Ackura Blog

We’ve previously talked about how important smartphone friendly websites are. Below is an interesting video looking into how the consumption of media has changed and how it’s mobile that is quickly become the most important medium.

We’ve talked about mobile optimised websites before but now companies are realising that more and more of their customers are viewing their emails on their mobile phones. As a result of this we are seeing more mobile optimised email campaigns.

Mobile optimised emails are not new, British Airways experienced great success with a campaign over a year ago, but recent figures show that, on average, 17% of emails are now opened on phones and that percentage increases to 24% when you only count emails that are opened within 24hours. 28% of mobile users say that they check emails on their phones and 70% of those check their emails everyday.

So, in other words, 1 in 5 people use their phones to view emails everyday.

On average the iOS platform wields the highest engagement for mobile optimised emails, making up 60% of all mobile click through. Android and Blackberry are 2nd and 3rd with 21% and 14% respectively.

The research also discovered that mobile optimised versions of an email out performed the non-optimised versions. mobile optimised emails received 6.5% more clicks and 6.7% fewer unsubscribes. By tracking goal completions (for example bought a product or downloaded a document), mobile optimised emails generated 7.7% more than standard emails.

If you would like to learn more about mobile optimised emails or is interested in using mobile optimised emails with MessageSender then please get in touch.

Source: comScore

You see sharing buttons everywhere on the web but not so much on emails. If you’re not including Facebook, Twitter and Linked in share buttons on your emails then you could be missing out.

Research done by GetResponse found that only 20% of email marketers include social sharing links in their emails. The research also showed that by including the sharing links the click through rate can double with Facebook and Twitter buttons but more importantly those that used LinkedIn’s button saw their CTR quadruple.

Below is an infographic that displays all the research findings:

The automatic creation and send of press release emails to Press Contacts has always been an update we’ve wanted to do and now we are very excited to say that it is now available.

We know that although you publish your news it doesn’t always get found by who you want and so a press release email is sent to your press contacts to help exposure. The process of creating a press release in PressRoom and then again as an email is now an unnecessary hassle. Now when you create a press release within PressRoom it automatically creates an email version of it that you can then send on to your chosen press contacts, all from within the PressRoom system, thanks to some integration with Ackura MessageSender.

With PressRoom you can now input your press contacts, build press mailing lists and create a publishing schedule with the ability to place embargoes on releases or send out for immediate release. In addition to this you are also able to send a release to an individual without actually publishing the story. This is useful if you would like another member of staff to see the release before it is sent out.

If you are currently using PressRoom then you will find the press information in the contact section and arrange the send of release from the Journalist tab in the press release editor.

Basic PressRoom users can add up to 15 press contacts to a single mailing list, whereas premium users can upload up to 200 contacts and create 20 different mailing lists.

If you would like to discuss the new email functionality then please get in touch.

Last week we rolled out our largest ever update to PressRoom so far. Although the majority of the updates were to the back-end of the system, there are a number of updates that you can now take advantage of.

Improved News Archiving

We’ve updated the archive system in PressRoom so that the news can now be easily filtered by month and year.

New preview viewing

In the previous system users needed to log into the PressRoom service to view any previews. We’ve now allowed users to view a press release before it’s published with out the need to log in, allowing higher management or related clients to view the release without the need to set them up as a PressRoom user.

Bit.ly Integration

The url shortening service, Bit.ly has been added to the “Service Accounts” section of PressRoom. This service allows you to automatically create a short urls for your press releases.

Improved Media Section

Media attached to a press release can now be viewed as a slide show or cycled through by the reader.

Categorisation available to all

The categorisation feature we developed for Pentagon is now available upon request for all PressRooms. More information about how the categories work can be read on the Pentagon blog post. If you would like the categories feature applied to your PressRoom then please get in touch.

We would love to hear your thoughts on how the PressRoom service can be further improved and we will look to add your ideas into our updates schedule. Work is already underway on a number of other features we hope to implement soon.

We are happy to announce that we are about to roll out a number of new updates to PressRoom.

The updates will start to roll out this evening will be completed soon so that your news will hopefully be unaffected.

While the updates are being applied current PressRoom users will not be able to access their publishing areas but don’t worry your PressRoom frontend won’t be affected so your new articles will still be visible.

Thank you for your patients. We will let you know what these latest updates entail soon.

The new year has well and truely got underway. There a few big updates to PressRoom on the horizon, which will improve social media integration and press release distribution.

Until then we would like to say that our Charity Program is still continuing. The list of charities using PressRoom is still growing and we are happy to announce that the following now use the service:

• Homeless International
• Kidney Research UK
• Tree Aid
• Lepra Health in Action

If you’re a charity and would like to use the PressRoom service or if you would like to discuss how to improve your news distribution then please get in touch.

Reports about how the smartphone market is going to continue to boom in 2012 are easy to find and it’s no surprise that 84% of smartphone users use their phones to browse the web. In 2011 the number of smartphones in the world was around the 1.08 billion mark and that has no doubt risen since. So with over 900 million phones browsing the web have you thought about how your website looks and works on a mobile device?

It is important not to rush into developing a mobile website just because of the figures mentioned above, instead some research into your website’s visitors is needed. You should be able to access mobile information in your website’s analytics and this will show you the system on which people are viewing your website on. Most analytic systems will show you a simple spilt between mobile and non-mobile visitors but if not you can gain an idea from the browser type information. The figures will give you an insight into whether a mobile website is needed. As a recommendation, we suggest that if 15-20+% of your visitors are visiting your website from mobile devices then you should seriously consider creating a mobile website.

Renold were experiencing an increase in mobile traffic and so created a website using our SiteManager CMS that would allow visitors to easily navigate their website. More about Renold mobile can be read here.

All major email clients have junk mail folders and spam filters to help their users keep their emails categorized and clear of annoying spam emails. The spam filters in these email clients provide the users with the option to flag an email as spam, which then means future emails similar to this is put in the junk folder.

These “flags” are also logged by the spam filter in general to help out other users meaning that if your email is flagged as spam by one user it could affect other recipients inboxes.

This is good for the end user because it keeps their inbox clear of spam but research done by Windows Hotmail discovered that 75% of email reported as spam were actually legitimate emails that the user no longer wanted. These consisted of newsletters, notifications and offers that the user was no longer interested in. Hotmail now call these emails “Graymail”.

The average inbox

Hotmail’s research found that 50% of the average inbox was filled with newsletters and offers, with social updates and people to people emails representing 17% and 14% respectively. Below is a breakdown of the whole inbox.

Cause of Graymail and the solution

The main cause of legitimate emails being flagged/marked as spam is that the user is no longer interested in the content of the emails and is unable to easily unsubscribe, resulting in them clicking on the “Flag as spam” button because it is the easiest option to them. Hotmail is taking steps to help their users clear up their inbox but thanks to MessageSender there are some easy ways to stop your emails becoming spam rather than graymail. The fact is the people receiving your emails might not want to receive them anymore and so you need to make to unsubscribe process as easily as possible to avoid becoming spam.

MessageSender has two unsubscribe options available. The first is the “one-click” unsubscribe that will allow the user to remove themselves from your mailing list directly from a link in the email. This method is the easiest and quickest for the recipient but not necessarily the best option for the sender. The second option is the “Manage Subscriptions” method which allows the recipient to choose what information they receive by allow them to opt in and out of multiple mailing lists.

To discuss your email marketing and the benefits MessageSender can provide you please contact us.

If you’re managing your email campaign effectively, you should have a concise list of people who your about to send your email to that should, hopefully, be interested in the content. As you click on send you look forward to seeing the open and click-through rates to appear in your reports.

More than likely though, the first thing you receive is an auto-response announcing that someone on your list has left the company, is on maternity leave or just on holiday for a week. Depending on the size of your email list you could be getting hundreds of these auto-responses and it would be easy for you to do a mass delete and focus on those who have interacted with with your email, but there are 2 reasons why you should not do this.

1. Email verification

An increasing number of companies are using email verification, that is similar to Captcha, which requests the sender to click on a link in order to prove that they are human and not an automated system. The system blocks the sent email and instead returns an auto-response requesting verification that the sender is real before the server then passes it onto the recipient. These emails come as auto-responses so they can easily be missed if you don’t check through your returned emails. Thankfully once you have verified that you are indeed human the server should not request you to perform the process again.

Until this is done your emails will never reach the person or anyone else within the company asking for verification, so it’s worth looking out for these emails to get the most out of your contact lists.

2. Replacements/Covering employees

Although many of your out-of-office auto-responses will just be stating that the recipient is on holiday sometimes they contain information on who to contact in their absence or in the case of someone leaving the company information on who is now the main contact. Use this information to update your database because it will avoid the need of trying to discover who best to speak to at the company at a later date.

It might not be vital to sort through your auto-responses for each email send but we recommend looking through them every 3 months to be sure your getting the most out of your data base and keep it up-to-date.