We’re off to a flying start this year, and I’d like to outline a few improvements you’ll soon see in your Sign-Up.to accounts as a part of our continual effort to provide you with the ultimate integrated marketing tools for your business.

Improved import and profile management

Our bulk import tool, the key to keeping your Sign-Up.to account synchronised with any CRM or other marketing tools, will be upgraded next week to make it even easier to upload your subscriber data. You’ll get more control over the way the system updates existing information, the ability to add custom profile data on the fly, and we’ll be far more forgiving about the column headers in your CSV.

All new navigation

We are currently putting the finishing touches to an all new, touch compatible, more compact and powerful navigation. It’ll give you more screen space to work on your marketing, quicker access to sub sections, our support and documentation, along with keyboard shortcuts and live searching for those power users among you.

Time zone support

For those with subscribers beyond UK shores we will soon offer full location based time zone support, allowing you to be confident that your marketing message will be seen by the right people, in the right place, at the right time. Even if you only operate in the UK you’ll still benefit from all new, easy to use, time and date selectors in the Send and Share sections.

If you’d like to know more about any of these features, or would like the opportunity to trial a beta version of our new navigation, please email support@sign-up.to or use the comment box below – we’d love to hear from you!

I’m no longer able to deny that Christmas is just around the corner, so it’s time to let you know about the changes to our support hours over the holiday period. This coming Friday, the 16th December, we will be closing our phone lines, live chat and email support desk at 2pm for our team Christmas party. We will also be closed from and including Friday 23rd December until Monday 2nd January, but we will be providing email support during UK business hours during this period.

Christmas business hours 2011

Friday 16th December: 0900 – 14:00

Monday 19th December: 09:00 – 18:00
Tuesday 20th December: 09:00 – 18:00
Wednesday 21st December: 09:00 – 18:00
Thursday 22nd December: 09:00 – 18:00
Friday 23rd December: closed (email support 09:00 – 18:00)

Monday 26th December: closed
Tuesday 27th December: closed 
Wednesday 28th December: closed (email support 09:00 – 18:00)
Thursday 29th December: closed (email support 09:00 – 18:00)
Friday 30th December: closed (email support 09:00 – 16:00)

Monday 2nd January: closed 
Tuesday 3rd January: normal hours resume (09:00 – 18:00)

These times only apply to our sales and support availability – as always the Sign-Up.to system will be available for you to use 24 hours a day and we’ll continue to monitor all services.

If you plan on undertaking any large data imports during this period please contact us in advance to ensure there are no delays in your data being approved. If you have any questions about this please contact us.

Finally, we’d like to wish you all a merry Christmas and a happy new year. See you in 2012!

Last week All Twitter released the results of a survey of 2,500 British employers, and told us that 48% of them have banned their employees from using Twitter in the office. Naturally here at Sign-Up.to, websites such as Twitter and Facebook are regularly visited as we actively promote the use of social media for business marketing, so let’s spend a few moments to reflect on the results of this survey, and what the motivation and options really are.

Why block social media sites at work?

The two most commonly cited reasons for blocking social media websites are to prevent them being a distraction (and therefore reducing productivity), and to ensure employees don’t comment negatively about the business while they’re at work. In our case nearly all our staff require access to Twitter and Facebook in order to perform their jobs – we both develop online tools to make social media marketing easy, and use these channels ourselves – but even if that wasn’t the case I’d still advocate open access.

Why you shouldn’t block social media sites at work.

Our staff have a great deal of social media interaction both in and out of work. This really helps keep a sense of team spirit and it’s generally a morale booster. So long as the team are well educated in the use of social media, this certainly outweighs any risk of a lack of productivity.

If an employee is inclined to comment negatively while at work, they might well do so out of work. Equally they might make such comments on other internet forums, or verbally to outsiders, or by email – their options are nearly endless! Which other sites will you block? What about all the other applications that connect to the Facebook and Twitter APIs? Far better to have a sensible social media policy in place, and encourage your teams to raise concerns internally. Preventing access to social media for this reason is treating a symptom not the disease. By keeping good communication internally, it should be possible to address those concerns and hopefully provide a more positive workplace for all involved.

Embracing social media at work.

Of course we don’t just permit access to these sites, we positively promote it! Teams have their own Twitter accounts to which they post status updates – these are rendered in real time on the status TVs around the office that also show system load and campaign traffic – this keeps everyone on the same page. All staff are encouraged to provide content to our Facebook page, and we’ve even got our own Twitter hashtag for Saturday morning hangover related tweets.

Naturally staff must be educated as to when to use a private Twitter account, how to use Facebook privacy settings and even then what kind of material is acceptable. I’d opine that the time spent doing this is less than can be spent blocking sites and APIs left, right and centre, and the benefits are clear. Social media savvy employees can reap the benefits of this technology both for themselves and for the company they represent. We strive to build a community around our brand, and social media is a great way to get these relationships going.

What do you think? If you’ve got something to say or you’d like to know more, please leave a comment below!

** Update :  maintenance was completed successfully, all services are running normally as of 22:10 **

We’ll be performing scheduled maintenance and upgrades this Wednesday evening (the 16th February), and this means that for a time, some Sign-Up.to accounts will be unavailable. This work will affect about 50% of our customers, and the maintenance window will be from 9:30pm until midnight on Wednesday 16th February.

We really hope any unavailability doesn’t cause too much inconvenience. Accounts will be affected in groups, and we don’t expect any one account to be unavailable for more than 30 minutes. Any scheduled or current campaigns will be paused while accounts are unavailable, but should go out within 30 minutes of the scheduled time. Please do relay this information to any colleagues or clients of yours who have access to Sign-Up.to or any of our associated products. We will keep everyone informed of progress from our twitter account so stay tuned to that for updates as the evening progresses. Any questions – please use the comments form below!

As winter has returned to bless us with another cold and grey spell, what better to brighten your online marketing than a selection of attractive, easy to use, and best of all free email templates? That’s right, throughout February our Template Tuesdays campaign will see a fresh email template popped into each and every Sign-Up.to account completely free of charge.

Our templates are always optimised for clarity and ease of use, as well as being tested in all major email clients. Every Tuesday in February you’ll find another email template available in the Sign-Up.to Campaign Designer – that’s the all-new point-and-click email building tool we recently launched. You’ll be able to quickly customise the templates with your own logo and content, and of course have access to all our standard features such as social sharing buttons, plain text generators, spam and spell checks and much more.

We will even be adding these templates to our free demo accounts, so there’s no excuse for not getting involved with some seriously classy e-marketing this February. As always we’d love to chat, so if you’ve got anything to say about Template Tuesdays feel free to use the comments box below, or watch out for the #templatetuesdays tag as you follow us on Twitter.

The choices

Recently there’s been a lot of press surrounding browsers and which is the most popular, so I’ve gathered some statistics as to how browser choice affects us here at Sign-Up.to. The main players on the market are Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera.  Sometimes there is far less choice – for instance on a smart phone, or in corporate environments – something I’ll discuss later.

Here at Sign-Up.to our staff are allowed to choose their own browser. This is partially because we believe in freedom on the web, and that we are all likely to be most effective using the environment that suits us best (we also extend this choice to OS, although 90% of us do use Windows on our primary machine). Another good reason is that as a web application development company, we need to test and support our products on all main platforms, so we all have to have the main browsers installed anyway.

Which internet browser do we choose?

A quick survey of the office shows the following breakdown of browser of choice:

Not a single one of us chooses IE as our primary browser – this is a long way from typical! Most online “browser wars” monitoring sites put IE at over 50% of market share – and this is an all time low. So why, if so many of us run Windows, do none of us choose to use IE as our primary browser?

1) It is slow – although I’m aware that it doesn’t necessarily seem slow if you’ve never tried anything faster. As a Chrome fan-boy (often cited as being the fastest browser available), on the occasions that I switch to IE for testing I am regularly appalled by its slothful nature.

2) It is a law unto itself. If you’ve ever had a hand in front-end web development, you’ll know not only that it is important to test in as many browsers as you can, but also that the others all tend to behave in a similar way, whereas IE often ignores accepted standards and costs you precious time. Of course, we still need to use it – many of our customers use it – but it would appear that none of us loves it enough to be willing to put its colours on our mast.

3) Other browsers, Firefox in particular, have much better source code and javascript debugging plugins available, saving our interaction and design teams precious time.

Which browser do our customers use?

Interestingly, our customers neither follow the general trend of 50+% IE usage, but nor do they completely shun IE as we do. IE is used by around 37% of our users, with Firefox a close second (note our statistics are based on the month of October 2010 and exclude our own use of our systems).

So why are our customers more likely to have chosen to deviate from Internet Explorer? We think it’s because, like us, they’ve realised they can get so much more from their web experience with a different browser, and with web applications like ours, the benefits are far more obvious. For instance, while we’ve spent a long time ensuring our new email design tools are as quick as can be, there’s no denying that they are a little sluggish at times in IE – not so in Chrome!

As we progress in the Internet age traditional, static, information-only web sites represent a smaller slice of the pie, and content rich web applications are becoming more common. As this happens, the speed of your browser will become more and more important. Is this the end for IE? There are two reasons why I don’t think this is the case:

Internet Explorer 9 is coming soon

There’s a new version of Internet Explorer on the horizon: IE9. We saw the public beta launch in September, and just last week the sixth IE9 platform preview became available for test-drive. In their eyebrow raising “beauty of the web” campaign, Microsoft are assuring the world that their newest browser not only “introduces support for modern web standards”, but will also be much faster.

At this point I imagine you’re in one of 3 camps: you either don’t really care which browser you use, you’re a fan of a particular browser (probably not IE), or you’re a web developer in which case you are howling with laughter on the floor, unable to see for the torrent of tears invoked by sheer disbelief at Microsoft’s boldness. To date, Internet Explorer has been one of the slowest and least standards compliant browsers on the market – a real pain for web developers.

Mirth aside, it is good to hear Microsoft make these statements because it does suggest they’ve listened and have taken steps to put their browser back into a state where it can compete on merit. Many benchmarking tests have demonstrated that IE 9 sets a good pace, in some cases coming second only to Chrome’s performance. With full HTML5 and CSS3 support in IE9, perhaps developing for the web will become less arduous in the future. This is A Good Thing, but there is still one problem lurking in wait for us:

Large organisations are slow to upgrade their systems

So hooray for IE9 – if you’re lucky enough to work somewhere hip like Sign-Up.to you’ve probably already tried out IE9 beta. Spare a thought however for those who aren’t allowed to so much as set their browser home page, let alone install an alternative. Plenty of organisations out there, and many branches of the UK government, fall into this category, and are still forcing their staff to use IE version 6. IE6 was released in 2001, and IE7 replaced it in 2006. Still, nearly 5 years later, this browser represents an extremely disappointing chunk of market share – around 16% at present.

Despite this, Sign-Up.to does not support IE6. Sure, you can just about use our system in IE6, but it isn’t pretty, or pleasant. While 16% seems like a notable lump of Internet users, a tiny proportion of our clients use it, and what’s more, we’re not alone in not supporting IE6. Neither do Facebook nor Google Apps – two web applications that we use an awful lot.

What do you think?

Have I been too harsh on IE? I’m rather more positive about its future – but are you? What’s your browser of choice? Let us know in the comments!

There’s one thing that separates great email marketing from spam. Permission. It’s the vital ingredient to any email marketing program and the principles of permission marketing are at the core of our business.

Did you know that we have an automated spam feedback loop with major ISPs such as Hotmail and AOL, and that we also receive automated updates from spam reporting services such as Spamcop? Additionally, our abuse.reports@sign-up.to address is circulated and made available on various web sites and DNS records to ensure we receive reports of any unsolicited email being sent through our systems.

We take any such reports very seriously in order to protect our clients’ reputations, our reputation, our email delivery rate and ultimately, recipients’ faith in email marketing. Our aim is to ensure that every email we send is anticipated, personal, relevant and rewarding – never unsolicited.

Ideally all data held in all our clients’ accounts would have been gathered using our built in forms, so we will ensure a confirmed opt-in loop and hold all IP addresses and times of consent on file. This means that each time an email address is added to a list we verify both that it exists, and that the owner knows that they’re signing up to an email list.

Of course, sometimes data needs to added en masse to our clients’ accounts – for instance if they move to our service from a competitor. In these cases we can only ask our clients to confirm that the data is fully opt-in. We do however have some key points to cover, and a more detailed overview in our anti-spam policy.

• We view any unsolicited, unexpected email/SMS as spam.
• We don’t allow use of 3rd party lists, whether consent has been gathered or not. We don’t believe that consent is transferable between organisations.
• We don’t permit purchased data to be imported, whether apparently opt-in or not.
• We believe that any communications sent to a subscriber about an unrelated subject to that which they requested to be kept informed about are spam.

We enforce these beliefs because:

• We want to promote permission marketing and protect subscribers’ inboxes.
• We all hate spam.
• We need to have a good email reputation to ensure that genuine permission-based messages are successfully delivered to inboxes.

We actively encourage disgruntled subscribers to report any unsolicited emails to abuse.reports@sign-up.to – and we investigate each and every report to the last detail. We also use both automatic and manual checks on all imported lists, and data added via our API.

Much as we love our clients, on the odd occasion that one doesn’t adhere to these rules we have to intervene, and if necessary terminate their account. Of course, we hate to lose a client, but we deeply believe in the principles of permission marketing and the benefits that it can bring to marketers and subscribers.

** Update :  maintenance was completed successfully, all services are running normally as of 22:36 **

We’ll be performing scheduled maintenance and upgrades this Monday evening (the 7th June), and this means that for a time, Sign-Up.to accounts will be unavailable.

The maintenance window will be from 9pm until midnight on Monday 7th June.

We really hope any unavailability doesn’t cause too much inconvenience. Accounts will be affected in groups, and we don’t expect any one account to be unavailable for more than 30 minutes. Please do relay this information to any colleagues or clients of yours who have access to Sign-Up.to or any of our associated products. We will keep everyone informed of progress from our twitter account so stay tuned to that for updates as the evening progresses. Any questions – please use the comments form below!

What has happened?

AOL have this week closed down a large number of disused email accounts. As is common with any free and popular service, over the course of time a significant proportion of accounts opened fall into disuse; as people’s ISP or other preferences change, they may start using another mail provider and stop checking their AOL account. As per their terms of service, AOL may close accounts not accessed for 30 days. While that could be perceived as being a bit too keen, reports have certainly been coming in of AOL accounts that haven’t been used for a couple of months or so being closed.

How does this affect my email marketing?

In the scenario where an AOL user signed up to your mailing list in the dim and distant past, but has since stopped using their AOL account, we have been successfully delivering your mail to that account for you. Of course, as the intended recipient no longer uses that AOL account, that mail will show in our Analysis section as being delivered but not opened. Now that AOL have closed accounts like that, such mails will now be hard bounced, so we’ll immediately suspend that address. This means we’ll no longer send email to that address and you’ll no longer be charged for it.

Doesn’t this mean fewer people will receive my email campaigns?

No – so long as AOL’s measures are executed correctly we’ll only stop sending your campaigns to inboxes that will never be checked. So long as your email campaigns are relevant and effective, the chances are that anyone who has moved their email account has re-subscribed to your list since doing so. The consequences for not suspending these email addresses are serious, as I’ll now explain.

The benefits of Sign-Up.to

This incident serves to highlight why using fully automated and dedicated permission marketing systems like Sign-Up.to is the best way to ensure your message is received by the broadest possible audience. It is entirely possible that AOL will repeat history and in time re-open some of those accounts as spam traps. If you get caught sending mail to a spam trap – an email address that has been issuing hard bounces for a large period of time and then lies dormant – it can only be the case that the address has been scraped or an old, dirty, list is in use. Sign-Up.to cleans your email lists by suspending addresses after just one hard bounce, ensuring that your email reputation is not damaged while also making your marketing budget work as efficiently as possible.