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.