements you should probably know about.

Download Customer Receipt PDFs

You asked and we developed. For every invoice you receive, enjoy the option to download a PDF version for your records.

Whoops? Did you mean to send that? -- Quick Campaign Pausing



Click the pause button to pause your campaign.

Did you press the send button on an email, only to realize seconds later that you made a mistake or you forgot to add something? It happens to everyone sometimes, even to the pros.



Now we made it easy to pause a campaign immediately after you send it, so you can go back and make a change or cancel the campaign if you need to. Because JangoMail is fast, you needed a faster tool.





Make your changes, and click the play button to resume sending.

To pause a campaign, click the pause button on the Message Status screen that comes up after sending. Once you pause, you can rest easy. Your message will remain paused until you resume it -- which you can do by clicking the play button or clicking the resume link next to the campaign under Reporting.

More Customizable From Addresses

We made some new additions that allow you to customize the way From Addresses work. For starters, we added optional, 

Custom List From Addresses.

Sending to your 'dozer list is easy

You can now specify a custom From Address and Name for any of your lists. If you do, whenever you send an email to that list, we'll automatically set the From Address and Name for you to the one you specified for that list. That's a time saver! To specify a custom From Address and Name for your list, click the edit button next to the list you want on the Lists tab, then click on the List Settings tab and specify the name and address under the heading in there.

We also added an optional,

Default Account From Address and Name.

Under Settings --> Authoring, specify this new default to be applied to all broadcast emails-- that is, if the list you're sending to doesn't have a default From Address and Name specified for it. JangoMail will first use a list's default from address, then will use the account default from address if a list default is not present. This gives you the most customizable experience!

Finally, if you haven't specified a custom list From Address and Name or a default account From Address and Name, we fall back on the

Last Used From Address.

Quite simply, if you don't have list or account defaults set up, we'll use the last name and address you sent with in your previous campaign. If you haven't sent before, this could be your JangoMail signup email address or your custom JangoMail Email address based on your Username -- [Username]@jangomail.com

Default Click Track and Open Tracking Settings

While we were in the spirit of making message composition easier with Customizable From Addresses, we also added intelligence to click tracking and open tracking settings, by making them default to the last position to which they were set in your most recent campaign. This makes it easy if you like to use click tracking and open tracking at the same time. After the first time you set them, you'll never have to enable them again --

Simultaneously, if you don't like to use tracking, it will save you just as much time by defaulting to whatever settings you last utilized.

Much More

We have been fixing a lot of little bugs and making small changes and adjustments to make the UI as easy to use as possible. You may have noticed some of these things if you visited the site recently. There are a lot more on the way too. Internally, we just laid out a heaping new list of messages features we plan to implement before the end of the year. Get excited because some of these are pretty neat!

Adieu

We'll keep you posted with more very soon. For now, Happy Holidays, Happy Emailing, and thanks for sending with us! As always contact us with any requests or feedback.

Connecting, Sharing, Do More With Social

The wheels have been turning and we added a few new features to JangoMail you should hear about!

Connect With Facebook

First off, we've integrated with Facebook Connect. Now you can connect your organization's Facebook account to JangoMail Account in as little as 2 clicks. Connecting with Facebook boasts the potential for lots of cool, seamless social integration features in the future. These will help you to spread the word about your campaigns faster, with greater ease, and ultimately bring more customers in.

To connect with Facebook, go to Settings-->Integrating JangoMail with Other Systems and click on the "edit icon" under "Connect with Facebook"

Auto Sharing Campaigns

Among the first features you have with connecting to Facebook is the ability to enable Auto-Sharing of campaigns directly on your Facebook Page. When you enable auto sharing, campaign pages are immediately shared on your organization's Facebook Page, immediately when you send a new campaign. Your Facebook fans and followers can now be presented with your campaign message, live, right on their Facebook news feed.

Sign-In and Sign-Up With Facebook!

Another cool feature available to you if you connect JangoMail to your Facebook account is you'll have the ability to login to your JangoMail account from the homepage, just by clicking the "Facebook" button, under Login. 

This is really nifty for many customers, especially those who are logged into Facebook all the time, because when you're logged in to Facebook already, it just takes the click of the button at JangoMail.com and you'll be instantly logged into JangoMail. No need to memorize your JangoMail username or password. You can just use Facebook. How neat is that?

If you're already a customer, this feature is great, but if you're a new customer, it's just as easy to join up and create a new account on JangoMail using your Facebook account as well. Just click the "Sign-up with Facebook" button, accept the permissions, and start enjoying the Free Trial.

Share on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus

We love giving you different options for ways you can share. You don't have to connect with Facebook to share campaigns. You can also do it quite easily from the message status screen right after you launch a new campaign. Just click on the share links presented on the status dialog after you launch a campaign to post the campaign directly on Facebook, Twitter, or Google Plus.

You can also share campaigns directly from your campaign's web page, so you can rest assured that your organization and campaign recipients can keep the message spreading through all of cyberspace.

Remember also, as we announced in a post last month, Facebook and Twitter Share statistics can be easily viewed directly on the reporting dashboard. This information comes in handy as a way to quantify social effectiveness, as users spread your campaigns across the social networks.

We hope you've enjoyed some of the latest additions we've made. Stay tuned as a lot more is on the way! If you have any requests, questions, comments, feedback, please send us a message. We'd love to hear from you. And thanks for doing email right.

Keeping an eye on your auto-responders

Auto-responders are a great way to keep in touch with your customers automatically, while still allowing you to tailor content to their needs.  Whether it's scheduled meeting notifications, appointment reminders, or follow-up emails, these emails provide a way for you to easily keep your product or service in front of your customers.

Recently, I purchased a computer from a well-known "fruit" company.  In the weeks since my purchase, I've been receiving follow-up emails congratulating me on my purchase, reminding me about support options, and advertising for accessories for my new laptop.  I knew these were automatically generated emails that they had set up, but I applauded them for their attention for follow up with new customers.

In their most recent email, they listed a number of accessories to go with my new purchase - everything from carrying cases, bags, wireless mice, and more.  One of these items was a portable hard drive, and since I've been looking for one (great timing on their part!), I figured I'd click and find out more about it.  I was taken to the product description page for the hard drive, only to see a note next to the price - "Discontinued".

These types of situations are avoidable, and it's important to keep an eye on your auto-responders to make sure that the message they're sending to your customers is up-to-date.  It's so easy just to leave your auto-responders alone and let them keep sending, but trust me, it's worth your time to dust off your auto-response emails every now and then to make sure they're sending the right message!