It amazes me every day when I see what our team is capable of. Whether our product team is rolling out a new feature or our service team is helping a marketer achieve greater results in the inbox, it’s pretty awesome.

I figured I’d outline some things about both our email marketing software platform and our services/support that you might not know much about. Take advantage of them – they’ll make you a better email marketer. It’s why we exist!

1. Snippets: These are simply small chunks of HTML content that you can create (like a boilerplate header, footer or side bar push area). Create ‘em, save ‘em and then drop a simple tag into any of your future emails and presto: we’ll merge that content ‘snippet’ into your email for you.
2. Social Share: Did you hear Twitter might be closing its doors? Me neither. Social media is here to stay and so is email: two great tastes that taste great together. Insert a simple tag and boom: your subscribers can share your emails with their networks on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, via email, on Google Buzz and more.
3. Cart Abandonment: 7 out of 10 online shopping carts are abandoned. 70%! Wow. Work like mad to figure out why, but in the end, SendLabs can go to work for you, firing off triggered mailings to each person that abandons your cart with an offer, incentive or reminder to complete the purchase. Studies show nearly 50% of abandoned shop carts can be recovered and turned into cha-ching…cash money, homes.
4. RSS-to-Email: Updating a blog or web site and want to re-use that content for your email newsletter? SendLabs can be set up to automatically grab your content via RSS and populate your email templates. Heck, some of our customers do this and use the next item to schedule the deployment and deliver while they sleep. It’s hands-free email marketing, baby.
5. Scheduled, Automatic Mailings: Set it and forget it. Want content to be deployed like clockwork? The SendLabs advanced scheduler deploys your mailings on time, every time. So while you’re grilling on a Sunday afternoon with Sam Adams, we’ll be delivering your messages whenever and wherever you need ‘em.
6. Inbox Preview & Spam Report: Curious to see how your email renders in Gmail? Hotmail? Outlook? Lotus (errr) Notes? How about on the Blackberry and iPhone? With one-click, Inbox Preview will provide a detailed screen shot report ensuring emails appear as intended. In addition, we’ll run it through all of the most popular spam filters (gateway, desktop and server-side) to see if your stuff might be mistaken as spam before you send.
7. Advanced Triggers: Want SendLabs to communicate with your CRM? While we provide stock Salesforce.com integration,  you may wish to integrate with some other system. With a standard SOAP API, you can have SendLabs “talk back” to any system you’d like.
8. Dynamic Content: It’s no longer a one-size fits all world. Mass customization is here and dynamic content allows you to deliver relevant content and offers based on subscriber preferences. It take a little setup, but the effort will more than guarantee higher response rates when you send stuff I want to know about and is unique to me.
9. Browser Image Editing: Let’s face it: Photoshop can be overkill. Sometimes you just need to make a simple image edit and drop it into your email campaign. The most common image editing functions exist inside of SendLabs through our integration with Google-owned Picnik. Cool stuff.
10. Auto-responders & Triggered Mailings: Put your welcome email series, lead nurturing and targeted mailings based on subscriber interactions on auto-pilot with an auto-response or triggered mailing series and let technology go to work for you once more.
11. API/Integration: Integrate your stuff with ours like never before. Want to build a custom reports interface for a client? Want to have your CRM and ours talk to one another? For you developers out there, head on over to our dedicated API site at http://api.sendlabs.com to get your hands dirty.
12. Complete Private Label: Did you know that you can claim our platform as your very own? Many agencies and resellers power their email marketing efforts with a completely private labeled version of SendLabs. And when we say private label, we mean it. Custom domain hosting, dedicated IPs and complete support allow you to grow and manage your email marketing business without the need to wrestle with technology.
13. Email Marketing Services: Let’s face it. Not everyone can be an inbox expert, but we’re hooked on it. Put us to work for you to help improve any discreet piece or all of your email marketing efforts. Our professional services team helps marketers design, develop and deploy better email marketing programs every day.
14. The most flexible pricing of any ESP: When it comes to licensing our software, we’ve learned that flexibility is a cool, refreshing approach. We price quite simply on a flat monthly or CPM (Cost Per Thousand) rate. You give us an idea of your volume, we’ll show you where you fall. And the greatest part? You’re only charged for the volume you send. Simple.
15. You can talk to us: This one is usually the most pleasant surprise to folks checking us out as a potential solution. Many self-service email service providers even refuse to publish a phone number. That’s ok, but that’s not us. We love to talk to you and want you to feel like we’re in this together. You can’t do that through a ticketing system.
    

Brett Houle is Co-Founder/CEO of SendLabs, a New England-based email marketing software company with great customers across the street and around the globe. Follow him up at Twitter: @heybrett and @sendlabs.

Recently, I became a subscriber for Entertainment Weekly and as any good marketer should do, they asked for my email address when I created an online subscriber profile.

This was several weeks ago, but the other day I got the email that you see here: a simple informative piece explaining how I get the opportunity to see advance screenings as a subscriber. Great! But that’s also where things got a bit, well, classic?

If you’ll notice the movie poster used in the email seen here, it’s Rush Hour 3. In the copy, Rush Hour 3, Shrek The Third and Dreamgirls are referenced as those films that subscribers got to see before they were released to the masses.

As I write this, it’s March 2010. Rush Hour 3 came out in August 2007. Shrek The Third? May 2007. Dreamgirls was released in December 2006! I don’t know about you, but I can name a few movies that have been released since 2007.

Essentially, this is an abandoned autoresponder/trigger- something set up years ago but has been left on the side of the road like an old car.

So now I’m wondering if this program still exists. Are they even aware these are going out and if so, are they totally fine with dated references in their emails? I would assume they wouldn’t be, but I’m not sure. (I can’t wait to have the inside track on Star Trek, which came out a year or so ago.)

Think about your autoresponders and triggers. Do they have time-sensitive information in there? If so, how often do you update that information and what’s your system of checks and balances to ensure you don’t forget?

Josh Nason is the Inbound Marketing Director for SendLabs, a New England-based email marketing software company with great customers across the street and around the globe. Follow him at @joshnason and @sendlabs.

I get bummed out when I see how much time and effort email marketers put into their creative, but not enough time into strategy or how the technology available to them can really take their email marketing efforts to the next level. The main reason? The tools are within everyone’s reach and are so simple to implement.

So here’s my short list of things I want you to explore asap and then do…if you are not already.

1. Split Testing
   This one is a no-brainer. Can you imagine giving the newspaper or a book author the ability to test which headline would be most successful before they go to print? With email marketing technology and split testing, it’s a breeze. Which subject line will create higher open rates or clicks? Which creative will motivate more people to take action? Which offer or call-to-action will generate more conversion? With split-testing, any reputable email platform will allow you stage a few options, hit send and let the system pick the winner based on the criteria you choose (opens and click-thru’s) and then delivers the remainder of your campaign to the winner.We’ve seen open rates at 20% spike to 45% and click-thru rates jump from 4% to over 10%, just by trying two different subject lines.

   Benefit? Find out quickly what works and get a better response rate.

2. List Segmenting
   OK – another no brainer: stop batch and blasting. Stop uploading a hundred lists to your account. Define your data (in your CRM, etc.), map out what fields of data you want associated with each subscriber (first, last, company, contact type, etc.) and import into a single list. Then create a list segment by simply identifying a search criteria – i.e. give me a list of everyone in zip code 03102, who came to the event. Even better, do it based off of customer or prospect type and create segments based on past interactions or behavior. The options to narrowly segment and send relevant content to that segment is unlike any other marketing vehicle in the world.

   Benefit? Cleaner management of data, more targeted mailings, greater response rates.

3. Triggered Mailings/Auto-responders
   You guessed it…another no-brainer. Put your outbound communications on auto-pilot. Have a web opt-in form? Set up a series of email “drips” that your email platform can deploy over a timed sequence. Maybe it’s like this: Someone visits your web site and requests a white paper or a trial of your software or perhaps they made a purchase. Connect that information to your platform and stage mailings to “auto” deploy based on the criteria you set. You could have a two week window of every other day communications based on who subscribed, what their profile is, what their behavior has been with you, etc. And again, any good platform worth their salt will provide all of the real-time stats on your triggered mailings as well.

   Benefit? Let technology go to work for you and keep the right (timed) communication in front of your audience. Multiple touches and BAM! They take action!

4. Personalization
   This is email marketing 101, but do it in an intelligent fashion. Try something different. Get creative with the data you know about your subscribers. Why not personalize an email with some details you know that wouldn’t be what you’d typically store in an email database. Here’s one, “Hi Brett – we feel horrible. Your birthday was yesterday and we were late.” How clever. Now I may know intuitively you automated this somehow, but you cleverly spun it to sound human (we made an error!). Have a purchase history on your customers stored somewhere? Why not use that to merge the last product purchased or the last interaction with you. And finally, personalization should be geared around profiles. What type of actual content does a slice or segment of your audience prefer? Or are you sending one-size-fits-all content?

   Benefit? Email is all about relevancy. You must know who your prospects and customers are, no? Why not demonstrate that? You’ll keep them engaged MUCH longer.

5. Social Follow & Social Sharing
   At this point, if you are not working your email marketing and social networking together, you’re probably living under a rock. You have to go where the eyeballs are and email/social is a powerful one-two punch. If you have a Twitter feed or a Facebook fan page like us, you need icons in your emails to not only prompt your customers to follow you, but also to share the content inside your emails with their networks. Forward to a friend is still a standard and many subscribers will use this, but the NEW forward is really the share feature. It allows folks to connect this with their personal and professional networks quickly and easily and may easily garner you some new subscribers.

   Benefit? Everyone knows hundreds, sometimes thousands of people you or I don’t. Why not tap that? Let them remarket on your behalf.

So there you have it. These things are within your grasp today, and as always, the SendLabs email marketing platform lets you set these things up quite easily. If you need help setting any of these things up in your account, as always, you can reach out to us at anytime.

Brett Houle is Co-Founder/CEO of SendLabs, a New England-based email marketing software company with great customers across the street and around the globe. Follow him up at Twitter: @heybrett and @sendlabs.