November 6, 2009
Want some insight on how to improve your e-mail communications in the next year? Or, at least, figure out how you might go about it? Lyris is sponsoring a webinar next Thursday, November 12, from 1-2 p.m. on just this subject.
See the webinar registration page for more information.
November 3, 2009
Although none of us were fortunate enough to attend the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association (MIMA) summit in October, High Point Creative pointed out three of their big takeaways, specific to the From and Subject fields.
Much of the summit appears to have been focused on social media. You can find presentations on MIMA's For [Summit] Attendees page.
October 23, 2009
Lyris ListManager will be unavailable for the duration of the IT Outage this weekend, but will become unavailable earlier than initially planned. A change has been scheduled for 6 p.m. tonight, Friday, that will redirect users clicking on tracked links to a general information page and will also prevent administrators from logging in. The information page may be intermittently unavailable before 6 p.m. today due to other work.
Please be sure to log out prior to 6 p.m. If you are sending mailings today, note that the outgoing mail queue may become backed up and result in your message not being sent to all recipients. If you have a mailing to send, please do so sooner than later. This excludes large, internal mailings which generally should not go out before 5 p.m. due to the load it places on central mail servers.
October 14, 2009
Lyris ListManager will be unavailable from 2 a.m. on Saturday, October 24 through 7 a.m. Sunday, October 25. This is due to a planned outage at an Office of Information Technology Data Center. This may affect recipients of your mailings.
Tracked links will not take users to their destination. When Lyris is unavailable, mailings sent with clickthrough tracking enabled will include links that are broken; Lyris cannot collect tracking data nor can it redirect users to their destination. Similarly, Lyris will be unable to process unsubscribe and subscribe requests. For senders using GEL lists, we believe links to opt-out in the Donor Management System will continue to work, so long as they were not tracked. We will provide an update if we learn otherwise.
Lyris users should not track clickthroughs on mailings sent in the few days leading up to the outage, and should strongly consider not tracking clickthroughs at all during the week of October 19.
During this outage, we hope to redirect anyone following a tracked link to a page with information specific to mass e-mail.
Keep an eye on the blog for any additional updates. If we learn that DMS opt-out links will be broken, or that we will be unable to redirect message recipients to an informational page, we will post that information and send e-mail to list administrators.
Additional information:
October 13, 2009
"Call to action" is a phrase I've been using quite often, particularly in the domain of mass e-mail. For those of you sending messages with a call to action, rather than information-only or longer, more diverse messages, how do you present this to your users?
Written with Web pages in mind, "Call to Action Buttons: Examples and Best Practices" from Smashing Magazine, covers several best practices for the call to action. Each of these can be applied to mass e-mail. Low clickthrough rate got you down? Work on your call to action.
Major hurdle in applying this to e-mail: image blocking. And don't forget your audience that reads the text part of your message and not HTML (pay extra, special attention for internal communications).
The next Mass E-mail User Group meeting is Tuesday, October 27 from 1-2:30 p.m. in Morrill Hall 238A.
First up will be presentation and discussion on tips, tricks, and best practices for the plain text part of your message, held over from September. What do you do to format the plain text part of your message? What can you do to make it more usable in Gophermail? How does your writing differ from content in the HTML part?
The second part of the meeting is TBD, and we're looking for input. Here are a few options:
If you choose the "other" option, we'll call on you to lead or help lead that part of the discussion. Who better to facilitate than the person who wants to know more?
No need to register or RSVP unless you'll be attending remotely. Audio is done over conference call and screen sharing over UMConnect. Send a note to ecomm@umn.edu no later than Monday the 26th if you're interested in attending remotely.
We'll have some sort of afternoon treat, but it is BYOB(everage).
October 1, 2009
Notes from the last MEUG meeting are now posted and available at http://www1.umn.edu/urelate/ecomm/meug/meug_notes_2009_sept.html. The next meeting hasn't been scheduled yet; more to come.
September 21, 2009
The Mass E-mail User Group (MEUG) is starting up again. Our first meeting of the new academic year will be:
Tuesday, Sept. 29
1-2:30 p.m.
Morrill Hall 238A
With the surge of internal communications to students, faculty, and staff, we're kicking off the year with an internal focus.
First up will be Matt Sumera, Internal Communications Manager for University Relations. Internal Communications group has been developing standards and guidelines for internal communications at the University, from content to branding to frequency and beyond.
Time permitting, we'll move into discussion on the text part of mass e-mail, also with an internal slant. We'll look at how GopherMail renders messages for its users and some of the considerations you need to take into account when constructing your message. Have your own tips and tricks on how to deal with this? Bring 'em along.
This is a great opportunity to meet some of other senders of mass e-mail at the University, learn from one another, and hear and feed back into central standards development.
No need to register or RSVP unless you'll be attending remotely. We've got three extra slots saved for the conference call and will do screen sharing over UMConnect. Shoot a note to ecomm@umn.edu if you're interested in attending remotely and we'll send you connection information.
We'll have some sort of afternoon treat, but it is BYOB(everage).
September 20, 2009
If you are involved with e-mail at all -- below is a link to a great quick read on five no-no's for designing e-mails. All too often I see e-mails relying solely on images to convey the message. Sometimes I even see that the entire e-mail is one honkin' huge image. Ugh! Not good.
Take a moment to read this article and start ensuring the time you are taking to send an e-mail results in someone being able to read it.
Enjoy!
September 15, 2009
If you're currently using an opt-in list for marketing and looking to grow that list, you might be interested in an upcoming webinar, offered by Lyris HQ.
Title: Grow Your Email Marketing Opt-in List ... Almost Automatically
Date: Thursday, September 24, 2009
Time: 11:00 AM Pacific Time / 2:00 PM Eastern Time
Moderator: Ellis Booker, editor, BtoB Magazine and Media Business
Additional information and registration
September 9, 2009
Writing for the Web is a different beast. Those of us who live, breathe, eat, and sleep electronic communications must respect the differences and help others who are not as familiar with the online world.
For some great ideas on how to tame the beast and provide sharp, attention-grabbing content, check out "20 tips for writing for the web."
~Jennie
P.S I'd love to know if you think Web should be capped. Is it Web or web? Thoughts?
August 24, 2009
As of Friday afternoon, the mass e-mail privacy statement, to be used in conjunction with messages sent through the University's Lyris ListManager instance, is live and under a host name many of you already know: www.privacy.umn.edu (and without the "www").
The mass e-mail statement itself is at www.privacy.umn.edu/mass-email. You might note that it and the Web privacy statement are not linked to one another; the Web privacy statement is related to an official University policy, while there is currently no policy related to mass e-mail privacy. To avoid confusion over the mass e-mail statement being a matter of policy, cross-links were left of.
Despite the absence of policy, best practice is to let your recipients know what information is being collected and how that information is being used. The mass e-mail privacy statement was written in broad terms, to cover possible uses of Lyris ListManager and the internal workings of the system. As an example, you might only make use of aggregate tracking data in the system but, the system needs to track at a personally identifiable level in order to come up with the aggregate information so, you're covered.
While inclusion of the statement is not required by policy, best practice is to include the statement for your recipients. Changes to the mass e-mail templates and a broader announcement should be coming in the next week or so.
July 16, 2009
By, "AOL Web mail rendering problem," we mean "renders as an empty message." This is what one user discovered earlier today when sending a message. The cause of the problem? HTML comments. Yes, <!-- HTML comments -->.
We've added an instruction to remove all HTML comments before sending any messages in the HTML template files and the readme file that comes with the template package. If you have any templates in Lyris that are based on the e-mail templates, you may want to review them to make sure all HTML comments have been removed. Aside from the instructions to remove comments and related bits in the readme file, the templates are otherwise unchanged and are now considered to be at version 2.1
You can download the templates via http://webdepot.umn.edu/email/downloads.php.
June 26, 2009
I just ran across two inline style converters in a Smashing Mag article.
These are great tools; Inline styler is especially nice for allowing you to feed it a URL rather than copying and pasting CSS styles and HTML code into separate boxes. The reporting on compatibility issues is also helpful.
If you aren't familiar with the joys of HTML and CSS for mass e-mail, external stylesheets and styles in the head section are just plain troublesome in e-mail clients, since they're often ignored. Inline styles are the ticket. Other than pseudo-classes (e.g., a:hover) everything should be inline and inheritance should be leveraged.
June 18, 2009
I recently received this excerpt from Forrester Research:
Email adoption and use by consumers and businesses alike remain strong, with 153 million online adults regularly using email by 2014. Social inbox users will total 47 million in 2014, but will ultimately level off based on the blurring lines of the "traditional" versus the "social" inbox. Marketing messages to the primary inbox will swell to an average of more than 9,000 annually in 2014, with retention email making up the largest permission-based share. Email marketing spend will balloon to $2 billion in 2014 with retention email, services, and ad-sponsored acquisition newsletters all representing bright spots. Innovative marketers will rapidly adopt relevancy-empowering tactics to cut through the clutter and avoid wasting $144 million dollars in 2014 on email marketing that never reaches the intended subscriber inbox because of erroneous blocking.
Who can argue with data points like that? There's no doubt that strategic use of mass e-mail can be critical to increasing the visibility for any college/unit/department.
You can learn more about how the University of Minnesota uses its mass e-mail system as well as best practices by attending the monthly Mass E-mail User Group meeting.
This month's meeting is:
Friday, June 19
2 - 3:30 p.m.
Morrill Hall - Room 238A
The meeting is casual and whether you are super-familiar with e-mail marketing, online strategies, and technical tools -- OR -- you are new to the whole shebang -- please come join us. There will be ice cream treats :-)
~Jennie
June 15, 2009
The next Mass E-mail User Group (MEUG) meeting is this Friday (June 19) from 2-3:30 p.m. in Morrill Hall room 238A. This month the topics are use of forms in mass e-mail and customizing and personalizing the subscribe and unsubscribe processes.
Basic forms can be embedded in mass e-mail but, should they be? And, if so, how should they be used? Whether you've used forms in your e-mail before or if it's a new concept for you, we'll look at best practices and implementation.
The second part of the meeting look at customizing the subscribe and unsubscribe processes in Lyris, plus related best practices. If you've heard the words "double opt-in" before, or wonder how you can fix up the bland messages your new and soon-to-be former subscribers get by default, this topic is for you. The list hello message provide you with an opportunity to introduce new subscribers to your list and other resources you have available, while the goodbye message gives you an opportunity to reengage departing subscribers on their way out.
The meetings are always relaxed and there's no need to RSVP if you're attending in person. If you're a remote user interested in conferencing in (audio via conference call and slides via UMConnect), send an e-mail to ecomm@umn.edu by the end of the day Wednesday, June 17, so we can provide you with all the connection info.
May 1, 2009
The next meeting of the mass e-mail user group is May 15 from 2-3:30 in Morrill Hall room 238A.
The main presentation will be given by Christina Morgan, E-Communications Specialist for the University of Minnesota Foundation. She will be presenting on the use of conditional scripting in Lyris ListManager. She writes:
"We had a situation where we made good use of conditional scripting to merge additional fields and messages into the email only if certain conditions had been met. The presentation is geared toward users who maintain their own lists (i.e. don’t solely email to gel and gil segments), and who are interested in taking advantage of one of Lyris’ more advanced features."
For those of you not familiar with the 'GEL' and 'GIL' acronyms she mentions, these stand for "global external list" and "global internal list," which are list segments in Lyris that contain alumni, donors, and friends of the University (GEL) or staff and students (GIL).
This presentation will be more technical than most, but don't let that phase you, there's a communications angle to this, as well. It's trivial to personalize messages by merging, such as the recipient's first name into the greeting, but this presentation will address how to customize messages using demographic and other data.
For more information, including how users on coordinate campuses can attend, see the Mass E-mail User Group Web page.
April 30, 2009
Lately we've been working with OIT to better position Lyris ListManager as an enterprise system. That's not to say it's not now or that it hasn't been, but it hasn't always appeared that way. We currently have 235 users from 47 different units (a unit could be an entire college or an individual department), coming from four of our five campuses, and we anticipate continuing growth from recent interest in the system.
The first change implemented, working with the Office of Information Technology (OIT), was to transition e-mail support requests to Request Tracker, to allow for better handling of support requests and other e-mail traffic, as well as keeping a better history of requests in a central location. Support requests and other inquiries should continue to come to ecomm@umn.edu.
The second change, also working with OIT, was to add Lyris to OIT's System Status site, since Lyris is supported both by OIT and University Relations and includes so many users. Taking OIT's approach of naming systems with a hint as to their purpose, rather than using actual product names, you can find the Lyris as the Mass E-mail Distribution System (Lyris). Feel free to keep calling it "Lyris," but a generic system name is desirable should the product used change in the future.
April 9, 2009
The April meeting of the mass e-mail user group (MEUG) is Friday, April 17. This month, Sarah Bjorkman from Extension joins us to talk about her experiences in Extension with mass e-mail and rolling out Lyris for their units communications. We're glad to have yet another speaker in to talk about their experiences, the good, the bad, and lessons learned in planning and executing a rollout for a large unit. We should have ample time for questions and discussion.
We'll have some short topics and announcements following Sarah's presentation and open discussion after that. It's a great opportunity to learn from and network with others working with mass e-mail.
The meeting details are:
Friday, April 17
Morrill Hall room 238A
2-3:30 p.m.
some treats provided
If you're on a coordinate campus, we can set you up with a conference call and UMConnect so you can participate. Send us an e-mail at ecomm@umn.edu by noon on Thursday, April 16 so we can get you connection information.
We don't have an agenda for May's meeting yet, but invite all of our users to present. The best feedback we've had has been for presentations offered by units who have shared details of their implementation and experiences with others. Even if you've had a bad experience, we can all benefit from that knowledge.
March 24, 2009
The University now has an official and standard privacy statement for mass e-mail recipients, complete with approval from the Office of the General Counsel. You can view a copy of the statement but should not link to it as it's behind X.500 authentication (this is not its permanent home).
Our hope is to put in place for mass e-mail a structure much like what is already in place for the Web, which includes both a privacy statement and a policy. The statement itself is to be referenced in mass e-mail sent by the University and informs recipients of the data collected and its use at the University and by "associated third parties," such as the University of Minnesota Foundation and Minnesota Medical Foundation. This statement is what has been completed.
While the statement is intended for recipients, a mass e-mail privacy policy is a policy that would require inclusion of the statement in all mass e-mail from the University. Administrative policies at the University can take months to obtain approval once submitted. Here are some next steps leading up to the creation and expected approval of the policy.
• Provide the statement in a common location for all to use (watch for a revamp of http://www.privacy.umn.edu).
• Update the existing eCommunications standards to require inclusion of the statement.
• Determine through feedback if statements for individual units, that meet minimum requirements, may be used in lieu of the standard statement.
• Prepare and seek approval for the policy.
It should be noted that the approved privacy statement was written only with consideration for Lyris ListManager, the centrally supported software that the University uses to send mass e-mail. This statement may not be appropriate for users of Constant Contact, Exact Target, and other systems.
March 5, 2009
All facets of mass e-mail at the University are covered, including: standards, best practices, templates, metrics, and decision-making.