New Mac Safari, Chrome and Firefox support for SpinnakerPro

New Browser support. Many of our customers prefer Mac Safari and Firefox browsers when editing campaigns. So whether you use a Mac or Windows, SpinnakerPro works great with Mac Safari, Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer. Watch out for our special offer later in this newsletter. Link to this newsletter http://urlx.ie/safari

BETTER email designer. Great looking email design, along with well written copy, is important for keeping your subscriber engaged. So we looked at award winning designs that statistically worked better in terms of open rates, inbox delivery and rendering in different email programs like Outlook 2007, Mac Mail, GMAIL and Hotmail. With lots of different colors, compliancy copy, round corners and square corners, the new designs are free for you to use. The designer gets a whole new look and approach to creating beautiful looking newsletters. You can easily try different canvas color, design color, borders and width against your copy. The preview design function will show how the email renders and we provide suggested widths to make sure your email looks good in Outlook 2007, GMAIL, Mac Mail and Hotmail.

Make sure HUMANS are opting in to your newsletter. Automated programs and "bots", usually written to generate spam, can be harmful to your email database and sending reputation. So with the help of Recaptcha you can make sure that it's a human who is subscribing to your newsletter. Get your signup form from the Admin/Setup menu.

AUTO-RESPONDERS. When a new contact is added or opted-out, you can create a custom message using the new content editor and you can direct the subscriber to a specific URL such as a survey.

Sending to a SEED list is a standard task in your campaign testing. We made this simpler so you can specify your test email address list as you create the segment and they will be automatically added to the database. The segment function is more intuitive so that you can easily create segments such as, from a previously imported file, a previously saved segment and advanced options has better examples, like sending a reminder email to recipients of a prior campaign.

IMPORTING your list can be troublesome, especially from Excel. When you create a map, we figure it out for you. Once you create a map you can reuse it each time you upload new contacts. We also optionally check the domain name on import (optional) to make sure the email address is valid. Sending email to a poorly formed address is a sure-fire way to damage your sending reputation.

TWITTER is an important communications channel for your brand. You can post directly to twitter and other social networks from your email campaign. It automatically shortens the link to your newsletter using tinyurl. That offer we mentioned earlier? To claim 500 email sending credits, Go to the menu Account / Redeem Voucher and enter the coupon code "twitter" - Make sure you follow us on @spinnakerpro

Got a SERIES of newsletters for each new subscriber on signup? That's hard to manage manually. With SpinnakerPro you can create the series of emails, define the frequency and SpinnakerPro will automatically manage and send the emails for each subscriber individually. The frequency can be setup as daily, weekly, monthly, just once, stop after a certain date or a number of issues.

For the TECHNICALLY minded, we made bounce tracking even smarter to recognize the difference between out of office versus not there at all. SPF can be validated (optional) before you send the campaign (it's not much use to check after the fact). Not having SPF in place will guarantee getting pole position in the Junk folder or not delivered at all. it also eliminates the obtrusive Sent on behalf of message displayed by Outlook. The Web service API also gets improved segment and broadcast management - useful when you use SpinnakerPro to work with other web applications.

And finally we've added more gorgeous FLEX2 graphs to the metrics screen with better at-a-glance figures along with top ten URLs clicked... Need to know MORE? Contact us on support@spinnakerpro.com for your personal webinar to help get the most out of SpinnakerPro. If you are an AGENCY or Web Developer contact us for special Agency rates and our WHITELABEL offer.

Spam in Ireland now an indictable offense

The Irish Data Protection commissioner signed into law on 9 Dec 08, changes to SI526 that now makes sending unsolicited communications an indictable offence. Previously the maximum fine was EUR3,000. The minimum is now EUR5,000 and can reach EUR250,000 or ten-percent of turnover. Private individuals can be fined upto EUR50,000. The onus of establishing that the subscriber consented will lie on the defendant.

In a press release issued on 22 Dec 08, Billy Hawkes of the Data protection office, said: "I want, in particular, to send a message to all involved in business to familiarise themselves with the law which applies to unsolicited communications for direct marketing purposes. Increasingly, in this period of economic downturn, my Office is receiving complaints about businesses making unsolicited contact with their past customers for marketing purposes. In many cases, such contact is unlawful and, if carried out by telephone, text message or email it may be a criminal offence. Ignorance of the law is not an acceptable excuse for non-compliance and I will have no hesitation in applying the full force of the new regulations to offenders."

Users of reputable email marketing software like Spinnakerpro are better protected because of the controls involved for opting in and opting out. Importantly, after a subscriber has opted-out, they receive a message confirming this and the software can no longer send to that subscriber. The problem with non-automated systems is that there is a danger a company could re-contact someone who has opted-out and thus fall foul of the regulations.

Link to this post: http://urlx.ie/71343/

#VOR Interview with Damian Foxall aboard Green Dragon, Leg2 at Cochin India.

Spinnakerpro.com sponsor Damian Foxall who is currently aboard the Irish/Chinese entry, Green Dragon, in the Volvo Ocean race. This morning, friday 3 Dec 08, we spoke with Damian who, along with the crew, are preparing for Leg 3 to Singapore. Listen to tales of pirates, a broken boom and more: http://urlx.ie/greendragon

Interview with Damian Foxall aboard the Green Dragon

We sponsor Damian Foxall who is currently aboard the Irish entry, Green Dragon, in the Volvo Ocean race.  At the time of writing (friday 31Oct08) the Green Dragon was a few hundred miles from the finish line for Leg1 at Cape Town.  Full audio: http://urlx.ie/s/greendragon  or get it on iTunes.

Take your email to the design studio

When we wanted to bring our customers a contemporary designer look for emails, we knew to look no further than Bafta-nominated creative design studio, Spoiltchild. Owner Alan O'Rourke brought out a sleek ezine designer called Toddle that's built to work with email marketing applications. Using Toddle with Spinnakerpro couldn't be easier. Just design your layout in Toddle, generate the link and paste into the Spinnakerpro WYSIWYG content editor. That's it! What's more, any Toddle design automatically entitles you to 1,000 email sending credits. Sign up here. Shortcode for this blogpost http://url.ie/tyk