Sailthru, Inc. » Uncategorized

unintentional irony

noah — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 21:09:29 +0000

If following those twenty-five essentials leads to an email campaign like this I’d say it’s time for a new list.

“text only” test send

noah — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 18:29:03 +0000

For clients who want to preview how their emails will be rendered by text only email clients our “text only” feature allows them to test send text only versions of their emails. When editing a campaign or template, simply select the “text only” box and test send to the emails of your choosing.

Now try and say “test send text only” five times fast.

New List Growth reporting

noah — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 21:04:54 +0000

As part of our ongoing effort to add power and ease of use to our UI we’ve introduced a new dimension to our Email List Growth report. When viewing this report you’ll now see not only the total size of the list, but the net change in the list size over a selected period. Net increases are preceded by a “+” and displayed in green, while net decreases are preceded by a “-” and displayed in red. But we don’t imagine you’ll be seeing much red. After all, you’re using Sailthru!

In addition to the change, you can also select the time interval to display. Select from “daily”, “weekly” or “monthly” from the duration drop-down menu, depress the refresh button, et voila! a powerful new chart is displayed. Finally, in the view drop down menu you are also able to select to calculate the growth report against the total number of email addresses in your list (including optouts and hardbounces) or against valids only. Yep, it’s pretty cool.

Stay tuned as we bring many powerful new features online over the coming weeks.

Help support Haiti relief

noah — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 19:46:59 +0000

Like many others, the enormity of the Haitian catastrophe has touched our hearts and reminded us that we all need help at one time or another. So we asked ourselves what we as a company could do to help. Once of those things is to support the red cross by including one of their banners in our emails like the one included here.

Clicking the banner takes donors directly to the Red Cross donation site where they can choose between the Haiti Relief and Development and the International Response Fund. Including the banner costs nothing but may help to ease the suffering of a people in need. We hope that you will consider including one of these banners in your outgoing emails and we’d love to hear ideas you have about helping out.

How to use a/b testing effectively

noah — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 19:44:16 +0000

Hello to all.
It’s been a while since we posted, but among other things, we’ve resolved to post more frequently in this new decade. And to kick off this new effort we’re going to address a subject much discussed in the email world: A/B split testing.

First a definition of terms: in it’s basic form an A/B split test is the competing of two versions of an email within a given campaign, each on a small percentage of a list. Having monitored responses to each, the more effective of the two test emails is then sent to the remainder of the list. It is important to remember that the two competing versions are run on exclusive segments of the list, that is, test recipients receive either version [A] or version [B], but not both. The purpose and great power of an A/B split test lies in the ability to determine how your users are likely to respond to an email before having sent it to the vast majority of them. Of course, coming up with two versions of a single campaign also puts to the test your basic assumptions about who your users are and how they will respond to a given message, thus making it a teaching tool as well.

Our system has a default setting of 10% for each of the A/B segments, which means that 80% of the list is withheld. So, under the default settings, the winning email can be sent to 90% (10% test + 80% final) of the list (unless the final version of the email is a hybridized third version… So many options!). You can specify any number of recipients for your tests, just remember that you want it to be a large enough proportion for the test to be meaningful, and a small enough proportion that the vast majority of the list receive the most effective version of your email.

A 50:50 A/B test is not really an A/B test
We sometimes get requests to run A/B tests on a different proportion of a given list. The system lets you choose any fraction of your list that you specify. But quite often we are requested to run a split of 50% and 50%. As I said before, the system will let you do this, but just know that to do so defeats a central purpose of the A/B test. After-all, once you’ve run your test on 100% of the list it’s too late to use any of the knowledge gained! And even if you were to send the same email a second time you’d be in new conditions and sending to users who, at least half of which, had received the ad already.

For detailed instructions on how to perform an A/B split visit: http://docs.sailthru.com/ab_split

How to avoid phishing

capenj — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 22:40:00 +0000

If you are not technically savvy it’s hard to figure out if an email from paypal or chase is really from who it says it is. If in doubt just make sure that you type the address in yourself. You should be able to remember most of your banking urls, and just open your browser and go there. Don’t follow that lovely link that may save you 1 click or may cost you $10,000. Sometimes its hard for me to spot a fake they are so good, and the biggest issue is if you click the link you may have already exposed yourself.

In the mean time we will keep trying to make the email business a better place so that spammers and phishers can do no harm!

Gmail Vs Hotmail spam filter

capenj — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 18:42:45 +0000

Poor Hotmail gets a lot of flack for poor SPAM filtering, while GMail gets all the compliments (although less so recently). Google must have some fancy algorithm for finding SPAM – or do they?

Well, it’s actually the fact that GMail has a big edge, a huge edge even. Up until very recently GMail was used primarily by techies, techies that unsubscribe from email they subscribed to and flag real SPAM as SPAM. See the subtle difference?

A non techie will tend to flag anything as SPAM they no longer want to receive. So why is GMail’s SPAM filter starting to get a little sloppy? Because more users are flagging things incorrectly.

One thing I absolutely suggest that you always put within your emails the date your users signed up. The secret is to encourage users to behave correctly as society should! Flag only SPAM as SPAM and we won’t get any (or much).

I’m still hoping we will come up with a solution that will kick those spammers into the stratosphere, although a recent legal ruling might help some what – $873 million fine.

15 million emails sent

capenj — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 19:20:17 +0000

That’s alot of emails we’ve sent, and our delivery is rockin. We are getting some great delivery results!