Recently we've made a minor update to our MAILCast service that lets you use the new Office 2007 file formats for your mailing source data.

Now, you can upload files in .xlsx (Excel) or .accdb (Access) format when you need to update the source of mailing data for your channel. These formats join the classic .xls and .mdb file formats that we supported and that you can keep using if you will.

Hope this helps!

Congratulations!  You’ve got your new MAILCast Channel and attached or uploaded your database, and now? What? Come on, send you first campaing or newsletter. There are up to three ways to compose an e-mail in MAILCast:

1. Composing it from scratch
   
   

   Go to “Channels customization>Change this channel's template and signature” and be sure than the checkbox “Automated format” is unchecked and Save it.

    

   

   Then, click on “Compose and Send” , choose your channel and select “Create content from scratch”.

   

   Finally click on “Next” to create your e-mail.

   
   
   

2. Composing it with an automated layout template

   
   

   Go to “Channels customization>Change this channel's template and signature” and be sure than the checkbox “Automated format” is checked.

   

   Then, choose a template, write your e-mail signature (optional but we recommend it) and Save it.  Now, when you go to “Compose and Send” (and select your channel) you will see automatically collected your news that you've created in the section “News” , just write an introduction to your newsletter and send  or schedule it.

   
   
   

3. Uploading your email into a zip file

   
   

   Go to “Channels customization>Change this channel's template and signature” and be sure than the checkbox “Automated format” is unchecked and Save it.

   

   Then, click on “Compose and Send” , select your channel and “Create from previous content” and choose the zip file from your computer.

   

   The best way to create the e-mail is putting together the html file and the folder containing  the images, and then zip them at the same time. But be careful, the zip file must be 500Kb at least and the html file ought to be in the root or you’ll get back an error when uploading . The file may be “.htm” or “.html”, no special name is required (also the folder doesn’t need any special name).
   So you can use your favourite html editor (as Dreamweaver) to create your mail, and use the MAILCast’s editor just to correct something if is necessary.

Remember that you can create or order us your customized automated template. We are also able to desing your personalized e-mail for your marketing campaigns. Ask fot this service to our customer service.

A few days ago I was interviewed in BaquíaTV. I had the chance to talk about e-mail marketing, Krasis and, of course, this blog too.

Interview (in spanish, sorry) has two parts. In the second one I speak about our other bussiness line at Krasis: on-line developer training on Microsoft's technologies. (www.campusmvp.com). I hope you'll find it interesting :-)

Nowadays a lot of people receive e-mail in their mobile phones (400.000 in Spain alone). Most of them used to be business travellers that use Windows Mobile devices or Blackberrys. But no anymore...

Today, given the small fees you must pay for GPRS/EDGE connections and unlimited e-mail plans, a lot of people is cathing up. At current SMS prices, you only need to send as few as 34 SMS mesages in order to equal the average unlimited e-mail plan fee. This leads to e-mail being considered cheaper and more useful than the far-limited SMS format.

In Japan, for example, they have been using e-mail in a regular basis for several years, and SMS almost has disappeared.

The current mobile e-mail usage it's expected to soar in the next years, being duplicated in two years, and being twenty times bigger in a 5-years time span. As soon as 2010 are expected to be at least 350 million mobile e-mail accounts worldwide. And these will not be only corporate accounts, but GMail, Yahoo or Hotmail accounts too in a high degree.

What does it mean to you as a marketeer?

Well, the conclusion is clear: you must take in account that many of your e-mail marketing recipients are going to read your mails through mobile devices. And this is now, not in two or three years.

Fortunately MAILCast has built-in support for this kind of situation. When you are creating your new campaign content notice that you have a tab that read "mobile version".

There you can enter the text you want your mobile recipients to receive when they download the e-mail in their cellulars. You can customize the content too.

Click to enlarge

If you not enter any content in this especial tab MAILCast will generate a simplified version of your full featured e-mail for you. This version will have all the text contents of your main e-mail so that at least people can read it in their phones. However we recommend to generate a shorter, summary, down-level version yourself.

Back in their desktops they will download the full-featured e-mail for easy reading in Outlook or other e-mail client.

You will never have to be concerned again about your customers not being able to read your e-mails while on the road :-)

Krasis has the pleasure of announcing a new version of MAILCast.

Our developer team, taking into account the needs and requests of our users, has working hard last months to finally achieve an excellent result.

As many of you would already know from this morning after log into your user account, MAILCast has new functionalities. All of them have been done to make it easier for you, sending your email campaigns and your newsletters.

Next I will introduce you the latest improvements of MAILCast 4.0:

· New “Basic” interface. Now you can choose whether working in the classic interface, or new basic one. This new simplified version allows to access to all channel’s functionalities from a single screen. You will not have to scroll the side bar. Try it! You’ll enjoy it.

· Excel integration. Many users were demanding this and here it is. MAIL Cast’s external channels that before were linked to Access, now they can also work with Excel.

· "One-Click ZIP Publishing".  This new functionality extremely simplifies your direct marketing´s tasks. Publishing your graphics bit by bit, and after composing the HTML in the content editor is over. Design your communication in HTML on your computer with any program, and include images and resources, as you wish.  Then include all your files in a ZIP file and upload it to MAILCast who will process them, publish them in the Internet and will get them ready for edition just before you do the mailing. Publishing an own design was never easier.

· Specific version for mobile devices. In the first step of the campaign composing process, you will find a new sheet called “Mobile version”. So you can type a shorter version for those subscribers who will read your mail from a mobile device.

· Sender’s personalization for every user. You only need to include in your Access or Excel document two fields called “Sender" and "SenderEMail". That way every subscriber will receive the email from the appropriate sender. Your marketing could be even more personalized.

· Personalized fields with own values in the test emails. Now you can introduce the values for each personalized field, as you wish. So that you will obtain a more “real” test version of the final mailing version.

· Content index automated generation. With a new label in the automated templates, you will have the option of generating an index, short or larger, with internal links to the different news included in an issue. MAILCast will automatically do it for you.

· News reutilization between issues.  When you are using the automated composing functionality in MAILCast, so useful creating newsletters, you can mark already used news as available for composing again, and vice versa. This facilitates the reutilization of the content between issues of the same channel.

· New templates versión. Although you may not notice it in Outlook or other ESPs, the new templates are optimized to improve the visual experience of subscribers using Yahoo, Hotmail or Gmail.

· Improved stats. At the time of checking the reports, you will find that they are generated faster tan before.

 · Improvement linking external databases.

And don´t be shy, your opinion counts!! So, please, don’t hesitate in sending us feedback about MAILCast. It will help us improving more and more…