Today I've just stepped into a real cool banner ad in a geek-page that I think it deserves a post.

Peter Blum, according to his web page, is a web control programmer that, after many years building UIs for commercial Windows and Macintosh applications, started to develop and sell commercial products on his own. Its company is a one-person one. Peter creates the documentation and provides the tech support. And he has no complex about it.

In fact, he does his own marketing too.

He has setup a real effective banner campaign based on "sincerity". Take a look at his banner:

It's real cool. I especially like the frame that puts an arrow pointing to the "Corny call to action" :-D

And I bet he's getting good results. Guerrilla marketing once again!

Visit Peter Blum's webpage. I think he's got to enhance the landing page, but I like the real cool and funny banner.

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.

It’s well known that, when economic downturns strike (as the current economic situation), the immediate response is to cut costs, not increase them. Which costs? First, always, marketing and advertising (oh, what  a mistake!, in fact, I think that during economic crisis there’s the great chance to position your brand better).

But as the Galo-Roman Axterix’s Village, there’s an irreducible, measurable and effective kind of direct marketing that not only doesn’t decrease during economic crisis, but even grows up!!! Of course, you’re right: it´s e-mail marketing.  Why? Because the well known email marketing advantages: it effectiveness, measurability, low cost, segmentation, high ROI … ¿Do you need more?

Aren`t just my thoughts, look this extract from a Media Survey (2008 – Source: DatranMedia ), where 82.4% of marketers who took part of are going to increase their investment in e-mail marketing during 2008 and 55.3% expect to get a higher ROI in e-mail marketing .

Note: this month has been one of the busiest I’ve had in the last two years. It’s been very hard on work and that’s the reason I’ve not been posting as frequently as I’d like. In fact, next week will be worse because I’m a speaker at the Microsoft’s worldwide presentation event of Visual Studio 2008, Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008, so I will be travelling for the whole week. I hope that I can post something however. At least I’ll try my best. :-)

This is a little bit technical post, but if you follow the steps one by one it will be easy to put into practice. Let’s go!

Sometimes you’re not able to deliver a message to a recipient and you get some strange code from your Outlook (or the e-mail client you normally use) or, simply, get your e-mail bounced back. What everybody generally does is call her system administrators in search of help. But you will earn a lot of time and knowledge if you can find the problem by yourself (and you’ll save your busy sys-admin some health too) . Let’s find out how to do it...

Open your command line tool typing “cmd” in your Start·Run menu:

The first thing we’re going to do is check what are the servers responsible for handling e-mail for the problematic recipient.

The destination domain is just the text after the '@' of your recipient’s e-mail address, so that if it is johndoe@yourcustomer.com, the domain would be yourcustomer.com. Type the following command in the command line window:

nslookup –type=mx recipientsdomain.com

using the correct domain. You will see something like this:

The information you get that starts with the text ‘MX’ (short for Mail eXchanger) indicates the server responsible for handling the e-mail of the domain. In big domains usually there are more than one of them, but you should normally check only against the one with the 10 preference, as indicated.

OK, now that we know the server we must check, it’s time to connect to it. In the command line type the following:

telnet mail.yourcustomer.com 25

using the server you’ve just found out.

25 is the standard port for e-mail communication. If the server is up (and your connection too) you’ll see something that starts by the number ‘250’ (which means ‘this is OK’), like this:

If there is not a connection with the server you’ll get an error:

And you then will know that the reason of your problems is that the server is not working at all.

If you succeed it’s time to check the validity of the e-mail account. Type the word ‘ehlo’ following the domain name of the sender e-mail address. You’ll get a series of 250 acknowledge messages:

Now type 'mail from:' using the sender e-mail between ‘<’ and ‘>’ signs:

Next type ‘rcpt to:’ with the recipient’s e-mail address in this server. If the e-mail address exists and is willing to receive your email you’ll see something like this:

This will mean that, in this moment, there is not any problem with the recipient’s e-mail so you can retry the sending now.

But if there is a problem with the e-mail -which is very probable and that’s the reason you started all this stuff in the first place- you will get an error code (a number not ‘250’) and a message telling you the which the problem is all about. For example, if the e-mail address no longer exits you’ll get:

That’s all. You have diagnosed the problem by yourself and will be the super-geek hero of your office :-)

Don’t forget to type ‘quit’ to exit the telnet program before leaving. And never mind: if the address is OK your recipient will not receive any message from you and will never know that you have made this check procedure.

A professional e-mail marketing program such as MAILCast will offer you detailed information about the cause for some mails to bounce back, but if you are just sending a small bunch of e-mails from your “normal” e-mail client, with this technique you can found the main cause by yourself.

Some of our customers had several offices in different states and countries. Or maybe they need to send e-mail addressed from each of their customer reps to the customers they are responsible of, so that everyone receives the email from the right person.

Apart from the main sender of the channel you're using to send your mailing, you can personalize the sender name and email address for each of your recipients with a little trick:

Just add two fields to the Access or Excel file that contains your recipients after uploading it to MAILCast. Name them: 'Sender' and 'SenderEMail' respectively (case insensitive).

When you start sending your mailing, each e-mail will be addressed from the address in the 'SenderEMail' field, and with the name contained in the 'Sender' field.

If any of them is NULL or empty (or invalid)  the default address or name for the current channel will be used instead.

You'll never miss the chance to communicate from the right source again. And it's very easy to do :-)

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 :-)

When I started to write the title of this post I was tempted to use the colloquial phrase “snail mail” instead of the more politically correct term “postal mail”. In fact I wrote it and immediately change it. It was not my intention to be shamelessly partial when judging one against the other, but in our sector this is a common way to refer to traditional mail.

And that gets to the first point in my list of advantages of e-mail versus postal mail: it’s much faster to start and execute a campaign with e-mail. A traditional direct mail campaign needs planning at least three weeks in advance. With e-mail you can plan the campaign, send it and measure the results in just a few days.

That’s one of the reasons traditional mail gets dubbed as “snail mail” ;-)

Another good reason to choose e-mail is that you can save a lot of money too. Depending on the total size of your recipients’ data base (it gets cheaper as you send higher mail volumes) you can even send hundreds of e-mails per euro. Every postal letter you send costs you more than 50 cents if you take into account paper, printing, envelopes, stamps, handling and so on. So e-mail is thousands of times cheaper than postal mail.

Other annoyance of postal mail is that you must sort it appropriately before going to your postal office. Depending on the final destination of the letters you get a different price, and if you want to optimize the costs is very important to have all the letters sorted by destinations groups. This is an extra cost you must take in account, and one that many people discovers only the first time they arrive to the postal office with their ten thousand letters marketing action in several boxes :-(
With e-mail this just doesn’t happen and you get the same price if you send an e-mail to your country or to one in the other side of the world.

E-mail marketing campaigns give you instant access to results and metrics, and you start to receive information only seconds after sending the e-mails. You can have a level of detail impossible to get through other means. Sure, you can measure things with traditional mail, but is more difficult and inaccurate, it takes a lot of time, and generally you must use some kind of reward to get people back to you (coupons, discounts…). And that costs you money too.

Despite all this advantages and some more, many times postal mail is the only choice you have. Maybe your target sector is a very low tech one and e-mail is not very common in it. Or maybe, plain and simple, you don’t have the e-mail address of the people you want to contact. Even worse: maybe you have the e-mail addresses but don’t have the permission to use it (be careful with privacy laws: they’re much harder with e-mail than with –in my opinion- the more annoying fax or environmental unfriendly postal mail).

But if you can e-mail is generally speaking a much cheaper, agile and effective way to keep in touch with your customers, and prospects.

Today I've been working in a small (just 97 lines of code) Excel VBA macro that can be somewhat useful. This utility allows you to split up columns of data that contain Names and Surnames mixed, so that you get two new columns with this elements separated.

It is able to correctly split names in several formats:

• Name and Surname. (for example: Zachery Barr)
• Name Initial Surname. (Stewart H. Shepherd)
• Two Names and a Surname (José Manuel Alarcón)
• Two Names and several Surnames (José Manuel Alarcón Aguín)

Download Name and LastName Splitter.xls (54 KB)

In order to use it you must enable the support for macros everytime you open it in Excel:

Press "Options", and select the "Enable this content" option:

Now just copy and paste your mixed data in any column in any sheet of this spreadsheet.

It's important that you select the range of cells you need to be processed for splitting. If you don't make any selection only the current cell will be processed.

Now go to the "View" ribbon in Excel 2007 (or Tools·Macros in previous versions) and press the "Macros" button or press ALT+F8, as it's shown below:

In the dialog that appears execute the macro "SplitCurrentColumn":

Now you will get another sheet named "Split" with two columns. In the first one you'll have the names and in the second the Lastnames.

You can process as many data columns as you want but take into account that the "Split" sheet will be emptied each time you execute the macro, so save your new data first. You cannot process data in the "Split" sheet which holds the results.

In the download I've included a sheet with sample data for you to try (300 randomly generated names).

Hope this helps!

Blackberry mobile phones are very popular within business users worldwide, although actually only around 12 million receive their e-mail directly in these devices through a subscription.

Blackberry e-mail client has been known for its dreadful support for HTML e-mail. The problem was not that it couldn't read this kind of content (a lot of mobile phones out there which are able to read e-mail don't support html). The real problem is that this devices in fact do think that they can read it, so instead of showing the multi-part text version of the contents (if any), they showed the html version but without being able to display it accordingly. This is a huge pain for marketers.

Hopefully it seems that this is going to change soon. RIM has released a press note about several software updates for server and devices that are going to fix this problem inthe next months. Literally they say:

"HTML and Rich Text Email Rendering – BlackBerry smartphone users will be able to view HTML and rich text email messages with original formatting preserved including font colors and styles, embedded images, hyperlinks, tables, bullets and other formatting. "

This are good news for everyone because Blackberry adoption will surely grow a lot in the next few years, and this will lead the way for others to adopt the same feature (as Windows Mobile Devices did long time ago).

Most people, as is perfectly normal, are not concerned about the technical details of the e-mail marketing software they use. But they should be. The devil is in the details, and technical ones are very important.

I've recalled this today, analyzing some commercial e-mails I've received recently.

For example, let's take a look to the URL an e-mail marketing provider generates for tracking reading stats for his customers (this is a real one, just changed the domains for privacy):

<IMG src="http://www.anemailprovider.com:8080/pcmwtg/trackingServlet=idtracking=2&idsend=906077">

Take a look at the evident purpose of each parameter of this tracking URL... What if I change the idsend value a little bit to, let's say, 06078?: I've just added a new read count to another user.

If I were not a really nice person (as I am in fact), I could easily mess-up all the reading stats of this provider, making them totally useless to their customers. :-(

Another thing interesting enough is that this image is not pointing to a real image. It doesn't even have an extension or even a real file name, which is easily spotted by some anti-spam filters. Not a good technical decision.

Now take a look at the typical tracking image we use in MAILCast:

<image src="http://mcs.krasis.es/C/R/MTc5NDA1NCAg.gif">

Well, the name of the image is not very beautiful either, but is clearly an image file name, and what's more important: all the information about tracking is nicely codified and encrypted in the name of the image, so is very difficult to tamper, and the stats are much more reliable.

Other issue involves the tracking of links. A tracked link in the previous sample e-mail was like this one:

http://www.anemailprovider.com:8080/pcmwtg/trackingServlet?idtracking=1&url=http://www.customerserver.com/landingpage.htm&idsend=906077

Uh??, The same as before but even worse. I could assign random clicks to anyone and the destination is directly embedded in the link, so I could easily avoid the tracking too.

A typical tracking link in MAILCast looks like this:

http://mcs.krasis.es/C/L/?V05_122498_MTc0NRB2NCAg

Which is, again, ugly (not uglier that the previous one, by the way), but is shorter and don't compromise the reliability of the tracking process.

The worst thing about the technical approach used in many e-mail marketing programs like the one I'm analyzing today is the unsubscribe link:

http://www.anemailprovider.com:8080/pcmwtg/GestionServlet?type=1&idunsubstemplate=10140&idCustomer=2447&idcontact=1572907

When I try writing in the browser that URL I get a message saying that I was successfully unsubscribed. But the customer ID and de contact ID are plain auto-numeric values in a database, so if I start trying different values I start to unsubscribe all the contacts of the customers of this provider too! Oh my!!!

Even If I get a message telling me that a unsubscribe confirmation e-mail is going to be sent to me, a malicious attacker could flood the inbox of all those contacts with unsubscribe confirmation e-mails which is in fact a cruel attack.

In fact if I try other values that are not numbers, in this case I could even make a SQL Injection Attack to the database, and don't want to know what a malicious attacker could do with this.

This is a very critical sample, but in fact a real one extracted from an email I've received this week. Just yesterday I received at least two newsletters that had this kind of issues, that are more common than you may think.

So the moral is: you don't have to be technical savvy for using an e-mail marketing or newsletter software, but is very important that you get advice from a skilled programmer or technician so that you don't have problems in the future. In fact you should get advice with any software you purchase, and this gets more important if you're dealing with your image and your customers' privacy.