Michael Gibbs » Page 19

Author: Michael Gibbs

I'm a technologist at heart, assisting companies best utilize the Internet to market themselves and sell their products and services online. This includes organizations as large as Google and as small as one or two individuals.
At Over The Top and Exhibit A Communications, I've programmed solutions for Google as well as at least one other company that was later acquired by Google.

I've been CTO of an Internet SaaS company and spent my time pretty evenly between guiding the future technical strategy of the company, architecting software solutions for my dev teams, designing and running a data center to service our clients world-wide as well as being a technical evangalist/sales engineer to our media clients large and small.

I've also been Chief Photographer of the Daily Sun/Post newspaper back when it was a 5-day a week daily newspaper.

I also spent a great many years as a beach lifeguard for the City of San Clemente as well as Jr. Lifeguard instructor and then as it's program coordinator.
Bragging rights
Private Pilot with Instrument rating and proud husband of soon to be 25 years (and counting).

EMM WYSIWYG work complete

By utilizing the built-in RAD editor that comes bundled with the ASPDNSF storefronts, we've been able to quickly and easily adding a WYSIWYG editor into EMM. By utilizing the included RAD editor, your staff won't have to relearn a new editing interface.

WYSIWYG Editor

The new editing system allows you to flip to full-screen editor and back, just like you get in the ASPDNSF as well as being able to flip back and forth between WYSIWYG and HTML editing mode. The editor will also respect the TurnOffHtmlEditorInAdminSite appconfig parameter so that if you have this turned off system-wide, we'll honor that request here. We've even provided in the code a simple override for this so that if you wanted EMM to use the opposite value than the rest of the site. And best of all, the Insert links work regardless of which mode you decide to use.

This new feature will appear on March 1st when version 1.0.0.1 is released to our current customers along with the other changes to be integrated into the product.

Google Apps Web Pages

Or How I learned to love Google Page Creator… almost.

I've had my first GASS clients decide they want to use this feature of Google Apps so I'm having to learn more about it. It is a nice little hosting plan with a simplified interface for editing HTML pages. Not bad for the price but not suitable for a lot of customers. In looking at this more, I ran across these links that I thought might be of interest to people.

Here are some GPC links of interest to those who use this feature:

On the Map, So To Speak… Part Two…

Well, we’ve gotten the GASS product product listed up on Google’s Enterprise Solutions Gallery… and now we’re proud to announce something similar for EMM… We are now listed on the ASPDotNetStorefront Marketplace page!

Click here to go directly to our info page in the marketplace

Hopefully in the near future, we’ll also have more information to share about another location where EMM will be profiled. The more people we get exposed to the application, the more we get them using it. The more we get using it, the more improvements we’ll be able to offer so buy early and buy often!

Enhancements Planned for EMM

plans are on for Enhanced Mail Manager (EMM) for ASPDNSF 1.0.0.1 to be released no later than the end of February (yikes, now that I’ve committed to this in writing, I’d better get on the stick). This next release will include the following features:

  • Freely downloadable demonstration copy available
  • WYSIWYG Editor support for the creation of the HTML portion of an email campaign
  • Support for newsletter sign ups from the website. Site administrator would control the following AppConfig settings:
    • Is newsletter sign up single or double opt in? (defaults to double opt in)
    • Will newsletter sign ups be added as new ASPDNSF customers or as records in the external customers database? (defaults to customer records)
    • Will sign up form force the collection of first and last names? (default is yes)

If anyone has thoughts or comments on how features they’d like to see added to the EMM application, please use our Contact Us form or by leaving a comment below or by leaving your recommendation in the EMM support forum.

On the Map, So To Speak…

Woohoo! Our Google Apps Setup Service (GASS) has been listed on Google’s Enterprise Solutions Gallery…

Link to Google's Enterprise Solutions Gallery

and we’ve already begun receiving emails about it!

If you are interested in setting up YOUR small business on Google Apps and don’t have the time or the technical experience to do so, we’ve got the solution for you. Our GASS product is available for as low as $150! Go to our Google Apps Setup Service (GASS) page to get the complete story!

When To Send… Does It Matter?

MarketingSherpa.com regularly posts articles of interest to e-tailers and marketeers. Here is one that I thought EMM customers might find of particular interest.

The question revolves around whether or not time of day makes a difference in the click-through rates for e-mail campaigns. Not surprisingly, they came to the conclusion that time of day does indeed matter!

The first step is to use analytics to narrow down the choice of times to test. You are using analytics, right? No? Then shame on you! In this day of Google Analytics (which is free BTW) there is no reason to not use Analytics to analyze the performance of your site. Most tools will show you the busiest hours on your site. The example used showed that 9 am & noon were the busiest hours with Tuesday being the busiest day of the week. With this info in hand they moved onto the next step.

Next you have to determine how to best segment your audience. Since this is a time based test, they chose to segment by time zone. You could just as easily have done it by state or network or anything else. EMM allows you a great flexibility in doing this via the Custom Query feature in each campaign. In this case they chose the two busiest hours and an off-peak hour to test against.

The next step would be to actually send the A/B/C tests. Because the only variable they wanted in this test was the time, the subject line and body of the message remained the same. EMM is perfect for this since the administrative interface refers to messages by a unique title you can name that makes sense rather than referring to the subject line alone. After the emails were sent they went back and evaluated the results by the click-through rates; another area where EMM shines. No need to go to a paid service to track click-through rates when this is built into the product. Conversion was less important since the content of the message and the landing pages were the same.

What were the results you ask? Does it really matter? I would argue that is doesn’t matter much as their customers are different than yours and mine. The only way that we can make assumptions about GENERAL buying trends is to compare the data across multiple customer bases.

It is more important that you take the time to run a test like this yourself and report your results here in a comment so we can all benefit from the shared knowledge.

Source: http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=30305

Enhanced Mail Manager for AspDotNetStoreFront Released!

Finally, this product is ready for prime time (I hope<G>)… Enhanced Mail Manager (EMM) for AspDotNetStoreFront is finally available. This tool is built upon years of experience in building and servicing the email marketing needs of hundreds of media properties around the world.

EMM brings the full power of personalized communications to your base of customers in your ASPDNSF storefront. Not only can you finally send personalized messages to your customers but the flexibility of the system allows you to target subsets of customers! Want to send different messages and offerings to customers on AOL? You bet! Need to send an email to everyone who bought a particular product? Of course you can. Looking to send an email to those who've haven't bought from you in the last six months? This is the product for you!

I could go on forever about this wonderful tool (if I do say so myself) but you'll learn more by going to the EMM page and learning more about it. Sure, you can outsource to companies like Constant Contact or others but why pay $15 to $150 per month or more when for $100, you can get this fantastic tool and put it to use immediately!

Check it out and leave us comments below if you have thoughts about this great new product!