Moosend Blog

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Moosend Status

Although Moosend is only on a private beta currently, we continue to monitor our infrastructure that consists of multiple Windows and Linux servers and a various worker nodes distributed across the globe.

Especially in these first days that we intentionally bring part of the infrastructure down to roll out new updates it would be nice to let you guys know what's is the current status of Moosend.

For this purpose we have a rather basic but neat tumblr page to keep posting small updates on how our infrastructure has been doing and whether there are any known problems.

You can find the status page by visiting:

http://status.moosend.com

The status page is also reachable through @moosendstatus if you prefer the twitter discussion.

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Email newsletters vs social networks = 1-1

During the last few years , there is a huge development of Social Networks Marketing Strategies. No doubt about this , social networks are great tools for new age marketeers, who tend to use them almost exclusively for their campaigns. On the other hand, email marketing - Internet Marketing grandfather - is mature enough, many times even misread due to spam issues , but based on my opinion is the ultimate marketing tool. Let me share with you my thoughts : 1) Email newsletter, stays in user's inbox as long as he/she decides to read it, forward it, delete it or mark it as spam. In social networks , new updates ( tweets, fb walls etc) replace olds. There is a huge possibility that your audience will never read your marketing updates since these will have already been replaced by a farmville invitation(!). 2) Most people use social networks , just to make fun with their old/new friends. So their logic is usually ( not always ) "anti-marketing". Of course this is not a rule, it is in the marketeer's hand and brain to find new ways to promote new products and services ( for example a facebook game...) . Email marketing is more professional , due to the fact that emails are most used for business stuff and not for having fun. 3) An email newsletter is always unique. Your imagination and some simple design rules are the limits. Social updates are limited in 2-3 lines and maybe a photo. 4) Emails are more measurable than social updates. You have the ability to know exaclty who read the newsletter, what links were the most clickable and more efficient. 5) And finally relevant cost. Email marketing has some expenses, but most of the times, significant higher ROI . Social campaings are cheaper, but results are much worse ( Except cases that social campaigns co exist with online game apps, coupons, etc) These were the advantages of email marketing vs social marketing. But there are and some disadvantages such as: 1) Running email campaigns requires technical skills. That why you need moosend to take care all the necessary procedures . There is no comparison with the simplicity of setting up a facebook / twitter business page and start writing. 2) Building your email lists from skratch is really a time consuming task and it depends on several parameters ( Search engine results' positions, website design). Twitter and facebook let you grow your audience much more quickly, because of the existant undergoing users networks with millions of interconnections. And you can gain from these very easily. So the score is a draw. You can and must use social media but you cannot forget to design and send email newsletters. It is the best way to keep in touch with your customers and your leads. And Moosend is your No.1 assistant in this...

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Maximum width and length for HTML emails

When designing an html email, think of your readers! They will read it, so make it easy readable.

Don’t forget that your recipients are busy and have no patience at all, so help them.

Design your email with a maximum width of 550-600 pixels. This way you will avoid horizontal scrolling in most cases and your readers will see the email as you have designed it.

So, understand that horizontal scrolling is forbidden in any cases.

Regarding the height you should take into consideration that most readers, read their emails first in a preview pain. An average preview pane’s height is around 300-500pixels.

So put all your important content at the top of your newsletter in order to tease and make the recipients open it and read it.

Remember that readers are used of vertical scrolling, so don’t mind that.

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Moo Story: Segmenting mydeals newsletters per city, category, deal site and price

When we launced our private beta page the folks from mydeals.gr, the largest greek daily deal aggregator (it's all greek to me...), asked us to help them with a requirements that they couldn't handle easily with their current email service provider.

When a user registers in mydeals they enter their city and their deal preferences which includes their preferred price range, set of categories (e.g. hotels, restaurants etc) and deal site(s). Then, whenever the visit the website they view a personalized deal page that takes into account their preferences. What they wanted from us was to work with them and allow them to send this personalized deal page in the form of a daily newsletter to each of their users. 

This isn't a trivial task - Each user will have completely different deal preferences (hence a daily newsletter has to be "prepared" and issued for each of them programmatically). Also, the folks at mydeals wanted to track this newsletter as a single campaign daily! Therefore, we weren't able to use the main campaign interface or the direct SMTP easily. 

We decided to go with the direct SMTP option using the following practice: Retrieve the list of users and their preferences from the mydeals database, retrieve the content from an online version of their newsletter (which is personalized for the given user) and send that through Moosend Direct SMTP. All email messages are going out with the same subject to create a single campaign and track all performance metrics in one place.

Tip #1: Moosend SMTP will create a new campaign if a) either the subject line is different between sessions (i.e. email messages) or b) the subject is the same but the last campaign found for that subject is not part of the same session (i.e. it's an older campaign)

MyDeals have seen a tremendous growth in the last few weeks due to the personalized daily deal newsletter. Their registrations have increased over 150% and their conversion rates have literally spiked up. We are happy to work with happy customers :)

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How to write a good subject line (Part 2)

In the second part of “How to write a good subject line” we will give you some important tips in order to get great results.

It is very crucial to understand how important is to create a subject line that will make your recipients open it.

After the “from” address, that should definitely be your company name, the subject line will make your recipients answer the question: Is it worthy opening this email?

It is easy to understand that you have only few words to make your subject line competitive, specific and create a sense of curiosity.

So here is what you should try to do:

Keep it short:

Try to keep your subject line short. It must not exceed 50 characters including spaces. Recent studies have shown that subject lines with less than 50 characters have 10 percent higher open rates than those with 51 characters and more.

Keep it specific:

Make you subject line as specific as you can and not generic in order to draw your recipients attention.

For example: “<Company name> Newsletter: June 2011” doesn’t say anything, doesn’t give any tip regarding the content.

It is better to write: “<Company name> Newsletter: 5 Tips for Better Vacations” It will draw recipients attention, cause it gives them a hint of what they will read. But make sure that the content meets your subject line.

Take your Time:

Writing a subject line is as important as the content, so give some time to think of a good subject and not just write down the first that came up to your mind. Try to think two or three different subject lines and then make a voting among your colleagues. You should definitely use the one with the most votes.

Run some Tests: 

In order to decide and conclude which is the best subject line that you are about to use, every time you send a campaign marketing newsletter, try to send to the same group of recipients newsletters with different subject lines. They will tell you which one they prefer, by watching the open rates in the reports of your campaign.

Or you can split your mailing list and send the same newsletter with different subject lines.

Run those tests a couple of times and then choose the subject line with the most openings. This one should be your default form of subject line.

Reconsider it:

Before sending your newsletter, reconsider your subject line. Read it once more and think if your subject line meets your content.

If your newsletter is about one product it is easier, but if it is generic you should be very careful. Highlight the top topics and think of a subject that includes everything and that will tease the recipients’ curiosity and will make them want to read more.

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What is the best day and time to send a newsletter ?

This is one of the most popular questions in the Email Marketing Industry. Choosing the right time ,most probably, will increase the CTR in more than just a noticeable percent.

So we will give some simple tips that should "make the difference":

Avoid sending on dead hours and days. The reason is fair simple . Imagine that you go Monday morning in your office and press the magic Send/Receive Button. You will get a few tens of emails , some of them concerning your business, other just newsletters and spam. Even if a newsletter is interested, most probably it will be deleted.

If your recipients are not in the same Timezones , split your list to avoid dead hours

Once again use the Trial & Error method. Save previous email newsletters performance, and try to compare them according different sending days and times.

But also these are quite simple for everyone to think off. There must be a more "scientific" method to decide the proper day and time.

Once again Google Analytics is your friend:

Create segments to summarize your site's traffic. For example create two segments, "Business Hours" and "Off business Hours"

Use the Google e-commerce Conversion tracker to find out which are the most profitable days and hours for your business.

Have a look at traffic sources from search engines. Days and hours that have more visits from search engines should be the best hours to launch a newsletter campaign.

If you want to be more scholastic , compare the same data in monthly base. For example if you run an everyday consumer e-shop, it is not wise to send you high promo offers in the last days of the month since most of the people run out of money these days.

In future we will publish specific case studies  summarizing the above tips (and other "secret weapons" ), so that you can get ideas and exercise your mind. 

Cheers...!

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Moosend: Architecture Overview

So as you know we recently released in private beta (want an invite?) and feel that we should talk a bit about what we did during the past few months (fifteen to be precise).

Moosend is an email campaign management platform with a web as well as a direct smtp-to-campaign frontend. We intentionally tried to keep the number of features put into the system down to a minimum to make sure that its easy-to-use and you can find your way around the app.

  With regards to the technology used, our aim was to keep the pricing down to as low as possible - Moosend was created cause we didn't have any money :( to run our own newsletter campaigns. Therefore, the development team engineered every vital component from scratch: From email dispatch to bounce management and spam analysis and content filtering to gathering campaign performance stats.

However, the original design of the app was *much* different that the final product. Initially we used an ASP.NET MVC frontend with a JAVA backend (for the dispatching service) using HA-JavaMail. The data tier used Hibernate/NHibernate reaching to a MS SQL Server 2008 database.

Later, we re-engineered the backend to use .NET backed by multiple messaging queues (MSMQs) and distributed across multiple machines. We also introduced a small Memcached caching tier. The backend bit is responsible for tagging campaigns appropriately to make sure that we can gather analytics such as open/click rates, and bounce reports. We have thought of using Port25's PowerMTA for the backend functionality but we are a startup and try to build software usable from small businesses like us. So in order to provide the lowest prices possible (and be as flexible as we want about it) we decided to roll our own email gateway for Moosend.

What we learned in the process:

 If you are building such large-scale systems, never commit on release dates! We have pushed our private beta launch a couple of months later than originally planned.

Get the design right from day one. Think about the resources in terms of developers and whether they feel comfortable going down the route you have chosen.

Get a coming soon page up and start gathering emails from people who might be interested in the app. This will help your marketing team later.

Hire a TOP designer - you have no idea how much good feedback we got for our design. We actually recently started re-designing the client backend (the management interface) to make it easier and more comfortable for you guys.

Test real world scenarios. For instance, if your clients are typically using X resources dont test using a hundredth of X.

Hopefully you found some of that useful. Expect to hear from us soon!

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How to write a good subject line? (part 1)

One of the most important things of your e-mail marketing campaign is to choose a good subject line. A subject line is the one that will make your recipients to perform the actions that you want, such as:

open the email,

read it,

buy your product or

make a click.

The subject line is something that must be given a lot of attention, same as the content. It’s a shame to have put such an effort to create a good email newsletter and not think a little bit about your subject line.

In this article we will try to help you and motivate you to think and come up with a good subject line.

A first tip that we can give you, is that your subject line should generate RIA: Recognition, Interest, Action.

Recognition:

Your recipients must understand that the email is coming from your company, in order to feel secure.

If not, probably your email will get ignored and deleted or even worse, marked as spam.

The top three factors that make an email recognizable is:

the name,

the subject line and

the content that appears in the preview pane.

Interest:

Now that your recipients recognized you, you must make them open your newsletter. Most people just read the subject line of hundreds of emails they get every day, and ask themselves whether it is worth opening it.

So you must generate the interest to make them open your email. But then, you must take into consideration that your subject line meets your content. You definitely don’t want to disappoint your recipients by giving them fake expectations.

Action:

The main purpose of your email campaign, after being recognized and evoked their interest, is to make your recipients take some action: buy something, download or click. So the subject line should give a small hint of what the recipients will read and create a sense of curiosity or desire.

  Having said all that, make sure your subject line doesn't "force" your recipients to perform the actions above. Besides, shouldn't your goal be to keep connected to your readers?

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Is SPF and DKIM the “holy grail” for passing antispam checks?

During last years , many newsletter end email marketing consultants insist that SPF and DKIM signing methods, are necessary requirements for achieving better newsletter readability scores.

But are these methods a “holy grail” for this?

The short answer is NO! And let us be more specific:

SPF, senderID and DKIM are the best methods to ensure that an email truly comes from the originating email. Of course that doesn’t mean that the sender isn’t just spamming the whole world.

For example, suppose a spammer who registers a new domain i-want-to-send-only-spam.com , configures the SPF records and DKIM signatures and starts sending millions of mails. Although these mails will pass SPF and DKIM checks, most probably these emails will get blocked by antispam content rules.

So the next question is “Should I use SPF and DKIM in first place?” And the answer is Yes. Using these methods, is the only way to protect yours’ domain reputation from forging attempts (internet bots, spammers, etc.).

Finally, I will give some statistics about the worldwide spread of SPF. You can actually see these statistics growing in http://spf-all.com/stats.html.

Total Domains 25665806 100.0%

Domains with SPF 2596351 10.1%

Domains without SPF 23069455 89.9%

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Introducing Moosend

Hello Folks – We are very thrilled to announce Moosend!

Moosend is a web app that helps you ease the burden of sending your email campaigns. We are just at the beginning and just started our private beta, so feel free to register your email address to receive an invitation when the first batch of beta invites is going to be distributed.

Although there are other tools in the market to send your email marketing campaigns we felt that small companies and start-ups can’t always afford their services (we know we couldn’t!). So we decided to make our own tool for managing your newsletter marketing.

Moosend offers two main services as part of its infrastructure:

a)      Direct outgoing SMTP designed to solve most of the problems integrating your web and mobile apps to a transactional email dispatch service.

b)      Web interface that lets you plan and design your newsletter campaigns, set up your subscription forms and manage your mailing list recipients.

All that on top of real-time statistics, deliverability reports and integrations with some of the most popular tools and web apps found online.