It’s been a busy start to the year here at Sign-Up.to HQ. During January not only did we launch our 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark report, but we brought you 22 brand new free email templates and even a new office on the other side of the world! For our next trick we’ve got some really exciting feature launches to kick start your February. So allow me to introduce our brand new navigation bar and international time zone support for the application.

Our brand new 2012 navigation bar

We’re pretty excited about this one folks. The new navigation bar brings the look and feel of your account bang up to date, as well as  introducing some serious benefits to the application. It’s sleek and compact, giving you more space to work on your marketing and making it quicker and easier than ever to get to the section you need.  Additional delight can be found in the fact that it’s touch device friendly, more accessible and we’ve even introduced a nifty search functionality (complete with keyboard shortcuts). Oh and should you ever need assistance, our support details and help documentation can be found in plain sight, ready to help you out.

We will be rolling the new navigation bar out to all accounts over the course of the next week or so. Keep your eyes peeled for yours, or actually if you’re really eager then get in touch and we’ll get you upgraded sooner!

International time zone support 

This update ties in very nicely with our ongoing plans for Sign-Up.to world domination! The new time zone support allows any international time zone to be set for your account. From this point you are able to see all dates and times within the application in your chosen time zone, as well as being able to schedule email campaigns and social updates to be sent out at the correct local time. We hope this will make life a little more straightforward for our international users, as well as anyone with subscribers worldwide. Don’t worry though, even if you’re a strictly UK only operation, you’ll still see our improvements to the date and time selectors throughout the application.

Time zone support is available now and can be activated on your account free of charge. Please contact us for more details.

As always, if you have any questions or feedback on the new features we’d love to hear from you. Please drop us an email or leave a comment below.

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!

To kick start the new year we’re very pleased to showcase 10 brand new free email marketing templates, available in all Sign-Up.to accounts now! The templates include a snazzy thank you template (perfect for post-Christmas niceties), two gallery themes and a couple of rustic ‘Teabreak’ templates (my personal favourites!).

As always, all of the templates are available in the Campaign Designer email editor and are customisable and suitable for any amount of content you might need to add.

Letter	Burger geeks	Burger geeks promo
Quickshot	Teabreak news	Teabreak triple
Template noir	Cup of Joe	Gallery
Gallery small

Watch out for even more templates arriving in your account very soon. We hope you like these, and look forward to seeing you use them. Please get in touch with us if there are any template themes you’d like to see!

It’s that time of year folks – December has arrived, with Christmas hot on its heels.  Do you know what else December means? Advent calendars!  If a small festive chocolate each day doesn’t float your boat, then why not enter the super Sign-Up.to online Advent calendar competition? We’ll be giving away a prize each day from today (1st) up until Christmas Eve and we have some real treats for both Sign-Up.to customers and non-customers alike. That’s right ladies and gents, anyone can enter – so spread the word. We have some fabulous prizes on offer throughout the month, including:

And our Christmas Eve grand prize - drumroll please…

• An Amazon Kindle!

Enter to win these or any of our other prizes by visiting the Sign-Up.to Advent calendar page each day and answering a multiple choice question correctly. It’s as simple as that and you can enter every day from now until Christmas Eve!

Struggling with any of the answers? You may be able to find enlightenment on our website, blog, Facebook or Twitter pages. Failing that, there’s always Google…

Have a great December and if you still need to kick off your Christmas email marketing efforts then have a read of our recent blog for some seasonal tips.

The Sign-Up.to design team have been hard at work again, and this time they’ve rustled up a pair of Halloween themed email templates for use in all Sign-Up.to accounts. Perfect for promoting your seasonal offers and events in suitably spooky style.

‘Hill 14′ is a dark, atmospheric template with plenty of ghoulish touches and room for you to make the layout your own. My personal favourite though is ‘Happy Halloween’, featuring Frankenstein’s classic movie monster in a bright and simple email design.

Both templates are now available for use in our Campaign Designer email editor alongside our full range of free templates. We look forward to hearing what you think of the new designs, so leave us a comment below!

To coincide with the launch of Sign-Up.to’s brand new Business Class Social Marketing tools, we’ve put together a selection of new social media themed email templates. These are free and available in the Campaign Designer mode of all Sign-Up.to accounts (even our free demo accounts!). Use the new templates to promote your business social media pages and reel in those fans and followers! Don’t forget to utilise our Go Social tools in your emails to allow your subscribers to share your campaign with their friends.

A little birdie told me	Follow us	Go Social
Become a fan	Keep in touch	My name is
	Tweet

We hope you enjoy the new designs and that they assist in growing your social media fanbase. Any template styles you’d like to see in your Sign-Up.to account? Drop us an email and let us know!

Whether you’re already a social media power user or you’re getting ready to test the waters, Share will change the way you manage your social marketing. We’re really excited about this, as you may have guessed from the teaser videos we’ve put out over the last few weeks.

Social is a huge opportunity for businesses but to get the most benefit it has to be well managed and integrated with other online channels, like email and mobile. We found that there weren’t the tools out there that made this easy enough for a busy marketer to manage. So we went out and built them. It took a while. But we think you’ll like what we’ve come up with.

Share enables you to manage your Facebook pages and Twitter accounts directly from within Sign-Up.to – moving us a lot closer to our aim of making us the single login you need to manage all your one-to-one marketing.

This isn’t simply about posting messages though – it’s about creating truly interactive conversations with your fans and about tracking those conversations so that you can learn from them and constantly improve. We call this Business Class Social Marketing.

Share’s main split-screen view lets you interact with your fans and followers, track posts, comments and tweets in real-time. It’s designed to let you handle lots of interactions with minimum effort – saving you heaps of time.

We wanted to make it simple to stay on top of what’s important, so Share shows you who your most active followers are, lets you monitor the sentiment of comments using ‘Vibe’ and allows you to create private notes for your followers, to help you keep track of your relationships.

So that you can get to know your fans better there’s a Facebook app that you can install to run competitions and mailing list subscriptions on your Facebook pages, with all of the data being stored in your Sign-Up.to lists. Set-up is a breeze, just follow the steps from the new App tab in Share.

Share is available in two versions, both of which can be used on their own or added to an existing Sign-Up.to account.

The standard version is ideal for managing single accounts and comes with all the main features, but without the ability to schedule posts or view detailed analytics.

The Business Class version of Share is for social media power-users and comes with extensive analytics, supports multiple Facebook Pages and Twitter accounts and allows scheduling posts across multiple accounts at once.

As a thank you to all our existing monthly and annual customers, we’re making the standard version of Share available to you free forever and offering the Business Class version free until the end of September, with a permanent discount on the normal monthly price if you choose to upgrade before the end of the month. For details please see the notices in the Share section of your account.

You’ll find Share available in your account when you log in. You’ll need to follow the steps to integrate with Facebook and Twitter to get started. We’ve create a whole new section of the site to talk about the features available in depth, and a host of new tutorials to help you get the most from everything. As always, you can call or email us with any questions.

We can’t wait to see what you do with Share!

In the next week or so we’ll be rolling out a brand spanking new Share section which lets you manage your Facebook and Twitter activity from within your Sign-Up.to account. What’s more is that you’ll also be able to co-ordinate and analyse your email, SMS and social media activity all from one place, making your online marketing activity more efficient then ever before. We’re really excited about the launch and our team are hard at work putting the finishing touches on what’s to be a truly fantastic offering. Here’s our CEO Matt McNeill talking about the brand new Share and the benefits it can bring to your business.

Watch this space for Share, coming very soon…

As you may well know, here at Sign-Up.to we are constantly working to improve our application. Today sees another stage of this come to fruition as we roll out an update to the Analyse section in all accounts!

Now when you log in to your account and visit your Analyse section, you’ll see something that looks like this.

There are no major functional changes in the update; but we’ve improved the email analysis graphs and general layout so the section is a little clearer and easier to use. The update also moves the graphs into their own sub-menu section, ‘Email Analysis‘. Don’t fret though, it’s not all change; Things like cancelling a scheduled campaign and viewing your campaign results are just the same as before.

You may wonder why we’ve gone to all this effort for some seemingly minor changes, however this update paves the way for some very exciting progress with the application that we will be unveiling very soon! Any questions or comments about our new Analyse section? Leave us a comment in the box below or email our Support team for assistance.