As we prepare to relaunch our Five Questions series with some top names and performers in email marketing today, I want you to come along with me for a few minutes into the Way Back Machine to February 2008 for what was to be the kickoff for the series. Needless to say, there has been some retooling since then.

I did an email interview with Zane Lamprey, the host of a great TV show called Three Sheets. In short, it’s about Zane’s trips around the world drinking. While the show has shifted cable networks a few times, he has a presence on Hulu, just wrapped a big comedy tour and is also an author. So yeah, he’s still staying busy while also doing a job many would love to have.

So to get you prepped for the rebirth of Five Questions, here’s my 2008 chat with Zane Lamprey, complete with the original intro. Vintage! And yes, we do talk about email. Enjoy! Continue reading

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 wanted to give you a quick update here with some screen shots of the new interface, currently in beta!

We’re excited and can’t wait to roll this out to you all, but here’s some candy for you in the meantime. Stay tuned as we will announce beta location for our customers and partners to access and provide feedback.

Screen shot and highlights below… Continue reading

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.

Just a few weeks ago, we released a long-awaited and pretty major upgrade to our API, the interface that allows programmers to connect their apps (both homegrown and third-party) to SendLabs.

We’ve already received some great feedback from a few customers. It was so great that we decided to take nearly all of it to heart. The result:  version 2.1!  This update fixes a small issue or two, but mainly introduces a few new features that you should find useful:

• GetSubscriber now returns the date/time the subscriber joined the list. See the documentation for more info.
• GetListDetails now gives you the full date and time the list was created.  In version 2.0, you got just the date and not the time.  It’s provided in full ISO 8601 format now, both for 2.0 and later versions. Here are more details.
• GetCampaignReports now tells you if a sent campaign was a test or not.  The new integer-based “IsTest” return field value will be a 1 if the campaign was a test or 0 if not. Here are more details.
• GetCampaignReports now tells you what the subject line of the sent campaign was.  SendLabs now saves the subject line at the time of sending with the campaign’s report, so if the campaign’s subject line changes and you send it out again, you’ll always know what the previous subjects were.  As they say in New England, wicked useful!  See the GetCampaignReports documentation for more info.
• You can now filter by start and end date when retrieving list subscribers via the ReturnActive, ReturnUnsubscribed, and ReturnBounced methods.  Not sure why we didn’t think of this in the first place but in this case, as they say, it does take a village!  In version 2.1 and newer, each method has a StartDate (renamed from “Date” in version 2.0 and earlier) and EndDate. These parameters are optional, so you can filter with one or the other…or both…or neither.
• And last, but not least, we did fix a bug related to the setting of “pick list” (dropdown) custom field values through the API.  For fields of this type that have had their list of values updated, the API didn’t always do so well at matching the values sent in to those currently in effect.  With version 2.1, the method now matches them correctly as long as you send in a value which is currently defined for the custom field.   This affects the AddSubscriberWithCustomFields and ModifySubscriberWithCustomFields methods.

Since most of these changes involve an update to the method definitions (adding fields to return values, etc.), there is an updated SOAP Web service definition file (WSDL) for version 2.1.  You can get the 2.1 WSDL via a link in the sidebar of the SendLabs API microsite. You’ll also see an updated ASP.NET sample which utilizes these new features.

So go to it!  We’d love to hear what you think of the API, positive or negative.  Even better, register your thoughts and check out what others think via our new UserVoice page. We programmers actually do look at and seriously consider stuff posted there.

Erik Bertrand is a product developer for SendLabs, a hosted email marketing software company. Erik also makes sure our glass bottles are recycled, has been known to perform musically for the masses and is known for his catchphrase ‘Document Or Else’ in the office. Follow his exploits on Twitter.com/bertpc.

One of the best things about becoming an Agency partner of SendLabs is that we make everything really easy. From setup to transitioning of clients to white labeling, we strive to make everything simple.

You have better things to do than worry about the small stuff, right?

Another one of the best things? Hearing suggestions from our partners that will not only benefit their own workflow but also the workflow for others. Thus, we’re happy to announce an improvement for our Agency friends when it comes to exporting information for billing purposes – all based on a simple suggestion. We call it our Billing Export.

Now you can easily export out a CSV file for any date range for either your entire client base or just a single client with the following fields:

• Date
• Company/User
• Subject Line
• Amount of Emails Sent
• Action (newsletters sent, renders used, triggers sent, credits purchased, etc)

How to do it? Very simple.

1) Log into your Agency account and go to Credit History in the top right.

2) Select the date range and either All Users or a specific one.

3) Export your list.

That’s it. Run a whole month, a week or any range you’d like. We love the suggestions so keep them coming!

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.

So here’s the scenario: you are like one of the many companies out there with a fan page on Facebook…like you should if you have a product that helps provide engaging content in our expanding social media world. (By the way, heard of our new social sharing feature? I digress.)

You also have a thriving email marketing program and are eager to add new subscribers however you can. You think, “Hmmm…how can I get people to sign up on my fan page?” Thankfully, there’s an easy way to do it with no muss and no fuss. Lucky you!

(If you want to avoid reading and/or want to hear my hypnotic voice, here’s our video on the subject.)

• Go to your page and hit Edit Page (under your main image on the left hand side).
• Scroll down to Static FMBL under Applications. Click and ‘Add To My Page’ when the popup window gets all up in your grill.
• Go back to your page, hit ‘Edit Page’ again and look for FMBL. Click the editing icon at right and click ‘Edit’.
• Cut and paste the code from your Subscription form you’ve already created in your SendLabs account. (You did this already, right?)
• You’re all good to go. Just like that. Simply rearrange everything how you’d like and you’re good to collect email.

Now when your boss complains about your Facebook usage, tell ‘em you’re working. I’ll totally vouch for you.

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.

Breaking news: Twitter is going out of business.

Just kidding.

In case you didn’t know it, social media isn’t going away and two great tastes taste great together. Welcome to Social Email 1.0. In an effort to foster the growing friendship between email marketing and the world of status updates, 140 characters and Buzzing, SendLabs has integrated Social Sharing into your email campaigns with the addition of a tiny little tag.

Any emails sent through SendLabs that include the social sharing tag can now be shared with the following social networks with ease:

• Email (of course)
• Twitter
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Google Buzz

The system simply grabs your email’s subject line and creates a tiny URL using bit.ly to share a copy of your email to the world.  We also integrated the Forward-To-A-Friend functionality in the Social Sharing center as well, making it easier to go old-school and simply send your email to another inbox.

So now the hard work you’ve done in creating content for your emails can be leveraged to another audience. How awesome is that?

Sweet. How easy is it?

Really, really, really easy . If you are coding your emails by hand, you’ll simply include the %%socialshare-link%% tag where you want a share prompt. You can simply link this to text or your own custom-created image.

If you using the editor, simply click Custom Fields and you can insert either a text link or share image automatically.

Here’s how our social share icon looks:

And here’s how the text would look: Share this…

Here is a screen shot of the Social Share landing page they will arrive at when they click to share:

So can I tell how often it was shared?

Of course! When you log into your Reports area, you will see a Share Statistics tab. Every time someone shares with a specific network, that number will be reflected in the reports, broken down by network.

What else should I know?

We started with the most popular social networks to share to, but may add more down the road depending on user feedback (so let us know what you’d like to see!). In future versions, we are looking at adding the ability to share individual articles within the email itself.

For feedback, questions or anything else related to the new Social Share addition to SendLabs, hit us up via email (thecrew@sendlabs.com), Facebook or Twitter. Here’s our official how-to video on this new addition as well.

Tony Adinolfi is the lead product developer for SendLabs, a hosted email marketing software company. Known as ‘Tony Test’ in the office for his legendary style of testing emails in early days of SendLabs, Tony has lead the development not soon after it was born. He also was on an early episode of Judge Judy. We’re not even kidding here.

There is some variance to the actual number, but in all, the studies show that roughly 7 out of 10 online shopping carts are abandoned before a purchase is made. Wow. 7 out of 10.

All that hard work (and money) to get a potential buyer to not only interact with your brand, visit your store, select a product(s) and get ready to pay you their hard-earned money goes bye-bye 70% of the time.

For obvious reasons, physical stores don’t have this problem. You may visit a store and leave, but if you drop items into your cart and stand in line, you’re completing a purchase. I’ve never seen a statistic on the number of consumers that bail out of the grocery store line with a cart full of groceries, have you? That’s because it doesn’t happen.

And while we can most definitely put together a laundry list of potential reasons why it happens in a virtual store, we’ll leave that to cool folks like Elastic Path who specialize in setting up and deploying ecommerce. What I can tell you is that with email marketing by your side, it won’t matter. Mostly.

Why it does and doesn’t matter why they leave your shopping cart

Obviously, there are many things within your power that you absolutely should work on fixing to provide the most optimal shopping cart experience and thereby convert more visitors into paying customers; design, user experience (like my friends specialize in over at MadPow), price pointing, special offers, etc. But at the end of the day, you can often find yourself doing all the right things and still, Junior gets into a fight with Missy. I close my browser by mistake with items in my cart. Or heck, I just decide to wait for any number of reasons. The “why” of abandonment we agree could be almost anything. Hey, people are fickle.

So by all means, do everything in your power to provide an optimal shopping and check out experience. But regardless of why they didn’t complete the transaction – you’ve got a secret weapon that doesn’t care and it’s called email marketing.

Real-time cart abandonment email triggers = cha-ching!

The SendLabs cart abandonment solution triggers real-time, automated email follow-ups to your potential buyers, helping to convert abandoned shopping carts into money in the bank. By delivering timely follow-up messages, cart abandonment emails can remind, gently push and motivate lost sales to come back to you. Here’s a few simple examples of how customers use cart abandonment:

• Remind customers of the products they left in their cart
• Cross-sell/upsell complimentary products
• Offer discounts or incentives to complete the sale
• Run surveys to ask why they didn’t complete the purchase
• Trigger special messages after purchase that entice new sales

With a look at your e-commerce goals and objectives, raising the bar with technology that exists can recover lost sales, plain and simple. While effort is required to set up these automated messages, the return we’ve found is recovering nearly 50% of those lost sales. Do the math yourself and ask why you’re leaving money on the table.

To learn more about email marketing automation, and specifically cart abandonment services, connect with me at brett@sendlabs.com. I’d love to hear about your business and e-commerce goals and how we might help.

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.

With 21 methods and counting, SendLabs programmers can do even more to customize their SendLabs experience and integrate with third-party applications.

What is it about the lucky number 21? It’s the ultimate outcome in blackjack and also the legal drinking age in our United States.

We should quickly mention that 21 is a Fibonacci number, a Harshad number, a Motzkin number, a triangular number, an octagonal number as well as a composite number — thanks Wikipedia!

But to the matter at hand: with the release of SendLabs API version 2, we now offer no less than 21 methods to give you that SendLabs glow! Through the hard work of our primary API developer, John; Tony with his invaluable domain expertise; and my testing and coding help, we’ve added real maturity to the SendLabs API. Version 2 introduces several new methods and bolsters several existing ones to help you get access to more of the SendLabs universe:

• Two new list-related methods to get detailed information about your list setup.
• A DeleteSubscriber method, for when you just want a subscriber gone for good.
• Three new reporting methods to give you detailed campaign result information, including specific clicks per subscriber.
• We optimized performance, especially for customers with large lists, by updating many methods to they return chunks of data, instead of all the data at once.
• Many methods have been streamlined, both under the hood, and especially in the area of parameter and return value field names, to reduce confusion (more below).
• Custom field validation has been greatly improved, and add/modify methods now return more helpful information on the problem fields, before committing anything to the system

They say it takes a village…

…and we agree!  With the release of API Version 2, we’re very proud to announce the unveiling of a dedicated home for SendLabs programmers:  http://api.sendlabs.com.  The site currently offers complete and detailed documentation of every method, along with XML Request/Response and PHP/ASP.NET C# code samples for each.

But detailed documentation is just the beginning.  Our future plans for this new site include a set of forums that allow you to communicate more effectively with the developers at SendLabs and with other SendLabs customers.  We also hope to create an area where the developer community can submit their own modules and third-party “hooks.”  If you have any other ideas, we’d welcome them!

The future’s so bright, we’ve gotta wear shades

Lest you think this is enough, rest assured, we’re not stopping here.  We’ll be working in the coming months on adding even more functionality, especially to support our agency customers in managing users, and introduce list and campaign creation methods.  Feel free to let us know of any functionality you’d like to see.

Progress does require change (for Version 1 API users anyway)

As we mentioned above, in putting API version 2 together, we made some tough decisions regarding the wording of parameters and return value field names for some methods.  In order to streamline nomenclature, we decided to change some names:

• “EmailID” has become either “CampaignID” (for those methods dealing with the source campaigns themselves) or “CampaignReportID” (for methods that report on campaign results).
• The list-based ReturnX calls (ReturnActive, ReturnBounced, etc.) give you a list of subscribers; the list (array) was called “Emails” in version 1, but it is now called “Subscribers”; the email address field within each item in the array is still called “Email”, however.

How will you use it?

In the coming weeks, we’ll share our ideas on how you might use the API to connect your stuff to SendLabs and vice-versa.  We’d love to know how you’re using it. Drop us a line at thecrew@sendlabs.com, or online via Facebook or Twitter!

Erik Bertrand is a product developer for SendLabs, a hosted email marketing software company. Erik also makes sure our glass bottles are recycled, has been known to perform musically for the masses and is known for his catchphrase ‘Document Or Else’ in the office. Follow his exploits on Twitter.com/bertpc.

We’re working hard on the new reports interface and wanted to give you a quick glimpse. Just know this is nowhere near final, but heading in the right direction. We’ve received lots of feedback from everyone regarding what would make reporting the most useful for you (and for agency clients).

Keep ‘em coming please. Thanks!

Highlights

• New snapshot ribbon. This will essentially replace the “snapshot” tab and ensure snapshot data is always visible.
• Snapshot ribbon IS the main navigation. Want information on opens? Clicks? Social sharing? Click the box in the ribbon.
• More detail in the detail list views.
• More “actions” associated within each section so you can act on the data.
• Revised charts and graphs
• Easy export, print and report sharing

John Norton is a lead product developer for SendLabs, a New England-based email marketing software company with great customers across the street and around the globe. He's addicted to energy drinks, rock climbing, pandora and jQuery. Hit him up at Twitter: @jukebox42.

While it’s crucial and necessary to give your subscribers the opportunity to unsubscribe, too many are not giving the opportunity to modify their details.

There’s nothing more frustrating than simply wanting to update your email address, yet you’re given a bunch of hoops to jump through or worse: no option at all!

From a user’s perspective, you want to have options when it comes to getting emails from a sender and making adjustments to your account like any other online relationship. From a marketer’s standpoint, you want users to have the option of updating their info with you at any time and deter them from unsubscribing.

The more engaged they are with you, the more likely they are to ensure their info with you is 100% up-to-date at all times.

More and more, you see the words ‘Modify Details’ or ‘Update Profile’ right next to the Unsubscribe link in email footers, a trend that is especially important if you have multiple lists. Like fashion, taste in food and what rotates through my iPod, preferences change and what someone wanted to receive two months ago may not be copacetic with them now.

In SendLabs, you can create a Modify Details page within seconds. Here’s how you do it:

- Login and head to Forms in the upper right. Select ‘Create A Website Form’.

- Enter in your preferences for the form and select what lists you want people to update, including any specific Custom Fields within the lists.

- Make any customizations for the follow-up Thank You and Error page.

That’s it! Now all you need to do is include a link in your email (either from a predefined link after hitting the Links icon in the WYSIWYG, a merge tag or a Custom Field) and you’ve given people the opportunity to update their details with a single click – including their email address.

So are you sending with just an unsubscribe link? That’s so 2003.

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.