Advanced Questions

How does the approval process work?

We go to great lengths at Blink Mail to ensure we can offer you and your clients a reliable service with great deliverability. An incredibly important part of this effort is ensuring Blink Mail is never abused by spammers, and also to ensure the "good guys" are behaving themselves and sticking to best practice.

Before you can send your first larger campaign (to more than 500 recipients or so), a member of our approval team will need to check out your creative and subscriber list to ensure it complies with our anti-spam policy.

How to start the approval process

1. Create a new campaign, with your final content ready to go or at least a close draft
2. Using the 'define recipients' step, select which list you would like to send it to

If your list is larger than the level you are already approved to, you'll notice an alert at the top of the Campaign Snapshot, like the screenshot below.

If you follow the two steps, and no alert appears, then you will not require approval to send out the campaign.

Clicking the link in this notice, or proceeding to the next step in the Create/Send process will take you to an approval form just like the one below.

As soon as you complete the form and provide us with an answer about how you obtained permission to contact your recipients, an email will be instantly sent to our approvals team. They can then check out your creative, subscriber list and the explanation provided.

9 times out of 10 they will approve your campaign on the spot and send you an email confirming the campaign will be ready to send. This is normally a one-off process, but you may need to be reviewed again if you send to a significantly larger list. In most cases this process shouldn't take more than 12 hours to complete.

How can I get approval in advance to avoid any delays?

To get your campaign reviewed and approved in advance, we recommend going through the steps mentioned above (actually creating the campaign, importing the content and selecting the recipients) a day or two before you plan on sending the campaign. This will give our team more than enough time to approve your design and also leave plenty of time for you to make any changes we might occasionally request.

If you have any questions at all about what might hold approval up or need any more information about this process, don't hesitate to contact our support team.

How do I synchronize unsubscribes with my own database?

It is a requirement of using Blink Mail that you have our instant unsubscribe link in every campaign. You may want to also capture those unsubscribe requests in your own system, and you can do that using a custom unsubscribe confirmation page.

Every list can have its own unsubscribe redirect page, which is where the unsubscribing reader will be automatically sent to, after they have been removed from your list.

This is how it works:

Your reader clicks the unsubscribe link in any email

They are unsubscribed from your list right away

The reader is redirected transparently to the page you define for that list, under 'unsubscribe options'

Your landing page takes the email address from the URL, and you take it from there

Select the list you want to work with under 'Manage Subscribers' and then click 'Unsubscribe settings' to access the page which lets you enter your unsubscribe confirmation URL.

For example, you could change your unsubscribe URL to:

www.abcdesign.com/unsubscribe.php?user=[email]

The email address of the individual who unsubscribes will then passed into the query string of that page. For example, the subscriber johnsmith@aol.com will now be redirected to:

http://www.abcdesign.com/unsubscribe.php?user=johnsmith@aol.com

Once it's in the query string you can do whatever you want with the email address server side. This technique will work for anyone who unsubscribes via a campaign or an unsubscribe form.

Please note: You can't pass through any custom field values on the query string like this, only the name and email address will work.

Accessing your campaign reports in Google Analytics

Once Google Analytics has been set up on your account and you've sent a campaign that contains Google Analytics tags, it's time to log into your analytics account and check out the results.

Drilling down to your specific campaign

To get started, click on "Traffic Sources" in the navigation on the left, and then click "Campaigns". This will display a list of all the campaigns that have been tagged for Google Analytics to track for you. This might include those sent with Campaign Monitor, a banner ad you've been tracking or clicks from a Google Adwords campaign.

In the example below, I want to see the results for the "April Newsletter" I just sent, highlighted in yellow. Click on that campaign to drill down to the results.

Basic overview of the campaign

Once you click on your campaign name, you're taken to a basic overview of the results so far, including the number of visits your campaign generated, the average number of pages viewed and plenty more. Here's what it looks like.

Tracking goal conversions

The reports in Google Analytics really start to shine when you set up the reports to reflect what you're trying to get out of your web site. The main way of doing this is by setting up "Goals". For example, a goal might be to get a subscriber to download a whitepaper, complete a contact form, or even buy something.

Google Analytics lets you set up to 4 goals (each with multiple steps called "funnels" if you need to get really specific) in each account. For a complete walkthrough on setting up goals, Google has put together a great guide here. Assuming you've set some goals up, you can see if any subscribers completed these goals by clicking on the "Goal Conversion" tab, next to "Site Usage". Clicking that will display a report like the one pictured below.

Google Analytics also has a great feature that lets you assign a value to each goal. So, even if you're not actually selling something directly through your site, you can still generate estimates of the return on investment for your campaign based on the number of goals you convert. Here's a quick explanation of what we mean:

"A good way to value a goal is to evaluate how often the visitors who reach the goal become customers. If, for example, your sales team can close 10% of people who request to be contacted, and your average transaction is $500, you might assign $50 (i.e. 10% of $500) to your 'Contact Me' goal."

You can read more about goal values in the Google Analytics help centre.

Tracking sales

If you run an e-commerce site of any kind, then you can accurately track exactly how many sales each campaign resulted in. If you or your client runs an e-commerce site, you can turn on the e-commerce component of Google Analytics by editing the settings for that site, like in the screenshot below. Here's a detailed walkthrough on how to go about tracking your sales data using Google Analytics.

To access the sales results for your campaign, click on the "E-commerce" tab (which will be visible as soon as you enable the e-commerce component like we explained above). This page shows you exactly how much revenue has been generated as a result of your email campaign, the number of transactions, the per dollar value of each visitor and more. It's really juicy data that your boss is going to love!

Seeing which links in your email were the most effective

While the Link Activity Report in your Blink Mail account does a good job showing you what links in your campaign were popular, Google Analytics lets you take that a step further and see exactly what each link in your campaign produced.

You can drill down and see exactly which specific link results in the most visits to your site, goal conversions and even sales. To access this data, select the Segment drop down, and click "Keyword". This will then list all of the links in your email and how each of them performed, pictured below. Clicking on the "Goal Conversion" or "E-commerce" tabs will also reveal that data for each link in your campaign.

How do I set the keyword for each link?

The keyword used to identify each link is automatically generated by Blink Mail when you import your campaign. If it's a text-based link, we'll use the words that are being linked. If it's an image, we'll use the alt tag for that image. You can also overwrite both of these by adding a title to the link. For example:

<a href="http://www.yoursite.com/page.html" title="This will be the keyword in your reports">This is a link</a>

How do ISP's block emails?

There are several blocking measures that ISPs have taken, specifically:

Blocklists (AKA Blacklists)

It is common for an ISP to use a blocklist to determine which emails should be blocked. Blacklists contain lists of domains or IP addresses of known and suspected spammers. If a sender is on the list, its emails likely will be blocked. Unfortunately, these blacklists also contain many legitimate email service providers and other senders. Just a few spam complaints can land an IP address on a blacklist despite the fact that the ratio of complaints to volume of email sent is extremely low. When we appear on a blacklist, we contact the ISP or blacklist owner and work with them directly to solve the problem.

Here are a few popular blacklists and a brief description of each:

SpamCop: This blacklist adds IP addresses to its list based on the ratio of spam complaints to volume of email sent. An IP address can be added and removed several times even during a 24-hour period depending on the frequency of sampling by SpamCop.

All email marketing, even fully confirmed opt-in mailings, generate some complaints. So, from time-to-time and generally for short periods, we can be listed on SpamCop. We monitor this carefully and, if a particular customer is causing the complaints, we either help them clean up their lists, or, if they don't have a permission-based list, we terminate their account.

SpamHaus: This is a popular and free blacklist used by ISPs and corporate networks. SpamHaus also runs ROKSO (Register of Known Spam Operations) that lists spammers who have been thrown off of ISPs three or more times.

Filtering

Another method for blocking is called filtering. ISPs block emails based on their content. If there are "spammish" terms or phrases used in the "from", "subject", or "body" of the email, a filtering system may block the email. This type of blocking occurs on a per email basis and is typically used by corporate networks.

Custom Method

It is common for ISPs and corporate networks to create their own custom set of criteria for blocking. Many ISPs will use information from blocklists and content filters in a "weighted" system that gives "spam points" for each offensive piece of the message and then set a threshold appropriate for their system. All mail with "spam points" above the set threshold will be tagged as spam, thrown in the trash, or bounced back to the sender.

Note: If you discover that we are being blocked and your emails are not being delivered, please let us know.

Viewing Campaign Monitor reports on your phone or mobile device

Even when you are away from your desktop or laptop, you can use your iPhone, Droid or other web enabled phone to check in on how your campaigns are going.

All you have to do is visit your normal login page from your phone, and we'll try to automatically detect that you are on a mobile device and give you a special mobile version to look at.

What is included in the mobile version?

Mobile devices have small screens and limited input options, so we've kept things nice and simple. You get fast and easy access to campaign reports for your own campaigns and your clients campaigns.

The design and layout has been built specifically for mobile browsing, so it is light, fast and easily readable. Here's how it looks on an iPhone.

I'm not seeing the mobile version when I login on my phone!

To keep things simple we are trying to automatically detect what device you are using, and send you to the mobile version when you are on a mobile device. Sometimes that automatic detection doesn't work. We'll keep improving that, but in the mean time you can browse to account.itsblinkmail.com/m and force the mobile version to load.

Can I still use the full version on a mobile device?

Yes, if you ever want to go back to the full Blink Mail experience you can click the 'switch to full version' link on the bottom of the page.