Total Blue System Ecommerce

Email offers from an address that's human and brand-friendly

When you receive an email message, don't you first check to see the from address?  When you recognize who it's from, you're more likely to open it, and do so immediately. Subject lines are important, no doubt, but the from address can be just as critical to the decision on whether to open the message. When sending email marketing offers to your opt-in recipient list, here's how you can optimize your from address:

First, a couple definitions and clarifications:

• The From address is the email address that appears in brackets like <this>, and the name that appears alongside it. Only the email address is required, but we recommend a person or organization name also appear here.
• The Reply-To address is to whom the message is addressed if you click the Reply button in your email client software. Often for commercial email marketing messages, the Reply-To address is NOT the same as the From address but for our purposes they are and or will be treated the same. They ought be. You want to have them be the same; others just cannot manage to accomplish this and still achieve the tracking and auto-processing that's desirable with email marketing efforts. Total Blue System enables this kind of optimal configuration.

Second, here's a couple examples of what we're describing as both human and brand friendly from addresses:

• Organization name <newslettername@yourdomain.com>
• Person's name (real or mythical) <firstnamelastinitial@yourdomain.com>

Thirdly, here's the alternative, or status quo, unless you give this attention:

• <reply-####@emailsubdomain.yourdomain.com>

Does the status quo work? Yes, your messages will be delivered. (However, our experience suggests that the human and brand-friendly alternatives will have the added benefit of getting past ISP's spam filters more often than the more machine-like status quo from address.) And yes, any replies to your message will be either processed automatically or routed to your "abuse" address for special, personal attention by someone on your staff. But what you want to do is present a from address that looks as close as possible to being what a normal person would send from their normal business email account on their desktop computer....

So, here's what you can do to establish a more human and brand friendly from address, creating as many as you might need for your email publications or special communications:

• Contact E-business Coach's support team via email requesting the set-up of your "super custom reply handler". This allows you to completely mask the address while still taking advantage of the reply handler that auto-processes bounced back messages, out of office auto-replies, and the like.
• Be prepared to create an email alias within your business email messaging system, setting it to forward messages to a special email address that we will communicate to you. Identify to us what this email alias is when you contact us. This will be your from address.
• Update your email marketing message templates to specify this from address, in both the HTML and Text-only areas of each template.

Consistent display of item's price given quantity discount

You've asked for more flexibility, freeing you to creatively design shopping cart promotions that give shoppers just the right incentive to complete a purchase. We've listened, and are up to our elbows in an overhaul of Total Blue System's shopping cart promotions module. Read our alerts here, or trust we'll contact you directly in advance if there's an impact to existing promotions on your e-commerce website.

As we introduce a more flexible and creative feature set, the shopping experience will evolve. Some changes will be significant and appealing, other changes will be subtle and possibly appear trivial. Here's the latest:

• Today the display of a product's price on the product detail page -- or category gallery pages, or recently viewed items, or wherever a product's price appears -- is conditional based on the presence of a special pricing discount promotion. What this means, to use an example, is that if there's a buy 1 at $10 normal price and a 'buy 2 at $8' pricing promotion, then after you add 1 item to your shopping cart, the product's price will appear as $8. This is because it's showing you the price for the next purchase. However, you're shopping cart will show the one item you've already added to your cart at a price of $10, the normal price.
• What's changed in the latest System Update:  the product's price will now display as $10 throughout the website rather than $8. IF you add a second item to the cart, then the cart will show the special pricing discount you've received. The product detail page and other pages will show the normal price.

Note that the product detail page can still contain messaging that explains the pricing discount, that being the option to save if you buy more than one quantity. But this will be in text that's separate from the official 'your' price of the product, as it's visually designated on the page.

For users of Mail Order Manager (MOM), the mix and match code pricing will still be recognized, and the explanation on the product detail page will still appear as normal. For example, the message "Buy 2 for $8" would appear in the normal place on the page, based on mix and match code pricing imported from MOM.

The intent of this change is to eliminate potential confusion of the shopper. This means showing discounts or special savings consistently on the cart items page, while not inconsistently displaying the product's normal price elsewhere.

How to convert CMYK images to sRBG color profile

If product images are not displaying on your website, it could be caused by the images having an embedded CMYK color profile.  Images uploaded to your website should have the standard sRBG color profile.

To convert your CMYK images to sRBG in Photoshop, open your image and select Edit > Convert to Profile from the top menu.

A dialog box will appear prompting you choose a color profile to convert to.  Choose "working sRBG" for the destination space and click Ok.

Re-save your image and ensure that it's estimated filesize will be small enough to display on your site.  (The "Save for Web" command may need to be used.)

How to tell if your images need to be converted

Note:  The color profile of your image will display in the title bar of the image, as shown below.  If you see CMYK, this can help you quickly determine that an image needs to be converted to an sRBG profile.

Send email offers in follow-up to a shopping cart order

Total Blue System's email marketing module recently released the ability to design and configure the sending of follow-up email messages to customers some period of time after they place an order. Here's more details on how you can create a triggered message that is sent following a specified number of days after the order.

To set-up the triggered message, go into the Admin Area and select the Email Marketing module. Navigate to "View / Edit Messages" and then select the List link. On the next page, there's a "Triggers" link on the left menu. Choose it.

Create a new trigger and begin by adding the actions to the trigger shown in the screenshot below.  These include:

• When a user joins this mailing list at any time
• When a user update profile at any time
• When a user whose demographic is a specific value:  Last order date is between MM/DD/YYYY  (date that you want to start sending the messages)  and MM/DD/YYYY (enter a future date to enable the messages to be sent without having to change this date)
• When a user whose demographic is a specific value: API Event Type = order

When choosing the specific demographic value for API Event Type, you'll need to manually type in the word order as the value.  A pop-up window will appear as shown in the screenshot below.

After finishing adding the actions. the logic statement will need to be edited to make the triggered message function correctly.

Edit the logical statement by placing your mouse between the parenthesis after the Logic Statement text.  A link should appear to "Edit Logic"

Edit the logical statement to follow what's shown in the screenshot below:

After editing the logical statement, create the message you would like to send.

 

To adjust your link tracking codes we advise the following changes to the campaign and source.  The source can be x number of days after the order that the email is sent, and then followup as shown in this example.  campaign=trigger   source=14day-followup

(A message template will need to already be in place for this order follow-up message to be created. We've created them for most of our clients already, involving you in their design, but you can request assistance with creating a new one if need be.)

Note:  Triggered messages will not appear on the "View Messages" page.  They can only be viewed from the Triggers page.

After saving the message for the trigger, a row of links should appear above the logic statement information.  Select Edit scheduling & delivery to choose the number of days after the last order date you would like the message to be sent.

If you complete the scheduling and delivery settings with the default options, the trigger will be active and will be sent out to customers based on the selected scheduling options.

To disable a trigger, navigate to the "Triggers" page, uncheck the box for the message, and click the save button.

How do you test the message? You can send Quicktests and Proofs for triggered message while viewing the options for the trigger.  The "Send Proof" and "Quicktest" links are listed on the same row of links as "Edit Scheduling & delivery".

Updates to shipping during shopping cart check-out

As your e-commerce software continually grows and incorporates new enhancements, it's worthwhile to pause now and again and ask: what ought be removed? In other words, as new features are added, does it make sense to remove some features that have lost or never gained substantive value over time? We say yes. A software product ought be pruned in some areas, even as it grows in others.

Here's a couple updates along those lines concerning shipping during the cart check-out. As you review them, know that they do not impact our present clientele, or the impact has been mitigated, or the client's needs will be managed differently and we've worked out those changes with you directly. If something's been overlooked, please contact us immediately:

• When shipping costs are equal to $0.00, because of a promotion or coupon code or just because that's the way you've set up your Shipping Services, then the line item on the order subtotal will display as £0.00 or $0.00 (the currency being configurable by you, the site owner). Before, it used to display as "Free". Now it's the actual amount, even if that's zero.
• A site-wide configuration to allow shoppers to specify during cart check-out a shipment arrival date and or the day of the week for shipment arrival has been removed.
• A product may no longer ordered as a "pre-order item," with implications for inventory management, shipping cost calculations, and multiple shipments.
• Related to the above pre-order items, there is also no longer a "ship-ahead" option for shoppers to choose, specifying that they want the in-stock items to be shipped ahead of those that are not yet in inventory because of a pre-order status.
• In the Admin Area of Total Blue System, there is a place to view order details. What's changed: the shipping calculations are no longer split out into costs for pre-order, back-order, and ship-ahead, as these features are no longer present to make the data meaningful.
• The "estimated" qualifier has been removed from the cart check-out process when it appeared next to the shipping amount. This qualifier related to the fact that there may have been back-order items that, when shipped, would be charged a different shipping amount than the shipping total specified at the time of check-out. The removal of this language doesn't prevent you from charging more or nothing for additional shipments of back-ordered items, but it does eliminate the ambiguity that caused concern among shoppers. You can communicate your own policies in "Teasers" on the Cart check-out pages where you think appropriate, to communicate what you wish.
• If you create a Shipping Service in the Admin Area of Total Blue System, and you define a maximum shipping weight, this weight total now applies to all items in the order, even those specified as on back-order status.
• Promotions involving the cost of shipping now apply to orders that include items  that have a back-ordered inventory status.

Send targeted messages based on a recipient's past activity

Within our email marketing module, you have the capability to send follow-up messages based on previous activity of the message recipients.

If you're looking to target customers who have opened/not opened a previous message, filters can be created to send these targeted messages.

Working examples include:

• You have a new email newsletter with a small number of subscribers, and you're looking to expand the list by sending a message to members who have not opened a specific message.
• Your website includes demographics selected by members indicate their lifestyle/shopping preferences.  A targeted message can be sent based on members who have certain demographic values.  Ex:  If members have indicated they enjoy apples, but have not purchased any apples or subscribed to the "Monthly Apple Newsletter", then a new message can be sent to these specific members to get them to subscribe or purchase.

When creating your filter, select "Add Activity Restriction", on the following page, select "Regular Message" under Individual Message Activity.

On the next page, you'll see a listing of all messages sent in the current month.  For older messages, click on the drop-down menu that shows the month and make your selection.
If you need to select multiple messages for your filter logic, you must go through this process for each message you wish to add to the filter.  On the next step, you'll see multiple options, but "Opened this message" should be your focus.  If you want to match members who did not open a message, select the "Opened this message" radio button and check the "inverse" box at the bottom of the page before continuing.

If you need your filter to match requirements for multiple messages, the logic statement of filter will need to be edited before finishing.

 

After finishing your filter, you should be returned to the filter list.  Click on corresponding "View Results" on the right hand column.  A pop-up window should appear.  Select "Regenerate this report".  Then choose "Generate report now - I will wait".  After the filter is finished generating, you should see a list of the current numbers matching the filter.

Note:  After regenerating a filter, navigate to a different page in the system, and click back on the left navigation "Filters" link to see the updated results appear in your filter list.

Guide to Creating Email Marketing Messages

When creating email marketing messages, here are some steps to guide to you along the way.  It's a quick rundown of the top priorities when creating a message using Total Blue System's email marketing module:

• Update the tracking codes of links in the template before creating a message from the template.
• Update all tracking codes in your message, following the assigned naming scheme
• Ensure all images are displaying correctly and have your site's domain name in the image source URL.
• Ensure all links click-thru to their desired pages.
• Fewer editable fields will save time compared to many.
• Send a Quick Test or Proof of your message to ensure the structure/ alignment/ design is displaying correctly in your email client.
• Run your message through EmailAdvisor to verify that the message will display correctly across major email clients and webmail services.
• Apply any necessary filters before sending your message
• Select EmailAdvisor reporting options when sending your message.

Below we've broken out topics that can be referenced when creating email messages:

Jump to a section in this guide:

Images
Links
Text Formatting
Testing in Internet Explorer
Editable Fields
Text Template
Draft Status
Inserting Demographic Values (Mail Merge Tags)
HTML Link Aliases
Applying Filters
Sending Quicktests & Proofs
Email Advisor Reports
Sending (Scheduling your Message)

Creating messages:

• Create a new message, selecting the desired template during the first step.
• When creating multiple test messages, unique names must be given in the "name" field, otherwise the message will not function correctly.

Note: Once messages have been created from a template, they are standalone from the template.  This means that if a message has been created, and the template updated afterwards, a new message will need to be created to reflect the changes in the template.

Images

• To use images in your message, navigate to the content library.  To help organize the images, use a pre-existing folder to upload your images to, or create a folder, basing the name on the other folders.  Use this new folder to keep all of your images.
• To add images from the Content Library into your message, right click on the thumbnail of the image, and in Firefox select "Copy Link Location". This will give you the URL of the image for your image tags.
• When adding images to a message, replace www.elabs7.com with email.yourdomain.com
• If you're simply replacing a placeholder image, replace the source URL inside the quotes to avoid having to type the image tag code:
  example:  <img src="placeholder.jpg">
• You can use the Find and Replace feature of your text editor to accurately and quickly do this for you. Enter www.elabs7.com into the find box, then enter email.yourdomain.com into the replace box. Select "replace all" and all the images you've added should still be appearing correctly after this change has been made.
• Ensure ALT tags are specified for all images
•  Image width and height specifications are usually only necessary for transparent pixel GIF images
• If new versions of images uploaded to the Content Library are not appearing in your message preview, refresh your browser to ensure that you're viewing the most current files of the images.  After refreshing your browser, if the preview still shows old images, clear your browser's cache.

Links

• Append tracking codes to all links included in the message, differentiating text and graphic links with utm_content=textlink OR utm_content=graphic
• When updating the tracking codes, normally the source= will be the only variable to be updated.  If a different category or theme of message is being sent, then the campaign= variable should also be updated.
• We recommend copying the tracking codes used in a previous message, and then editing the source and also the campaign if necessary.  When copying and pasting, be aware of the two different tracking codes that should be used to differentiate text and graphic links; also ensure that the end of your link directly before the tracking code has not been altered or cuttoff after the tracking code has been appended to the end of the link.
• Here are two sample tracking codes, the first being a generic tracking code and the second being used for order follow-up trigger messages.  (Notice that the utm_campaign is included in the tracking code.):
  
  ?utm_medium=email&utm_content=textlink&utm_source=newsletterYY_MM-DD
  
  ?utm_medium=email&utm_content=textlink&utm_campaign=trigger&utm_source=14day-followup
  
• If a tracking code is being added to a URL that runs a search on your website, the tracking code must be changed to begin with a "&" symbol, instead of a "?" symbol to properly track this type of link.
  Here's an example:
  http://www.yoursite.com/search.php?q=keyword
• Tracking codes should only be added to link URLs, if they are added to image source URLs, the images will not display.
• Use <font> tags directly before and after a link's text inside the <a> tag to ensure colors are displayed ex: <a href="mysite.com"><font color="yellow">link text</a>
• Broken links can often be fixed by ensuring that both quotes are used in the <a href=""> tag. 
  Here are some pointers to prevent broken links:
  Ensure the full http://www.yourdomain.com  is used at the beginning of the URL
  Read through the entire URL to ensure that no extra characters are present and that no part at the end of the URL has been cutoff.

Text Formatting:

• Redundant <font> tags are necessary to ensure formatting is kept, as cascading styles in the form of <span> tags will be stripped out by some email clients.
• DIV tags will not be acknowledged by some email clients and webmail services, so they are not recommended when coding email marketing messages.
•  It’s recommended to not paste text copy from a browser into messages because special characters can be inserted that affect display.

Testing in Internet Explorer

• You can save time running additional quicktests and proofs by opening the preview of a message from Internet explorer.
• Table structure, spacing, and other nuances of HTML can be displayed differently by Internet Explorer than by Firefox.  Email list members who open messages in Outlook will view the message as rendered by Internet Explorer.
• To prevent incorrect display of table images and cells in Internet Explorer, it may be necessary to have the ending </td> of a table cell immediately after any content, instead of being on the next line of code.  Internet Explorer interprets this extra space differently than Firefox and will display a thin white line in your layout if this is not corrected.

Editable Fields

• Editable fields are used for content areas that will be changed on a regular basis for each message to be created.
• Warning: After a template is created, if an editable field <data> tag is deleted, it will push the content of each editable field down to the next field, which will drastically affect the display of your message. If you're going to delete an editable field, be prepared to copy/paste all your code into the editable fields all over again.
• After a template has been created, placeholder content can be added in the template editable fields.  Afterwards, when a message is created from that template, the placeholder content will automatically be filled into the editable fields of the message. This will allow a message to quickly be created that shows the layout with placeholder images and text copy visible, and ready for easy editing in the message editable fields.   We recommend using brackets ie:  [Product Name]  [Product description], and dummy text to fill these areas when adding placeholder content.

View the message online link

• To add the "View this message online" link and text, edit your message, and select the link to "Edit HTML" for an editable field.  Click on the Enhancers link on the right.  A pop-up window will open and you should see an option to "Insert Tag".  After you've clicked on "Insert Tag" verify in your editable field that you can see a web version plugin.

Text Template

• When creating a template, place one editable field data tag in the "Text Template Body" and name it something like "text version"
• When you're ready to create your message, the editable field should appear on the 3rd step of the creation process. Click to edit the "text version"
• This is a sample of what should go in that editable field:

  Greetings,
  
  This is the [Company name] [Name of Newsletter].

  To see our article about. . . . /To see our offer for. . . .please change your email settings to view this message with the graphics.

• Give the subscriber reasons to go to the message and allude to why they should see it.

Draft Status

• After you've created a message, if the status column reads "Draft" and the Edit, Proof, or Quicktest options are not available, draft mode is preventing the message from being completed.  To take a message our of draft mode review the following:

• Ensure that your text version field has some content in place
• Check that "Apply filter to identify recipient list" checkbox has been selected on the final step of creating a message.
• If the multi-part/HTML message format option has been selected, ensure that all parts are completed.

Inserting Demographic Values (Mail Merge Tags)

• To insert demographic values AKA Mail Merge tags, navigate to the first page of creating/editing a template.
• You simply select one from the drop-down menu and a gray box gives you a tag you can copy and paste to use wherever it's needed. The mail merge tags follow a standard format, as seen in <EMAIL_ADDRESS>. <exact demographic value>. I would still recommend grabbing them from the template creation page, however, because errors could be introduced with copying and pasting to replicate the formatting.

Sorting Products on your Website

• We recommend manually sorting any products featured in email messages to appear at the top of their categories.

HTML Link Aliases

• This is done on the 4th/final step of editing a message. Link Aliases are simple descriptions to be added that describe what link a viewer is clicking on. These will not affect the destination or appearance of the links to the visitors, they are for internal use to run reports on what links were clicked.

Applying Filters

• To apply a filter, you must edit your message and select your desired filter from the dropdown menu. On the last step of editing a message, there is a checkbox to "Apply filter to identify recipient list", select this box.
•  If a filter is applied, it should appear on the "View Messages" page.

Sending Quick tests & Proofs

• To send a quicktest to a few email addresses, select "quicktest" from the dropdown menu on the right on the "View Messages" page
• To send a proof email to multiple pre-selected addresses in your company, select "Proof" from the right hand drop-down menu on "View Messages" page.

Email Advisor Reports

• Note: There are a limited number of EmailAdvisor usages available each month, and EmailAdvisor reports should only be selected when finalizing a proof, after adjusting coding to fix display issues, and finally when sending out the message to the subscribers.  EmailAdvisor reports should generally be used only 2-3 times per message.  Do not select EmailAdvisor reports for every Quicktest you send.
• To run Email Advisor reports, go to Quick test (described above), and select all of the options, including Delivery Monitor, Content Analyzer, Inbox Snapshot, and Blacklist Monitor
• To view Email Advisor Reports from Quicktests, click on the "test messages" tab on the View Messages page.  Then select "view reports" from the drop-down menu on the right hand side, then click the blue "go" button.  Now click on the tab with the EmailAdvisor Reports link.
• To view EmailAdvisor Reports from Sent Messages, navigate to the "View Messages" page.  Find your sent message in the list.  (The text under the status column should display Sent.)  Click on "View Reports" from the drop-down menu and click go.  Now click on the tab with the EmailAdvisor Reports link.

• Note: EmailAdvisor Reports take approx. 48 hours to display a good set of full results.  If you want to send a message on, say, Friday, then you ought have the message created on a Tuesday, and send a Quick Test message with the full EmailAdvisor reporting options checked. Then come back on Thursday and evaluate the report's results. Then make adjustments, and plan to send on Friday.

Reviewing the reports:

Within the delivery monitor reports, the important thing to check is that 0 percent of the messages are considered Bulk or Junk. The deliverability percentage should generally be above 90%, especially if none were considered junk. In general it appears that a few ISP’s are unreliable at receiving messages (iWon, excite).

Under the Content Analyzer, the Content Risk Assessment Score is the key marker for whether or not the messages will be rejected as spam. 5-6 points is the threshold of most ISP’s for messages being considered spam. 3-4 points should be examined for text copy or other issues that could be pushing the spam risk higher. Lower than 2 points is low risk of messages being considered spam, and will probably not be necessary to scrutinize the HTML / text copy, unless of course the content will be changed a good amount before the message sent to subscribers.

The Inbox Snapshot is useful to check the appearance of text, links, etc. for Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, etc. (Which ISP's you give the most attention to will depend on the make-up of your recipient list. You can create a report under the "List Breakdown" option to segment recipients by ISP; this identifies which ISP's matter most to your list.) Some email providers strip out cascading styles (CSS) used in the message code, so redundant font tags may be necessary to make things appear as they should. If the images are not appearing, make sure you’ve selected to view the "full message with images".

 

Sending (Scheduling) your Message

• Before sending your message, review the checklist at the top of this guide to ensure message is complete and satisfactory before sending.
• Click on the drop-down menu to the right of the message.  Select "Schedule" from the menu.
• On the scheduling page you have the option to send the message immediately or to send the message at a specified time and date.
• Before clicking the "save" button, select all the EmailAdvisor reporting options.