We’re very sorry to say we will be closing our telephone lines an hour early at 5pm this evening for a spot of staff training and team building.

This final hour of our working week is traditionally quite quiet so hopefully this shouldn’t affect many people, but please try and get any requests in as early as possible to ensure we’re on hand to help.

Following on from my essay earlier in the week on creating a positive customer service experience, I have just received this text message:

Just to let you know, the transfer of your Elec supply to us is progressing. Thank you for choosing British Gas.

So they’ve just spent a few pence to stay in touch, and let me know I’ve not been forgotten. I’m happier for knowing that, and more importantly, I’m impressed enough to let other people know. I may even Tweet about it. Ultimate marketing, for just a few pence.

Sign-Up.to provides all the tools you need to do just this kind of mobile marketing, and much more. Have a read and see how you we can help you: http://www.sign-up.to/html/mobile_marketing/

Mozilla’s Firefox browser is pretty much the office favourite. Some prefer Chrome, Safari or Opera, and sometimes we even catch a glimpse of IE, but Firefox reigns supreme. I’ve just found a handy tips and tricks page to make even better use of what is already a pretty nifty browser. I was just going to share this around the office, but thought it worthy of a more public broadcast.

Did you know that Ctrl-Shift-T opens the tab that you last closed (normally by accident!)? Find out more here:

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/tips

Have you ever wondered how your email campaign results compare to other Sign-Up.to users? If you choose your industry sector (the selection box is on your home dashboard page, as soon as you log in), you can see your average statistics, and how they compare to other users also in your sector.

I’ve chosen our most successful account in the most successful sector for the screen grab to the right. An open rate of over 50% is absolutely outstanding, most sectors are in the 15%-30% bracket. Don’t forget that the open rate value is pessimistic. We use a tiny tracking image or tracked links to register an email being opened, but as most email programs such as Outlook won’t load images by default, the open rate figure we display is an absolutely worst case scenario figure.

It is also interesting to monitor clickthrough and unsubscription rates too – best make sure your recipients are making positive not negative noises!

Sorry, that was awful. As you may know, our office is in Woking, Surrey. I’ve been dull enough to live here for nearly 30 years, and I’ve never seen anything like this.

I can’t show you a picture of the office because I’ve not got the arctic explorer apparatus required to get there. This is the road outside my house – knee deep!

A couple of the most local staff should be able to get to the office, but please bear in mind if you call that we will be on skeleton staff today. The online service itself, and our email support, will be operating speedily as normal.

If you’ve checked the news in any way today you’ll probably have heard about the change to the law that will, from the 15th March, oblige all Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to keep a log of all emails exchanged through their system. ISPs won’t be obliged to keep the contents of those emails, just who sent a message to whom and when. These records must be kept for a year, and disclosed to the government, police or any other public body which makes a lawful request.

The lack of privacy associated with this EU led decision has got various groups up in arms, from Human Rights activists to those who point to our government’s recent failings with regard to data security. What I’d like to cover here though is what this means for our clients, and us.

The email messages you send through Sign-Up.to, whether as a large campaign or as the result of an auto-responder you’ve set up, are all logged. This has always been the case and will always have to be – we need this information to present your tracking information and to permit you to exclude recent recipients. So in that context this is a law that we already adhere to.

The law affects us in another way that’s perhaps not so obvious. We send millions of emails a week (all logged as mentioned) from our servers located in three UK datacentres. For redundancy, each data centre has more than one internet service provider. As a data centre user we can do some digging and find out exactly who those suppliers are, but what’s important to us is that we are presented with a fast, dependable connection by the data centre. So in our scenario, who is the ISP responsible for logging our mail?

We considered this for a while, and decided that the safest bet was to ensure we logged everything, including our own corporate @sign-up.to email. We’ve always done this too, as I imagine do most corporations. They’ll either have a perpetual retention policy, or a fixed retention policy. Those who don’t are likely to have their email requirements outsourced.

The chances are then that unless you happen to be an ISP, you don’t need to do anything to comply with the law. Which is good, so now you can chose to worry about the privacy and data protection aspect, or indeed, what you’d like for dinner.

eTickets.to started from a desire to provide an alternative for promoters who don’t want to charge their customers the high booking fees usually levied by ticket agents – it seems that others are finally seeing things from our perspective as well!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6657179.stm 

We’ve been a little quiet on the blog lately, but we’ve been hard at work adding new features for you.  So far we have made the following new features live:

• Manual ticket issuing - if you take phone orders or want to issue free tickets to anyone, you can now use the ‘Manual Ticket’ option in your account to issue tickets directly without needing to enter payment details.
• Deleting events – once you’ve closed an event you can now delete it from your account.
• Enhanced purchase completion screen – once a customer has purchased they now have the option to add a diary reminder of your event straight to their calendar program and they can also send an invite to friends direct from the page.
• Display your payment screen in a new window – if you’re displaying your order pages in a frame on your site, drop us an email and we’ll configure your account to open the PayPal payment screen in a new window, avoiding any security warnings being presented to your users.
• Control panel improvements – we’ve tidied up various areas of your account to make things a little neater and simpler.

That’s all for now – we’ve also made a lot of back end changes to our systems, which you can’t see but will help us introduce some great new features that will be available very soon…

We’re often asked what the rules are relating to email marketing, what defines spam and what companies can and can’t do. Our definition is simple – spam is any message someone hasn’t requested to receive. In order to contact someone you need to have their permission to do so, and most importantly, this permission isn’t transferrable – they have to have given it explicitly to you.

For an overview of UK and EU legal regulations about email, have a look at our guide

We get asked at least once a day about our domain name – which is part of the point of it! For the curious, .to is the domain suffix of The Kingdom of Tonga, but no, we’re not based in the South Pacific, we’re based in Fulham, London. We just thought it was a catchy name that was easy to remember because it was different.