A-B Split Testing

The A-B Split functionality from MailDirect enables you to test two versions of your marketing mailer in parallel. You can now test mailers based on subject line, sender name, sender id and sending time. The feature allows you to test the two mailers on a smaller percentage of your mailing list. The A-B Split Testing feature allows you to assigning weights to parameters, such as Open Rate and Click-through Rate, in order to determine which of the two mailers has performed better and send it to the rest of your subscriber base. The A-B Split feature also comes with an ability to schedule the better performing mailer for a later point in time. So now you can test two mailers simultaneously, analyze how your customers are reacting to each one of them, and roll out the winning mailer at your convenience. A-B Split Testing enables you to:

• Test multiple version of your marketing mailers
• Know which subject line, sender name, sender id and sending time works best for you
• Assign weights to Open Rate and Click-through Rate for identifying the better mailer
• Schedule sending of the better performing mailer as and when desired

Enhanced Name & Salutation Handling

MailDirect smartly handles variations in your customer list, including missing first and last names, to ensure you achieve maximum personalisation. There’s always the possibility of incomplete names entering into your mailing-list, for instance recently signed up prospects from your web sites. MailDirect allows you to make them a part of your mailing lists, without impacting the level of personalisation of your communications. MailDirect lets you customise for the presence of both first and last names, or only one of these, and also lets you specify a default greeting/salutation to be used for any records where neither is available. So you no longer need to maintain separate lists of partially qualified prospects, with separate processes for these – just manage your master list and let MailDirect handle the rest.

Web-page as Mailer – on a Schedule!

If you have a website that’s regularly updated, and a list of customers who wish to be informed about the changes you make on particular pages, then this feature from MailDirect will make you very happy – because you don’t need to do anything extra to send out email alerts to people who subscribe to your content pages. You can use the Web-page as Mailer feature to quickly and easily send out updates to your subscribers as and when you’ve updated the page content, or in conjunction with the Scheduled Campaign feature of MailDirect if your pages are updated on a regular schedule. So you get to focus on content, analysis and marketing, and MailDirect ensures that your subscribers are kept updated with any new content that you post on your website.

Internal Alerts for Engager & Calendar-based Campaign Messages

Engagers and Calendar-based campaigns are versatile features of MailDirect that allow you to streamline the workflow for customer engagement and interactions – the former lets you pre-schedule a flow of interaction, and the latter takes away the need for human involvement to interact with your customers during milestone events like birthdays and anniversaries. [Read more: Engagers, Calendar-based Campaigns] Both of the above functionalities have now been extended – to also alert you after an Engager or Calendar-based campaign has been completed, should you wish to add any additional steps into your customer-engagement. For instance, a list of customers who have been sent a Calendar-based reminder for renewing their insurance policies can now be sent to the concerned team for follow-up; or a key customer celebrating her birthday could be sent a bouquet to make her feel even more special. We believe this is another excellent example of using automation to deliver even higher levels of personalisation – the difference between mass-mail and email marketing! To enable, just add the email ID to which the alert is to be sent in the appropriate field (towards the end of the process of creating the Scheduled Campaign or Engager) and that’s that. You can get in touch with our branch office nearest to you, or Contact Us for a no-obligations demo or trial, to find out how MailDirect redefines email marketing for you.

Dynamic Sender Customisation

Meant for organisations that need to run email campaigns across multiple locations, and would like to ensure that standard templates are used by all. MailDirect lets you specify particular variables like sender-address and contact details, specialised local-offers, etc., which will then be inserted into the standard template for the particular campaign. The template gets made with place-holders for the relevant sender-level customisation, and the relevant information for the different senders is to be provided through discrete CSV-files. When a campaign is to be run, by simply selecting the data-file containing the information for their location, the standard template gets customised for the location with just a few clicks! Dynamic Sender Customisation – More standardisation, with reduced effort for all.

Enhancements in the Survey Module

The Survey Module has been enhanced to provide you more information on the survey-forms already completed by respondents, and to allow you to easily tweak and reuse existing surveys, and keep track of the original and modified forms and responses easily and conveniently.

Access Campaign Reports via Email

MailDirect allows you to receive your campaign reports as an email, without having to log in to your panel. Apart from the obvious convenience of being able to check out a campaign’s effectiveness while on the go, this also serves as a secondary alert about a campaign being successfully completed.

Outcome based Campaigns

Using MailDirect’s Outcome-based campaigns you can now retarget those customers who’ve shown explicit interest in your offerings; with more relevant, focused and personalized messages – assisting them in making the final purchase decision. You can reconnect with recipients who’ve viewed, not viewed or clicked on past emails, thus ensuring that you never miss out on any potential customer.

How does it work?

Analyzing your campaign statistics enables you to identify those recipients who’ve viewed and clicked through your emails. Using Outcome-based campaigns you can target such recipients with more personalized content or special offers in order to entice them into purchasing your offering. You may even use this feature to reconnect with those who have not viewed your previous email. All you need to do is select the ‘On the basis of earlier campaign result’ option in the list selection area and choose appropriate conditions (viewed, not viewed, links clicked) based on the performance of previous campaigns. Outcome-based campaigns enable you to:

• Retarget customers based on their interaction with your previous mailers.
• Attract interested customers through special offers.
• Reconnect with active customers to induce trial/purchase.
• Send personalized content or seek feedback.

Note: This feature needs to be activated in the MailServe v03 panel. Feel free to contact your nearest branch for further assistance.

User Roles with Rights & Permissions

MailDirect lets you define access rights and permissions for your users, based on the roles they perform and limit the areas of your panel they can access. You can decide whether a user is only allowed to manage the mailing lists, create and execute campaigns, or only access campaign statistics and reports, or combinations of these, based on your internal policies and security guidelines.

How does it work?

Your database administrator can now be given permission to access the List Manager area of the MailDirect panel to manage the mailing lists and nothing else, while you permit your Marketing team to access the Campaign & Statistics areas for the operations, without giving them access to the List Manager area. MailDirect allows you to specifically allow/deny group users into the following roles:

• List and Recipients – Users who manage the recipient lists – blocked email ids, unsubscribed recipients, bounced email ids etc. These users will be able to access the List Manager area of MailDirect.
• Compose – Users responsible for composing messages and executing campaigns. These users will be able to access the Campaign area of MailDirect.
• Stats and Report – Users who analyze the campaign statistics and reports. These users will be able to access the Statistics area of MailDirect.

You can combine the above permissions, e.g. allow a Team Leader to access the Campaigns & Statistics areas, while List Management is done by your database administrator. Thus ensuring higher reliability & security through need-based access to your panel. Just one of the many thoughtful features in MailDirect meant to let you focus – on Personalised Email Marketing.

Enhanced Access Security – Allow by IP-address

MailDirect allows you to define the users who can access your panel by IP-address (or a range of IP-addresses) to act as an additional safeguard – now you can define not just who can use your panel, but also from where.

How does it work?

MailDirect understands that your mailing-list is extremely valuable, and also vulnerable to potential misuse. So we’ve introduced a simple, yet powerful safeguard – by letting you define and restrict the workstations that can be used to access your panel. And thereby ensuring that an unauthorised terminal simply cannot access your panel or your data. Along with granular activity-logging, this capability of controlling access to your panel is meant to put you at ease about the security and confidentiality of your mailing lists.

Calendar-based Campaigns

MailDirect enables you to schedule recurring timely campaigns and automate all event-triggered messages. Be it personalized birthday greeting, or service renewal reminders, or payment reminders – you can now rest assured that you’re connecting with your customers on time, every time. Moreover, this feature also enables you to set reminders on a recurring basis, and stop worrying if you’ve missed out on any.

How does it work?

Once you upload your lists, Calendar-based campaigns allow you to ascertain the exact number of days prior to which you need to send reminders to your customers for a particular intended action. All you need to do is select the appropriate date and the desired recurrence interval – monthly, quarterly, bi-annual or annual – and let MailDirect do the needful. Calendar-based campaigns enable you to:

• Induce customer engagement and branding through timely customer interactions
• Send personalized birthday/anniversary greetings
• Communicate critical actionable items such as bill payments and installments
• Select the frequency of communication once and for all

With MailDirect’s Calendar-based campaigns, you no longer need to worry if you’ve missed sending an important payment update, a birthday/anniversary greeting or a simple repeat purchase request based on your customers’ purchase history.

Scheduling Campaigns Based on Views

This feature adds a further level of automation to the outcome based campaigns. You can also schedule Recurring Emails to retarget those recipients who have not viewed your previous email, where you can set the particular email to repeat, based on the frequency and the end date or the number of times required.

Recurring emails are useful when you want to send out reminders to your clients about the bills. When the recurring email is scheduled, the email will be sent based on the next recurring pattern that meets the criteria.

"Send at Best Time" Setting for Recurring Campaigns

If you ask what the best time to send email campaigns is, there’s no definite answer to that question - the best times to send emails depend on your own audience! So what if we told you that you can schedule emails to be sent to individual recipients based on their engagement pattern?

The “Send at Best Time” setting in MailDirect studies the views and clicks behavior of your audience from the previous campaigns and uses machine learning to determine when your recipients are most likely to engage. It then automatically schedules your current campaigns to be sent out at those times! You can choose this option for recurring campaigns in the scheduling section of the campaign creation tool.

Group Campaigns

With this feature, you’ll be able to send your email campaign directly from your email client like Outlook, Thunderbird or Gmail to a group of subscribers based on common interests and preferences and send targeted emails to those groups. All you have to do is generate a ‘Group Email Id’ for the targeted group of subscribers while creating a list in MailDirect and then send your email campaign to this ‘Group Email Id’ from your email client without having to login to MailDirect.

Email and SMS Campaigns

SMS messages have a character limit so you’re sometimes not able to explain your value proposition in depth. And with email, you can but you’ll lose out on those levels of engagement.

With ‘Email SMS Campaigns’ you’re sending your recipients an email while informing them about it through an SMS! As a result, you gain the best of both worlds - depth of content and engagement. Another powerful engagement tool that is at your fingertips, with MailDirect! You can access this feature from within the MailDirect Dashboard and use it if your lists have both emails and mobile numbers stored in them.

Real-time Dashboard

Monitor your campaign’s performance in real-time and get actionable insights to build your strategy around it. That’s how smart marketers get smarter.

MailDirect provides statistics of your overall email marketing campaign — including geography, acquisition and engagement per campaign. Opens, clicks, shares, bounces - You get a complete set of reports that give you the data you need to exceed your goals.

Facility to use Campaign-Level Variable Content in Mailers

In addition to the 30-fields available at the recipient level for customization and personalization, MailDirect now allows you to introduce ‘variable/custom’ content, at the campaign-level. This is a functionality that your multi-location teams will love!

How does it work?

Let’s look at an organization with multiple locations, each of which requires to conduct its own email marketing activities. However, it’s important to maintain standardization as far as the content and presentation of the message is concerned, so Head Office would want to control the message templates used by the locations and not want them to edit the template. So, just to make sure that the address of each location is correctly mentioned in that location’s template, the Head Office team would need to prepare as many templates of each message as there are locations. MailDirect addresses this painful waste of time, simply and elegantly, by allowing for the inclusion of campaign-level variable content. Now the Head Office team will create only a single template for each campaign, and incorporate a campaign-level variable for the address, and send these out to the locations. At the time of creating the campaign, MailDirect allows the operator to add the substitution-content, which in this example happens to be the location address. And the campaign goes out duly ‘customized’, with complete template-integrity.

Enhanced Bounce Reports

The Bounced Mail Report now provides information on Soft-bounces (e.g. mailbox full, DNS failure, connection timed out, content is blocked, message size too large, transient bounce), Hard-bounces (e.g. mailbox does not exist, domain does not exist, relay denied) and No-Send bounces (e.g. mail lost, no response from recipient server). Incidentally, an ID that’s tagged with a Hard-bounce is automatically scrubbed from your list as a convenience, and cannot be re-subscribed. If an ID is tagged with a Soft Bounce or No Bounce Tag, we try resending your email message later again. And if it continues to bounce back, we advise you to update the list!

Editing Multiple Records

MailDirect allows you to edit/modify attributes across multiple records simultaneously – which is a necessity for good list management. You can use various search criteria to locate the relevant records, then select all the records to be modified (including ‘Select All’), choose from the actions that you can perform (including Block, Unblock, Copy, Unsubscribe, etc.) and the selected action gets performed across all the selected records. We hope this helps you maintain your lists effectively online, without having to resort to frequent download-upload operations.

Email as Webpage

The ‘Email-as-Webpage’ feature improves the effectiveness of your mail campaign by ensuring that your prospects can view the mails irrespective of their email client or mode of access – PC, tablet, or smartphone. With the proliferation of smartphones and tablets, it’s becoming more and more difficult to ensure a consistent email viewing experience across target audiences. And this situation is further compounded by the growing amount of email that a typical user has to process; so your message is far more likely to be accessed on a mobile device, and if your user couldn’t make sense of it there, it’s far more likely to get deleted. Which is where the option to view the email as a web-page can come to your assistance. Enabling this feature results in every email being also saved as a web-page identical to your mailer, and a link to this page gets automatically embedded in your message. Clicking on the link fires up the user’s web browser and the email is rendered as intended. We hope that this feature from MailDirect helps make your email marketing even more effective.

Google Analytics Enhancement

Your mailer is just one side of a conversation, don’t you want to hear your customer’s reply? For a lot of marketers, parameters like click-thru’ rates (CTR) and view-counts are necessary, but not sufficient. Because they’ve understood that the email needs to be backed with compelling content on their websites, that engages with the customer to achieve outcomes. How long did the person stay on the landing page? Where did she navigate to from there? Did anyone receiving the mailer fill out the enquiry? To help you to dive into all this and more, MailDirect now allows you to transparently hook into Google Analytics for sites. If you are already using Google Analytics to monitor your web presence points, you can embed your property ID into your MailDirect campaigns; so when you now access your Analytics account, you will be able to see information on how many visitors your campaign generated, how long they stayed on the landing page (longer indicates more interest), where they moved from there, and more. All of which could prove useful in tuning up not only the specific campaign landing pages, but your site overall. We believe that successful marketing is a conversation with your customer – engaging, and ongoing. And we’re working on many more ideas that help you achieve precisely this; for instance take our powerful and flexible Engagers functionality, that helps you maintain a flow of time+event based interaction with your prospects and customers. Drop us a line for a no-obligations trial and see how MailDirect can take you from one-sided announcements to conversations with your customers. Note: This is not an endorsement of Google Analytics, nor a recommendation to use the system; this new capability of MailDirect will allow you to connect transparently to Google Analytics, should you be already using the system to track your web properties.

Engagers

Think of an Engager as a pre-defined flow of structured communications that is automatically handled by MailDirect. For instance, you want every person who signs up on your web-site to first receive a thank-you message, followed by any instructions that she may require to start using your offering; you may want to send her a list of some of the more ‘advanced’ features and how to use them about 10-days later. You may want to seek her feedback on how her experience with your offering has been after another 10-days, followed by a request for referrals on day-30 after purchase. Four distinct events, with four distinct messages. Can you imagine the possible errors as the number of customers increased? For an Engager, handling this is child’s play – and you may change the message templates anywhere along the process and the new one’s would automatically start getting used.

CleverLists

CleverLists enable you to create conditional filters using standard data fields in the recipient lists. They allow you to define certain conditions as per your campaign requirements. Based on these conditions you can extract relevant recipients from lists you have already uploaded in MailDirect. Consider a typical scenario where you want to send an email campaign to all customers from Mumbai who have subscribed for product X. All you need to do is extract data from an already existing list where ‘City’ = ‘Mumbai’ and ‘Product’ = ‘X’ as opposed to creating and uploading a separate list every time. This not only saves the time required to create, upload and maintain lists, but also speeds up your email campaign roll-out time since you now you simply need to extract a subset of recipients from existing lists.

AutoAppend

What happens after you ask visitors surfing your website to subscribe to your newsletter, notifications, schemes, new product trials, etc. Once the user clicks on the ‘Subscribe’ button, AutoAppend spontaneously incorporates the user into the appropriate list in MailDirect. This not only ensures promptness but also that you never miss out on share of mind with any prospective customer. And all this without any user intervention – which means that you have even more time to focus on your core business. With AutoAppend, you can be assured that your mailing lists will always be up-to-date, thus allowing you to seize and cater to all potential customers.

Forward-to-Friend

‘Word of Mouth’ is undoubtedly one of the key means of business expansion and brand establishment. ‘Forward-to-Friend’ makes it possible to measure this medium catalyzing your lead generation and brand establishment initiatives for seamless business development and expansion. With this new feature you can be assured that your business and brand awareness are growing by means of your satisfied customers. More importantly you can precisely track which of your customers are actually spreading positive ‘Word of Mouth’ about you, and devise strategies accordingly. And all this at no additional effort or cost!

Social Share

Social Share lets you include social icons in your email campaigns that lets your subscribers quickly and simply share the entire email with their social network(s). By including social sharing abilities within your email campaign, you are potentially extending the reach of your emails, which is particularly useful for limited time offers and promotions.

Social sharing is also an interesting way of gauging the attractiveness of your offers, and who your most active customers are – letting you reward loyalty and refine your offers even more. And of course, not to forget the added leverage of credible social media exposure for your brands and company.

CustomAttach

Consider the classic scenario of a financial institution sending its customers their Net Asset Value (NAV) or monthly statement. Since the attachments are different per customer, someone would have to manually send these mails to the customer after attaching their respective NAV statement / monthly statement. Time consuming as this relatively unproductive activity may be, an additional problem would be your organization’s bandwidth getting clogged affecting its overall IT infrastructure. CustomAttach enables you to send personal attachments to multiple customers and have the entire campaign analysis run via MailDirect’s bandwidth, allowing your infrastructure to function seamlessly. Moreover, since the process of sending personal attachments is automated, the possibility of human errors is also eliminated.