The From Line
Sending, Managing & Monetizing Email
AddThis – Social Media/Sharing
Gold Lasso is very excited to announce our partnership with AddThis, the #1 bookmarking and sharing button on the Internet. This partnership enables us to offer Social Media Integration for your email campaigns. This integration is seamless, fully customizable and can be accessed through the new and improved toolbar within the HTML message editor.
RSS to Email
RSS (most commonly translated as “Really Simple Syndication” or “Rich Site Summary”) is a Web feed format used to publish or announce frequently updated works such as blog entries, news headlines, audio and video.
The only information that you need to get started is the link to your RSS file. In Twitter you can simply click the orange RSS icon under your list of people that you are following, in WordPress it's listed with your "Site Meta" and in most other sites you simply click the RSS icon and it will take you to the necessary page. Copy and paste that link into the RSS wizard in eLoop and you are well on your way.
What does this mean for you? It means that if you have a website, blog or a WordPress site, Twitter account, or anything else that can generate an RSS file, you can automatically get that information to your recipients in a few easy steps. There are two options within eLoop to help you accomplish this goal and you only need a few pieces of information to get started.
The first option is to setup an ongoing campaign based on time intervals and updates of your RSS stories. This feature would be used if you wanted to send out updates of your RSS stories to your recipients daily, weekly, monthly, etc.. We have built in the ability to check to see if your stories have been updated before the campaign is executed to ensure you aren't sending the same information multiple times to your followers.
The second option is to simply include your stories from your RSS directly within a message (using a datapoint based on an RSS profile) i.e. have your last five tweets in your monthly newsletter. I have included an example of that technique at the bottom of this message from my own Twitter account.
This is another awesome addition to our system because it's just one more "Really Simple" way of getting new information out to your recipients quickly. You setup a campaign and do what you normally do, update your stories, tweets, content etc. and watch your click rates climb. This new feature will be available to all users by Friday August 7th. Please keep your requests and feedback coming, we welcome and encourage your input!
To start adding RSS to your communications, simply click the icon within the editor and follow the simple steps.
Real-Time Autoresponder Campaigns
This feature allows you to send real-time autoresponders based on your eLoop landing pages, as well as any existing form that you already have implemented on your website(s). You can accomplish this through an "auto" campaign triggered by either a submission of a Landing Page or by using a query string. This process differs from Time Released Campaigns because you can send multiple emails to the same recipient unlike the Time Release Campaigns which will only allow you to send to the same recipient once per campaign. Recipients can fill out the form multiple times and receive a message for each submission. In addition, the message is sent immediately upon submission of the form/query string instead of waiting for a time release campaign to kick off every few minutes. This process is faster to accomplish real-time sending instead of batching, queuing, and then sending when the campaign criteria is met.
Image Map Tracking
Even though image maps are not as widely used as they once were, they are still popular enough to warrant tracking capabilities. Now designers can map out coordinates in an image pointing to multiple URLs without having to slice the image in to multiple pieces. It's a simple way to save time when creating messages. Please keep the comments and suggestions coming, we value your feedback! If you have any questions on these new features, please contact Client Services at
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Last week Gold Lasso featured a webinar discussing the benefits of RSS-to-Email. Thank you to everyone who participated and joined in the discussion afterwards. A complete recording of the Webinar is now available online, click here to review.
RSS-to-Email is a hot topic these days. Highlighted by Website Magazine in the article, E-Mail Marketing’s Future… Right Now, eLoop’s new feature is included in an overview of ESPs changing the email landscape. “This is useful for people using Twitter, publishers who update their sites regularly and have newsletters based on updates, press releases, or any other type of timely content that gets posted to a website regularly." View the article here.
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Recently Gold Lasso rolled out a social media feature for eLoop clients. A powerful tool, social media is a popular topic in interactive marketing. It offers unique opportunities for increasing the reach of an ordinary email campaign, exposing it to a much larger scale than other marketing methods. The potential for social media's impact on campaigns is exponential.
In order to ensure social media exposure from your email campaigns, it is important to incentivize the reader. Create a compelling promotion; two for one, half price, new products or any other incentives that will influence online word of mouth via social media sharing. This will increase your exposure to new customers and reinforce messages with existing clients.
By integrating social media with messages in eLoop, you can measure the number of reposts, who shared information with their networks and how many times the information was shared.
One feel-good approach is to use cause marketing to encourage posting to social media. Being associated with a cause and supporting one such as cancer research fundraising, holiday food drive or simply tweeting about social issues can be the differentiator for getting additional exposure. Using the cause marketing approach is not only rewarding but could potentially keep your messages alive on the web even longer.
To share more ideas on leveraging the social media tools that we offer, contact Gold Lasso on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook. And remember to stay tuned for GL Jive, our online client community - perfect for information exchange and brainstorming!
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Below is another example of how using a custom DNS with your email service provider can help increase trust and deliverability. In this example, TechTarget sent me an email to sign up for their Online ROI Summit. However when clicking on the link my email client warns me that the link could be fraud. Why? Because the link resolves through the email service providers domain instead of TechTarget. This is why custom DNS coupled with a unique IP is the gold standard for deliverability and trust.
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It's definitely not the most elegant collaboration tool however email is the most widely used for sharing thoughts, documents and other communication essentials. So it's surprising it has taken this digital medium over forty years to evolve from plain ASCII text to a soon to be social application for managing relationships and efficient collaboration on business documents. Get ready for Email 3.0, a one inbox mix of social media, instant messaging, text messaging, news feeds, widgets and other mash-ups all swirled together creating a better organizational environment for the user and greater challenges to the email marketer.
On May 27th, Google demonstrated Google Wave, a new Open Source application based on HTML 5 standards. The presentation by developers Lars and Jens Rasmussen and Stephanie Hannon from Google's Sydney office show's a Gmail inbox on steroids where the worlds of email, social networking, instant messaging and document collaboration collide creating an integrated string of desperate communications call "Waves" where the lines between various mediums and real-time, on and off-line communications are blurred. Microsoft too is trying to change the versatility of email with its upcoming release of Outlook 2010. Mainly geared toward businesses, this new version of Outlook will try to mimic some social networking allowing users to view emails as conversation threads coupled with the ability to hide threads they aren't interested it. The announcement that Microsoft plans to continue to use Word as the main HTML rendering engine for Outlook is providing a lot of grumbling in the email marketing community because of the message design obstacles the application causes.
New Protocols On The Horizon
Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) hasn't changed much since it was widely adopted in the 1980's when ARPANET was converted to what is known as the Internet today. The protocol lacks the processes necessary to facility a seamless real-time collaboration and interactivity that newer technologies such as social networking encompass. However simple, SMTP's wide implementation and open roots can be directly attributed to the successful proliferation of email use among Internet users. SMTP is also blamed for the wide spread of spam because it lacks sender authentication technology. Enter the Google Wave Federation Protocol, an Open Source communications protocol to facilitate Google Wave technology. If you think Microsoft, Yahoo and FaceBook are going to sit idle while Google muscles influence over the guts of future email communication protocols think again. It is absolute that one of these companies will extend their current platforms to compete with Google Wave and they will be reluctant to support the Wave Federation Protocol. Eventually, some will cave as users demand cross platform compatibility (Microsoft users able to communicate with Google Wave users).
The Carry Over From Traditional Email
When these new communication platforms become compatible it will open the gates to marketers however enforce challenges from traditional email. For one, it is possible that spam could be curtailed, as authentication and security technologies would be built into these new security protocols. This would force marketers to solicit a true opt-in from subscribers giving them full and true control of permission. Gone will be the days of implied opt-ins, purchased lists and other forbidden fruit that have tempted too many email marketers. Another challenge Email 3.0 will offer users is an easier way to sort, categorize and mute different types of communications. The continued challenge for marketers will not only be to get permission but to be relevant enough to stay at the top the inbox queue. Even though the marketer might obtain permission, once muted, a marketer's message may never been seen again. Many email pundits stress the importance of creating a dialog with subscribers by using more engaging content. With Email 3.0, a true bi-directional dialog will become necessary as communications start to look more like Twitter with subscribers expecting immediate responses to questions and inquiries. Telling subscribers not to respond or not responding will quickly get marketers muted rendering their efforts useless.
These new advances in Email technology are long overdue however will be surely welcome amongst consumers and business alike. These technologies will help to lift the overall email experience by providing a true integration of social media and other technologies. In addition, email marketing efforts that are slapdash and executed in haste will be rendered completely useless as traditional challenges come to the forefront of the discipline demanding greater respect from marketers.
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