This might sound strange for an email company, but for certain activities we hate email. One such activity is the collecting of feedback from various sources, on what needs to be tweaked in an email campaign.

Endless chains of emails are sent between those giving feedback and the person making the changes. This person needs to make sure they do not miss any changes, while trying to decipher ambiguous change requests.

To address this problem, Emailcenter have introduced a tool to streamline the feedback process and improve communication. The video below demonstrates this, but here is a summary of the key features:

• Provide feedback by drawing on top of the email – remove ambiguity with visual annotations, so everyone is clear what the feedback means.
• Each comment is easily identifiable to the region and commenter, helpfully stored in one location, to make it easy to review all comments.
• Comments are archived for auditing purposes.

To understand how the Collaboration tool can make your email team more efficient, call the Support team on 01327 355871.

Following the recent publicised data breaches at a number of digital and email marketing organisations, we thought it appropriate to emphasise that Emailcenter takes and is continuing to take measures to safeguard our customer’s data held within Maxemail.

Password strength meter

One of the methods hackers use to gain access to secure systems is to make a ‘brute force attack’ on a users login. This means they will try and guess a password by using thousands of common words used in passwords.

Maxemail contains a list of millions of such ‘common’ passwords, which it does not allow users to have as their password. Users are also shown how secure their password is by Maxemail’s password strength meter.

Encrypted connection

Whenever you input any data into Maxemail it is done so over a 256bit high grade encrypted connection. This means that when you are doing anything from inputting your passwords or uploading data, this information cannot be accesses by any third parties.

IP restriction

IP restriction ensures that only those on your specified IP can gain access to Maxemail. To set up IP restriction simply:

1. Find out your IP address at www.whatismyip.com.
2. Log into Maxemail as an Administrator.
3. Select ‘Edit User’.
4. Tick ‘IP Restriction’ and enter your IP address.
5. For those wishing to access Maxemail in multiple locations, they should enter the IP addresses from these locations, separated by a comma.

Maxemail will also ban IP addresses that try to login too many times in quick succession.

In addition, there are certain steps that your organisation can take to increase the security of your data:

1. Ensure Maxemail users regularly review and change their login password.
2. De-activate login details for employees that have left the organisation.

If you would like to discuss your data security with a member of our client services team, please call 01327 355871.

Emailcenter won the Silver standard award at the Travel Marketing Awards last night. We received this award for the innovative work we have done for environmentally friendly adventure holiday company – ResponsibleTravel.com.

This award is the latest in a long list of reasons why companies are turning to Emailcenter to deliver highly innovative and targeted email marketing campaigns to their customers.

By using behavioural data captured from their website, ResponsibleTravel.com were able to target their customers with highly relevant holiday emails, resulting in a 254% increase in conversions of prospects.

Read the ResponsibleTravel.com case study.

To discuss how behavioural targeting can help your email marketing get in touch >

The rise of the smartphone over the last few years has been phenomenal. It seems as though almost everyone has either an iPhone, Android or Blackberry.

Whilst most B2C email recipients do not read their emails on their smartphones, the numbers are growing. In fact, according to a recent survey by Knotice 1 in 5 B2C emails are being read on a mobile handset.

With this ever increasing mobile activity for emails, we thought it was time to give you some tips on creating a mobile friendly version of your marketing emails.

I personally think that its more time efficient to create an online mobile friendly version (similar to a weblink) rather than setting up two versions of each email, but the tips below are valid for both methods:

• Make sure that you are sending a text alternative to your HTML version.

• Recommended width of 320 pixels (Max 600 pixels), the list below is in order of market share:
  1. Iphone – 320 pixels
  2. Android – 480 pixels
  3. Blackberry – 360 pixels
• Stick to a single column layout and make sure the content is left aligned

• Keep images to a minimum and make sure they are small in size

• Automatic text resizing – many mobile devices automatically resize your fonts, which can impact on the design. Use the CSS rule below to disable this:
  -webkit-text-size-adjust: none;

• Space your links out! It can be troublesome clicking the correct link on a touch screen so make it as easy as possible.

• Is your website mobile friendly? It’s all well and good optimising your email marketing for mobile devices but make sure the landing pages you are directing them to are as well.

• Test your work – make sure that you thoroughly test your web version before going live.
  There are some great tools out there for this, such as Litmus.

If you wish to discuss any of this with us, then please email the client services team or call us on 01327 355871.

Here at Emailcenter we love football and have started to sponsor our local football team – Northampton Town FC.

Northampton have had a number of memorable results this season, including a victory over Liverpool in which they beat them on penalties in-front of the Kop and Tuesday night’s triumph over league two rivals Crewe Alexandra.  Northampton came from a goal down to romp to a 6-2 win.

This was the first time Northampton have scored six at their current ground and the sweet victory was enjoyed by a good crowd including a number of us from Emailcenter.

Another memorable Northampton result in which 6 goals featured, was the game against Manchester United in which George Best scored his famous double hat-trick.

Watch the highlights