Blogerry

New Dashboard: More useful than ever

Tue, 25 May 2010 00:00:00 -0400

We have released the new dashboard for Newsberry, which is more beautiful and easier to use than ever. The new dashboard will allow you to see all the relevant information related to your campaigns. You had all of this information before, but now it is organized better.

How it works

We show you information on the dashboard based on your usage of Newsberry. Not all details are visible straight away on the dashboard.

If you are new to Newsberry, you will see only details on how to get started, and create your first list. The more you use Newsberry, the more information we will show you.

When you are familiar with creating campaigns, sending campaigns, adding subscribers, you will see the dashboard with full details.

On the left side you will see:

Which campaigns are being sent at the moment
Which campaigns are scheduled for sending and when are they being sent
Which campaigns are saved as a draft, and whether they have content defined
Which campaigns were already sent
Brief statistics of campaigns (number of opened emails, spam)

On the right side you can easily access any of the lists you have created or you can create new ones. If you are on dedicated IP plan, you can also see basic information about your reputation on the dashboard.

We hope you like the new dashboard, if you have any feedback or suggestions, please let us know.

Header Banner Templates

Mon, 17 May 2010 00:00:00 -0400

After releasing the new HTML editor, we received some fantastic feedback on some changes that would make the editor even better. We immediately got to work on some of these changes. One of the most common requests was to allow wide, banner-size logos at the top of our templates. Since the new editor will automatically resize your images to fit perfectly, customers with long logos ended up with little, squished logos that were no good.

Introducing: Templates for Wide Logos

We’ve created a set of our Templates that now have a banner-size logo at the top. These new templates are located at the bottom of the Template Gallery. Make sure to select one of these templates if you have a logo that is wider than 110 pixels. The new banner logo is about 600 pixels wide.

Further Rendering Improvements

We also spent some time painstakingly tweaking and updating our templates to better render in several email clients (Outlook 2007, Outlook 2003, Live Hotmail, Yahoo! and AOL). This is something we revisit often as these email clients make changes to their rendering engines. Since the new editor doesn’t let you alter HTML, with these new changes your emails will look perfect!

New Editor: Create beautiful campaigns without the effort

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0400

We know you’ve waited a long time, and we appreciate your patience. We’ve launched the new customer HTML editor which we are sure you will love (we sure do). Here’s a quick overview of how it works and what you can expect. Detailed help articles coming soon.

Editing a new Newsberry template

When you go to create a new template, you will notice that we have separated your own custom templates from our templates (now called the Template Gallery). This way, you can now filter through our templates based on various layouts.

To edit one of our templates, just go to the Template Gallery and select the one you want and the new editor will open. What you will see is a template full of editable regions. We’ve basically separated all of the places you can edit into their own sections. This way, you can make all the changes you need without messing up the HTML. Start making your changes by editing each section at a time. You can add images, documents and text to each section separately. We’ll do all the proper formatting for you.

We can also now generate the Text Version of your template (click Text at the top). This was a highly requested feature, so now you have no excuse to send out your email without a version for your subscribers who don’t read emails in HTML.

You will also notice that adding default tags is much easier with the new editor. Now you can just select the Unsubscribe, Subscribe, etc tag from a list and we’ll put it in for you. You still have to insert your own custom tags, we are working to add these in a future release.

Existing Templates

Unfortunately, it was not possible for us to convert existing templates to use the new editor. So, we have left the option to use the old editor for those who are in the midst of creating a campaign, or those who want to reuse a previously sent draft. You will notice the layout of the page is different, but the tools for editing (WYSIWYG) are still the same. We will, in the future, remove the old editor completely, so we highly encourage you to start editing your campaigns using the new, custom editor.

Custom Template

We are currently working on a markup to allow you to create a custom HTML template that can be edited using the new editor. This way, if you have a designer who wants to create a template for you to edit, they will use a special markup in their HTML that will talk nicely with the editor. Until then, you can still add custom HTML and use the old editor to make changes. Expect this capability in the very near future.

Images

We are happy to report that when you upload an image in the new editor, we will do all of the resizing for you so your image fits perfectly within the design. No need to resize anything on your end.

However, for those customers wishing to reuse an image they have uploaded before, there is currently no elegant way to do this. Since the new editor is completely custom, it does not use the same Image Manager where you have stored your previous files. Therefore, you cannot access them while editing, all images are uploaded from your computer. We are working on a custom add-on to make this work. In the meantime, there is a workaround.

To access the image manager you can open or create a custom template. Here you will be able to access the old WYSIWYG editor and open the Image Manager. Just download any images you need to your computer and them upload them again when you are editing in the new editor. We know this isn’t ideal, and we are working to get you a better solution.

Support

This release has taken longer than expected as we wanted to test, and test and test again. If you notice any bugs or issues, please submit a ticket. Also, if you have any feedback or suggestions, please let us know. We hope this solves a big headache for you when you are working on your marketing campaigns.

Security Breach – Issues this weekend

Sat, 10 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0400

As we mentioned yesterday, we identified that someone gained unauthorized access to a single account. While initially this seemed to be an isolated issue, we continued to investigate throughout the day and night and have determined that we were victim to an organized attack on our servers.

At this time, it looks like only 2 accounts were affected (those customers have been notified directly), and that the goal of the organization was to use our mail servers to send Spam email. Since we have several levels of protection in place, they were not able to send out a large number of emails and therefore affect delivery of your campaigns.

Since the attack occurred on our servers, we are in the process of strengthening our servers. This has caused unannounced server restarts and downtime this weekend. We are still actively investigating the extent of the breach, and will provide updates on the blog as they become available. For now, our priority is to secure everything today to ensure your data safety.

We want to sincerely apologize for the incident. We know you have put your trust in us to keep your data safe, and please know we do not take this lightly and are doing everything we can to ensure this first time incident is also the last. Unfortunately, these attacks have become common against Email Service Providers, many occurring within the last few months to some other well known services.

Please note, your credit card information is safe. We do not store it ourselves so it is not possible for anyone to acquire it. As for your subscriber list, we believe that they did not set out to take it. If you, or your subscribers, feel that they are receiving unwanted emails all of a sudden, please let us know right away.

We thank you for your continued support through this difficult time. We will continue to be honest and transparent with you. If you have any questions or concerns, please email us. We will post updates here and on Twitter. Once we have more information, we will email all account owners directly.

Update: Our servers are undergoing a serious security audit by both internal and external experts. We are sure we closed the breach and fixed everything, but we want a second opinion!

Using Twitter for unsubscribe retention

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0500

From time to time I clean up my inbox of newsletters that I don’t read anymore. Since in most cases I signed up to receive it, I do the polite thing and simply unsubscribe. Today I ran across a really nice technique while unsubscribing from a CollabNet newsletter and wanted to share it.

Recovering from an unsubscribe

We all know that sometimes when people unsubscribe it does not necessarily mean “I don’t want your content”, it might just mean “I don’t want it in this format” or “I get this content too often.” We’ve explained in a previous post how to create unsubscribe exit surveys with Wufoo.

When this happens, the best thing to do is offer alternatives. When I unsubscribed from CollabNet’s newsletter today, they did just that. Here is the confirmation screen:

By offering to follow them on Twitter, it provides a non-intrusive alternative to still get updates without cluttering my inbox. I thought this was a smart approach.

Updated User Permissions

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Today we released a new update to User Permissions. While we updated the design to be more user-friendly, we also added two new permission levels.

Exporting Subscribers

We’ve separated the export function from the overall Manage Subscribers section. You can now assign someone permission to manage all of your subscribers, but limit their access to exporting a file of your subscribers.

Sending Campaigns

We’ve separated the ability to send a campaign from creating a campaign. Now you can allow someone (like a designer, for example) to create and test a campaign, but prevent them from sending the final blast.

To learn more about the changes, take a look at the updated article on user permissions.

SpamAssassin Bug for 2010

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Just a quick note to email senders. It has been confirmed by SpamAssassin that there is a bug in their software that will affect scoring of legitimate (ham) emails. In short, SpamAssassin had a provision in place to block emails that had been dated in 2010 or later. Well, it’s 2010 and they never made the change. For those companies running SpamAssassin, they will need to make some changes on their setup, which can be found the SpamAssassin website.

The affect to you, as the sender, is that your Spam score could be raised by 3.6 points for sending email this year. This means that an ISP can block you if you have some other issues and have a combined score above their threshold (oftentimes 5.0). If you receive any Blocked bounce statuses from domains in your Bounce Report, this could be due to this issue. We recommend you contact the postmaster of that domain and let them know of the issue. Also, you can resend a previous campaign those subscribers using our Behavioral Sublists.

Let us know if you have any issues or need any help with this. Happy New Year!

Announcing High-Volume Sender Tools

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Over the past few months, we have been hard at work designing new tools to help high-volume senders achieve the best delivery results possible. Our goal: to provide more transparency of delivery results (and therefore ROI) by placing the control and responsibility back in the senders hands.

The new tools are being offered to customers who have more than 10,000 subscribers and have purchased a monthly plan. We provide these accounts with a dedicated IP address and tools to track their personal IP reputation, all at no extra charge.

With the launching of these tools, you may have noticed that we have also rebranded our website. We wanted to highlight that we provide powerful tools for high-volume senders at a much lower cost. While we will still continue to support and build for our low to medium size customers, we want to make sure these delivery tools shine.

In a nutshell

The tools consist of three parts:

Dedicated IP address
IP Reputation Monitoring
Inbox Delivery Monitoring

Dedicated IP

For high-volume senders, sending from a dedicated IP ensures that other companies’ sending practices do not affect delivery. So, we provide these senders with their own IP, Feedback Loops and Whitelisting ready to go. Since, on a dedicated IP, your sending practices are the direct cause of any delivery issues, we now put the power in your hands.

IP Reputation

You can track your IP reputation and check if certain campaigns make it to the Inbox. Then when there are issues, we provide a vast resource of information on how to fix delivery issues and improve. The tools would be useless without the information to improve, and we’ve got a lot of it.

Inbox Delivery Monitoring

Without these tools, high-volume senders are mailing blind. You send an email and hope that it makes it. With Newsberry’s Inbox tracking, you can see your Inbox delivery results for major ISPs such as Yahoo, Hotmail, Comcast, AOL, and many others. With that information, we offer you the reasons and solutions to constantly improve overall delivery of your emails.

Learn more about the tools by browsing our website. If you are interested in signing up, please email us so we can answer any questions and help you get started.

Designing HTML Emails: Suggestions

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 00:00:00 -0500

In a world that lacks uniformity and common standards for email clients, designing an HTML email that will work in all of them (even most of them) seems like a difficult task. We’ve created an article that contains some guidelines and recommendations to help you design your emails to look good in most of the email clients.

I know that designers, once they see these suggestions, will think we are crazy. Yes, most of these are outdated design standards that every designer hoped would go away (TABLES, anyone?). But, unfortunately too many of your recipients are using email clients that just don’t support the new, fun stuff. It’s just a fact of life at this time. Let’s all hope that one day, we will have smart, uniform standards that will make the lives of senders and recipients much easier.

Check out the article, and let us know if you have any suggestions or questions.

Suppression (Do Not Email) Lists

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0400

We often have customers ask us about separating a group of subscribers who should not receive their email campaigns. Some call this a suppression list, or a Do Not Email (DNE) list. Whatever you call it, there is an easy way to do this in Newsberry so I thought it would be helpful to quickly outline it.

Setting up the file

Newsberry has a few system-wide fields that indicate a subscriber’s status. In order to tell Newsberry to mark someone as Inactive, you need to import a file with some extra fields. Note: The following fields and values need to be entered exactly, in order for Newsberry to recognize them.

The two fields necessary: Subscriber Status and Reason.

Add these two fields to your existing Suppression file (.csv or .xls). Now you will need to provide a value for each subscriber. For the purpose of a DNE list, type Inactive for everyone’s Subscriber Status. In MS Excel, you can select all the cells and copy the value, which should make this really easy. For the Reason you have a few options:

Unsubscribe
Manually Deactivate
Spam Complaint

Whichever you enter for a subscriber, that Inactive Reason will show up in your subscriber list. Keep in mind that Unsubscribe and Spam Complaint are permanent, meaning a user cannot reactivate them in the account once their status is set. This is to protect someone from accidentally activating a subscriber who asked not to be contacted.

Result

Once you complete your file, you can simply import it as you normally would. Newsberry will recognize the new fields on the second step of import, and select the field names for you. If Newsberry did not recognize the fields, you may not have the correct spelling/wording in your file. Double check that it matches exactly.

Once the import is complete, these users will now have a new Subscriber Status and Reason. If these subscribers were active before, they will now become inactive within that list.

For more detailed, step by step instructions (with screenshots) of how to create and import the file, check out this article on our help site.

As always, feel free to email support if you need help with this.

View email client statistics with Fingerprint

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Ever wondered what email clients your subscribers use to open emails? There are so many (Gmail, Outlook, MSN, etc) and they all render HTML differently, so knowing what your subscribers are using may be important when designing custom HTML emails. This will help you design based on the most popular clients in your subscriber base.

Identify the problem

When you are designing an HTML email, you may want to know if it’s worth changing things around for a particular email client. That’s what a Newsberry customer recently asked themselves. Software Test & Performance Collaborative, a community for test and quality assurance professionals, found that their newly designed email was not showing up nicely in Outlook 2007. The changes that were required were drastic and it would have to be a change that would affect everyone (Gmail, Outlook 2003, etc). Before taking this step, they wanted to figure out if it was worth it.

Understanding your subscriber base

The first thing they did was try to determine the penetration Outlook 2007 has in the business community. While the statistics vary, a study performed in late 2008 showed that only 7% use it. That was great news, but obviously a lot can change in a year and it depends on your list. That’s when we directed them to use this great tool, Fingerprint, from the people that brought you Litmus. Their application lets you track your campaign to see what email clients your specific subscribers are using.

So, ST&P Collaborative signed up for an account and tried it out. They chose a campaign that was going out to all of their subscribers (not a sublist) and added the simple line of code into the HTML (generated in Fingerprint). That’s it. The campaign went out through Newsberry as usual.

Viewing the results

When the final results came in (we waited the full 14 hours), the numbers were much different than we thought. Of the subscribers who opened that particular campaign, 53% were using Outlook, and 21% were using Outlook 2007. That quickly answered the question, a redesign was definitely necessary so as not to ignore such a large group of people.

Final Thoughts

If you are using our Templates, be assured that we have tested them in all clients and, unless you do something drastic while editing, should show up fine in Outlook 2007 (and others). Also, if your usage for a certain mail client isn’t high, you may decide it’s not important to make any changes. For ST&P Collaborative, they made changes by simplifying the template and removing backgrounds (which Outlook 2007 may strip).

If you are using your own HTML, we highly recommend both Litmus and Fingerprint to review your campaigns and learn more about your subscribers.

New HTML Editor

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0400

In the last few months, our existing WYSIWYG editor (HTML editor) has been causing some customers tons of grief. We realized quickly that we needed to find a better solution, but that’s not always so easy. Today we launched a new editor that we’re sure will make editing campaigns much easier, and in ALL browsers.

What’s Different?

We chose an editor that would still provide all the features in the existing one, but do them better and more effectively. You will notice that the icons are different in the new editor.

Old HTML Editor (top) compared to New HTML Editor (bottom)

Also different will be the windows that popup when you add a hyperlink, image or document. The following will explain how to use each.

Adding a Hyperlink

To add a hyperlink, first select the word(s) that you would like to link. Then, click the icon that looks like chain links. A window will popup where you can enter the full URL and select the Target (where you want the link to go).

You can also use this window to edit an existing link. If you want to remove a link from your campaign, simply highlight the word and click the icon that looks like a broken chain link (clever, we know) .

Adding a PDF Document

To add a document, first select the word(s) you’d like to link to the document. Then, click the icon that looks like a piece of paper . The window that opens is the storage of all your documents. Here, you can upload and keep any PDFs that you would like hosted on Newsberry to be used in campaigns (and online versions).

Here you can create folders to organize your files, view all the files you have, and delete any that you don’t need anymore. When you want to add a new document, you can click on the Upload button. From here, you search your computer for the file, and then upload it into Newsberry. Once you are finished, the new document will appear in the main screen. Click the checkbox and then Insert (bottom left of the screen). The document will become attached to the word(s) you highlighted.

Adding and Editing Images

Just like with the document manager, the image manager also stores all your images that Newsberry is hosting. To access it, simply click on the icon that looks like a painting and the Image manager will open. Here you can edit any existing images, create folders or delete any images.

To upload a new image, click the upload button. If you are using Safari, you will need to select the Basic Uploader while we wait for the update for the missing button. Browse your computer until you find the image, then upload it. Once you get to the main screen, you can edit the image.

By clicking the UP arrow, you get to the edit page. Here, you can rotate, crop and even resize the image! This has been a HUGELY requested feature. No need to open Photoshop to change an image size, you can now do it right in Newsberry.

Once you are finished editing, simply click “Insert” or just click the image, and it will be added to your campaign.

In order to wrap text around the image, you need to select the image which you have inserted and then select one of the alignment options from editor menu.

We have something else for you!

Since we know how painful editing HTML can be using these WYSIWYG editors, we have been hard at work designing our own template editor. The new editor will allow you to make changes to your campaign without messing up the HTML, which is often what happens with these WYSIWYG editors. The new editor will ensure that any changes you make to your campaign will preserve the design of the template, and therefore make it look pretty in all email clients.

Here is a sneak peak at the new Template editor. We hope to have this available to you in a few weeks.

Beta Testers Needed – Send free for three months

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0400

We have some really cool, top secret tools we are working on in Newsberry. We’re looking for a handful of new companies to help beta test. As part of the process, we will give you free use of Newsberry for three months. The beta is for features not related to sending, so sending and campaigns will still be 100% stable. Here are the requirements:

You send more than once per month to over 10,000 subscribers
Your campaigns follow can-spam laws and you do not send to rented lists
You already use some variation of an email system for current campaigns
You can keep a secret :)

We’re extremely excited to get this out to the public. If you are interested, please email us at support@newsberry.com with some information about your company, email campaigns, and lists. We can only accept a small group, so be sure to apply quickly.

Unsubscribe Exit Surveys with Wufoo

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Ever wonder why people unsubscribe from your list? We recently released a feature that allows you to show a custom Unsubscribe confirmation page. We had a lot of requests for it, especially with so many international customers needing it in different languages. With this new feature, we decided to do study to see why users were unsubscribing from our Beanstalk list. Here’s what we did.

Using an awesome web survey system called Wufoo, we redirected our Unsubscribe confirmation to a quick (quick = short) survey asking why they unsubscribed. Wufoo let’s you customize the survey, so you’ll see it looks very similar to the Beanstalk site.

We spent some time figuring out the right questions to ask our subscribers that were relevant to our list. We decided on these four (plus comments section):

I don’t remember subscribing
The content was not relevant to me
I receive too many emails from Beanstalk
Email address is no longer active
Any comments that can help us improve?

The Campaign

Our entire list of Beanstalk customers consists of those who have signed up to use the service (same as Newsberry, actually). We sent them a campaign announcing several new features that would make using the application easier. In Newsberry, we linked the Wufoo form for the Unsubscribe confirmation page.

And that’s it. We sent the campaign, and waited for the survey responses to roll in.

Results

Of those that clicked Unsubscribe in our email, 82% actually filled out the survey! The results really surprised us. Here are the results from the survey, which can be generated easily in Wufoo.

I don’t remember subscribing – 40%
The content was not relevant to me – 40%
I receive too many emails from Beanstalk – 12%
Email address is no longer active – 8%

A good number of subscribers actually added some comments that explained their answer (no longer have an account, not using the account anymore, etc). What surprised us, is the first two reasons were the two we thought would get the least response. All our subscribers subscribed to receive the emails during the signup process. Also, we would expect that any information about new features or updates is relevant to people using the application.

What we learned

For starters, we need to segment our Beanstalk emails better. We didn’t remove any users who haven’t logged in or used their account for a particular time. This meant we ended up sending to people who weren’t using our application anymore, so obviously the information wasn’t relative to them! We also decided to re-evaluate the signup and email subscription process. We’re considering separating the subscription options so people can opt-out of Features and Updates emails. This way, we continue to send important emails to our customers (system status updates, important system changes and requirements) but let some customers opt-out from the rest. As far as sending too many emails, we’ve realized that we just can’t please everyone. The last email we sent to these customers was almost 3 months prior. We can’t imagine sending any less.

Other recommendations for your surveys

The questions we asked were tailored to our needs, but you can ask a variety of questions. Here are some other useful questions to ask that will help you learn more about your sending practice. Of course, always remember to keep it short. This is free, valuable information, so make sure you tailor it to meet your particular subscription.

I receive too many emails in my Inbox
I’m no longer interested in your product (store, information, etc)
I receive too many emails from you, and would like to receive less
I signed up for a specific reason (event, product information, etc) and no longer interested
I have trouble understanding/seeing your emails

Interested in performing the same survey? Let us know if we can help, or if you’d like to share your results with us.

Why we changed the navigation on Newsberry

Wed, 13 May 2009 00:00:00 -0400

The new Newsberry has been online for quite some time, and you might have noticed that some things are different. We mostly applied the new look of the public site to the application, but one thing needed a serious overhaul…

The Navigation

We have to admit that the navigation was not entirely easy to understand on the previous version. The biggest problem was that the hierarchy of the different navigation elements was torn appart. The new version does a much better job at grouping all the actions and presenting them with much better visual weight.

Have a look at the Subscribers page for example. I’ve marked the different navigation levels with numbers, with 1 being the the highest level and 4 being the lowest. As you can see, the new design even got rid of the fourth level, making it much easier for navigating through the application. At the same time, your eye does not need to jump from left to right/right to left when you move between the main areas (Dashboard, Lists and Templates).

Yes, we removed the left sidebar

Some customers might be a bit confused that we removed the left sidebar. But we did this in favor of consistency. For instance, a Camapaign was created within the Campaigns section of the application. Lists and Templates were created via the sidebar. Sounds wrong, doesn’t it?

Now, we basically had two options:

Add a “Create Campaign” button to the sidebar
Remove the sidebar and add “Create List” and “Create Template” buttons, just like the “Create Campaign” button

As you probably noticed, option two won. Removing the sidebar really helped to clean up the overall design, which results in less confusion for the viewer.

We really hope that these changes help to speed up your interaction with Newsberry and make the overall experience more fun.

Fresh, new look for Newsberry

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0400

You may have already noticed that we redesigned Newsberry public to give it a fresh, clean new look. It’s Step Two of the effort we talked about earlier to update the application with not only new features, but also a clean-up of what’s there.

So, what’s different?

We have been thinking about a way to keep the old functionality intact, but adding a new fresh look to it. Thanks to our designer Gilbert, Newsberry got a completely new face. If you have been using Newsberry before and you liked it, we’re sure you will love it now!

What have we done?

Moved Subscriber Lists to their own section at the top to make them more easily accessible.
We’ve moved the tabs for Account and Help to the top so they are always visible.
Moved our Help System to an outside application called Tender. This will allow our customers to post questions, comments and feedback as well as post private issues for our customer service.

These are only small changes which you would notice when you first log into your Newsberry account, but it does not stop here. During the makeover, we have completely redesigned navigation, buttons, tabs, modalboxes and much more. For example, take a look at the redesigned “Create a Campaign” page:

Want to see for yourself? Login to your account or signup now! The adventures of Newsberry do not end here. We have a lot more cool stuff planned for 2009. Stay tuned and follow us on Twitter to get the latest updates.

A closer look at Newsberry’s new public site

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0400

It was about time that we finally redesigned the public site of our Email Marketing application, Newsberry. I’m very proud that I had the chance to do this – I kind of lurked on this task since I started working at Wildbit.

Besides the fact that we are very happy that this happened, I want to talk about the use of icons on the site today. Long story short, for myself icons have two big roles when it comes to design:

Explain certain actions visually, so they are more clear to the user
Support the visual design

In general, icons can contribute to your overall design the same way a typeface, a color or an image – they don’t have a minor role in the visual hierarchy. I stumbled upon a lot of websites which make use of free or stock icons. I don’t want to convict the use of them, but in my eyes custom made icons really help to make your design stand out from the crowd.

That said, it was a no-go for me to use free or stock icons anywhere on Newsberry. Even if they don’t match the taste of the shiny-icon crowd, I put a lot of love in these little bunch of pixels. Come on guys, it’s easier than you think – inspiration and help is everywhere.

So, I hope you enjoy the new look of the site. What? You ask if the new public site is the last stop on the road? No Sir, there are more adventures ahead of us:

Newsberry Redesign Sneak Peek

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0400

A new look for Newsberry’s public site is coming next week, along with some exciting new features. Here is a sneak peek, so be sure to check out the site next week and follow us on Twitter for the announcement.

Target subscribers based on behavior

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0400

You may not recognize me, but you will be seeing a lot more of me in the coming months. I recently joined Wildbit to help with Newsberry as the service continues to grow. I’ll be responsible for customer service, improving your delivery, and giving the product the close attention it needs. We just released an exciting new tool in Newsberry, behavioral targeting. Now you can target and segment subscribers based on who opened emails, clicked links, and which emails bounced. This new tool will help you maximize response and create follow up emails based on subscriber behavior.

Here are some basic ways you can use this new tool:

Send an email to all subscribers who clicked on a specific link.
Send a follow up email to only those people who opened your email.
Send an email to anyone who clicked a link or opened email in the past 5 campaigns.

Read more about this new feature in the help system.

Highrise integration in Newsberry

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0500

We released a great new feature for Newsberry: Highrise integration. Highrise is an online contact manager and address book, which keeps contact info centralized, sharable, and safe online. By integrating with Newsberry, you can synchronize contacts between Newsberry and Highrise. This is the first integration tool for Newsberry and we plan to release more in the near future.

How does it work?

By integrating with Highrise, we offer:

Automatic updates of name, email, and phone in Highrise to your Newsberry list
Posting a note in each Highrise contact when a campaign is sent

In Newsberry we provide two ways of importing subscribers:

Importing contacts from CSV and Excel files
Manual import

Now, if you have a Highrise account, you can import subscribers by integrating with Highrise. Not only can integrate contacts, but you can do it for every list that you have in your Newsberry account. Every list can be integrated with a different Highrise account. You don’t need to worry whether your contact list in Newsberry contains all the contacts you have in your Highrise account. If you add, update or delete contacts in your Highrise account, you will notice the same changes in Newsberry. Newsberry will synchronize the contacts between Highrise and Newsberry for you automatically. You can add contacts from different sources to your account (manually, by importing through CSV, XLS files or by Highrise integration), and all of them will coexist in your list.

Give it a try!

The feature is available for Free and Paid Newsberry accounts. To give a test run, sign up for a Newsberry account. To learn more, read the Highrise integration article in Newsberry’s help section.