September 23, 2008

Table of Contents   

Update Your Address!
Update of Physical Address Requirement

As per the CAN-SPAM Act, all emails are to include the sender's valid physical postal address. In accordance with that, CoolerEmail would like to remind all customers to update their physical mailing address from the Settings page of each mailing list. Simply log into your Account Manager and click on the "Settings" button from the Control Panel. Then enter your physical address in the two lines provided next to "Postal Address." Hit the "Save Changes" button, and you're done! When in compliance, you'll be looking good and feeling good.
The Knowledge Base
Help Just a Click Away

Many answers to function and feature questions can be found in the Help files. Simply click on the "Help" tab and start your search in the Knowledge Base. Enter key words in the space available, and use the drop-down menu to specify "matching ALL words" or "matching ANY word." Obviously you'll get more search results by choosing to match any word. Select the "Search" button, and search away! Results are listed according to their scores in descending order, so the most pertinent results should be near the top.
Managing Your Lists
Archive or Compress!

Do you have two or more editions for a mailing list?

Before they grow into an unwieldy list of editions, you can do one of two things: archive or compress. Archive editions by clicking the "Archive" button in the Control Panel and selecting the editions you wish to archive; to compress, check the "Compress Control Panel" option in the My Account page. If you compress those editions, they will be set as a drop-down menu in your Control Panel. Choosing either method keeps those editions more manageable.

Archived or compressed editions will continue to collect reads and click-throughs for tracking, as well as have functions such as send-to-a-friend operable. Of course, editions may be made active or the compress option may be unchecked at any time.
Account Configuration
What's in Your Account?

CoolerEmail customers are urged to familiarize themselves with their My Account page, particularly for account configurations. Numerous choices exist there for account settings, bounce thresholds, etc. Go check out your choices and customize your account configurations to match your preferences.


We are always striving to make CoolerEmail ever better. Customer requests for feature enhancements are responsible for many additions. If you have feedback or suggestions, please send them to suggest@cooleremail.com.

Cooler by Design

Send a Cooler cartoon suggestion, to Bill Mitchell!
THE COOLER CLIENT PROFILE:

Art Shectman of Elephant Ventures

Art Shectman is the president of Elephant Ventures, a firm in New York City that specializes in digital marketing solutions, providing expertise in Internet marketing, technology strategy and web development. In addition to marketing, Elephant Ventures has a deep base of programming talent.

Cooler Tips: Art, describe how you utilize CoolerEmail to communicate with your customers.

Art: We are a CoolerEmail VAR, and we use our branded service, groundwave, to help our clients achieve extremely high deliverability rates based on the CoolerEmail platform.

We have created customized database and list management tools that monitor particular business cases or user profiles on our client's websites, then we engage the CoolerEmail XML API to generate personalized marketing emails to individual users. We have campaigns that run as autoresponders one, three and five days after a user's interaction with us, or also as monthly "periodic" campaigns. For the periodic campaigns we typically see three to five campaigns going out each month for a given client, and we help them to design the messaging and the offers they need to present to support a regular set of monthly communications.

Cooler Tips: What significant things have you learned from analyzing the real-time statistics CoolerEmail provides for each edition you send?

Art: We've learned a lot about the delivery times on the other end. Yahoo, for instance, will delay presentation of a "received" email into the user's inbox, sometimes as much as six to eight hours from the time of receipt.

CoolerEmail helps us to address this issue by setting the timestamp at the time they hand the message off to Yahoo. Unfortunately, once Yahoo has the message, sometimes they take time to actually show it to the recipient. So, while there can be as much as a few hours' delay in getting messages delivered to our Yahoo recipients, the messages go as close to the top of their inboxes as possible due to the fact that CoolerEmail timestamps our messages just before delivery to Yahoo and not when they're placed in our local email queue.

We've also created a Yahoo delivery-lag monitoring script that gives us a good idea of what the current lag is at any given time. We also make heavy use of the bounce reporting tools. When we send large broadcasts, we carefully monitor the open rates and bounce rates by domain. We always try to catch any domain-specific delivery issues before our clients do and to begin work on resolving those blocks as soon as we can.

Cooler Tips: What methods do you use to build your contact list? Which ones have been most effective?

Art: The single most effective campaigns we have run for list building are in-store giveaways for our clients that have brick-and-mortar stores. For those customers that are online only, gift promotions or sweepstakes have been effective as well. Running a sweepstakes giveaway is not as hard as most people perceive it to be, and it can yield great results.

Cooler Tips: How has CoolerEmail helped to improve your business?

Art: CoolerEmail has helped us to generate more than $7 million of client sales through promotional email marketing. It has also created higher levels of repeat visitors (and several million new visits) for our clients that are content publishers through the creation of weekly newsletters for them.



Editor's note: This is the second in a series of interviews with CoolerEmail clients intended to give our readers more insight into how they may benefit from using CoolerEmail to communicate with their customers. These are "power" users and their profiles start with a brief introduction followed by a question-and-answer format.

CoolerEmail
  •   ,
866.4COOLER   •   Fax:   •   editor@cooleremail.com   •   http://cooleremail.com