Your Friend - “I have some big news. I am moving to Australia in a few months!!”
You - “Nice! I’m glad you got the Job. I’m not jealous… much!”
Non-mutual Friend - “Generic congratulations/shock!!!” = Irrelevant email notification from Facebook
Non-mutual Friend - “Generic congratulations/shock!!!” = Irrelevant email notification from Facebook
Non-mutual Friend - “Generic congratulations/shock!!!” = Irrelevant email notification from Facebook
Non-mutual Friend - “Generic congratulations/shock!!!” = Irrelevant email notification from Facebook

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Recently our Principal Email Marketing Consultant – Sean Duffy, was interviewed by Ciaran from Target Internet on his views on all things Email Marketing.

Listen to a podcast of the Interview for some useful insights into email marketing topics ranging from customer relationship strategies and design tips all the way through to email analytics, the recent data breaches effecting the industry and the what the future may hold for email marketing.

You can view this and other digital marketing podcasts at www.targetinternet.com

If you would like to discuss any of the topics covered in this podcast please get in touch.

To celebrate the start of the new football season, we have created a league of the marketing emails sent by football clubs from the Barclays Premier League.

Read on to see if your team are going to make it into Europe, settle for mid table mediocrity or get relegated.
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There has been a lot of talk recently of data security, with the recent breaches at a couple of ESP’s, where millions of email addresses have been stolen by hackers. In both circumstances this has been because user logins have been compromised.

One of the basic rules of data protection is, only give access to those that need it. Reducing the amount of people that can access the data reduces the amount of people who can lose their logins to hackers.

This is one of the benefits of the ‘Enhanced User Permissions’ available in Maxemail V6. Users have always been able to specify what areas of Maxemail are available as per the screen below, but if someone needed access to a single list, they would need access to all lists.

Now for each user, you can assign them to a group. Then against each folder in Maxemail, you can define which groups can read or write in that folder. So you could set a group of users to be able to view all of your newsletters but not actually create any.

This applies to everything you store in Maxemail – lists, emails, reports, segments, templates, forms or dynamic content – choose which users have access to which folders in each of these areas.

Another enhancement is aimed at our customers who have multiple customer spaces. Previously users could either see just one or all customer spaces, but now it is possible to choose which ones they have access to:

For more information on configuring user access rights and folder permissions call our support team on 01327 355871.

Maxemail has had a powerful A/B Split Testing function for many years, that allows you to easily test anything about your email campaigns, to random samples of your lists. We have now enhanced this to make it even easier and quicker to use, allowing you to automate the picking of a winner for when you are not around to do so.

Here is a screenshot of the updated Split Testing screen:

Here you can see there are new icons along the top to open, copy, delete or create emails for this Split Test. The best way of adding different versions into the test, is to create one version you are happy with, copy it and change the one element you are testing in the other emails.

The other new icon in here is the “New Winner…” option. This opens the following dialogue box:

Simply select which metric Maxemail should decide the winning version upon. For example selecting “Total Unique Opens” will mean Maxemail chooses the winner that has the highest percentage of unique opens.

The next dropdown allows you to specify when the winner should be picked and sent to the remaining people on your list, which have not already received one of these emails:

When you do start using the updated feature, remember these key elements of best practice:

• Leave it long enough for results to become clear – even a subject line test might take 12 hours to be reliable

• Use a sample size of at least 2,500 people per test, ideally 5,000

• Change only one thing per test, otherwise you will have no idea what impact each element has had. This includes when you send the email, so make sure you send the tests at the same time

• Choose the right statistic to pick your winner from. While open rate might appear to be the best statistic for a subject line test, we often prefer to use click-thru rate. This is because if one subject line is directly related to the offer at the top of the email, this might generate more clicks, even if less people open it. After all these people are opening the email because of what is in the subject line.

The new ‘A/B Split Testing’ function will be available 9th May, 2011, as part of the V6 release.