VerticalResponse Product Blog

Be a Friend and Share Your Emails on Twitter and Facebook

It's almost been a year since we launched our free Social Sharing feature, and we want to make sure that you're getting the most out of this friendly feature.

A quick rundown of social sharing is that it integrates email and social media by allowing you to share your emails on Facebook and Twitter directly from your VerticalResponse account! There are many benefits to social sharing, such as; expanding your email reach, gaining new customers & growing your email list, sharing news with your friends and followers, and generally strengthening your email marketing by enhancing it with social media.

To social share your emails you will need to link your VR account to your Facebook and Twitter accounts. But don't worry - it's easy! Watch our video that walks you through the steps on how to share a sent email on Facebook and Twitter. To update the Facebook Page for your Business, copy the URL from the social share window and paste that into the status update. Be sure to add a punchy subject line to get people to click on the link! 

5 simple steps to social sharing:

1. Click on the name of a sent email.
2. Select the Share Email option under the Email Actions on the left.

   

1. A new window will open with an automatically generated link to your email.
2. Write any copy you would like to include along with the link to your email in the Post section. This is what will appear on your social networks.
3. Select the boxes to post to Twitter and/or Facebook and then click the Share Email button.

Congrats, you've shared your email with your friends, customers and prospects on your social networks! Your mom would be proud.

New Image Editing Features

Greetings from the team at VerticalResponse. We've just made some enhancements to the image editing features for our email creation editors and wanted to share the news. Designing an email with great-looking pictures has never been easier and you can access these new features when creating or editing an email with the new Email Wizard or Email Canvas.

Here's a quick overview of the new stuff:

1. Easily add spacing around your images:
Adding some horizontal and vertical space around your image makes the text wrap a bit nicer and gives you a better overall layout.  Simply choose the amount of spacing to add then click "Save Image" and you're in business.

2. Quickly re-size by pixel or percentage:
Two options now for quickly re-sizing your image.  Some folks like pixels, others are partial to percentage -- now you've got options, which is nice.

3. Constrain proportions when editing:
Nobody likes a squished image and distortion is only cool at a punk rock show. To avoid unintentional messiness with image re-sizing just use the contrain proportions feature to maintain the aspect ratio of your picture.

Click the image below to see a full-size view of the new editing features:


4. Image re-size suggestions:
We know a lot of you upload pictures from your computers or digital cameras when creating an email. Often times the size of these images are MUCH larger than what a typical email template can handle. For our email creation upgrade release in March '10, we included some auto re-size functionality to help you scale those big pictures down to an email-friendly format and we've just improved that feature. 

Now you'll be able to choose from a few different pre-defined size options (small, medium or large) that should fit nicely within your email. Don't worry, you can still edit and tweak the image further if you'd like but we thought some quick re-size options would be a huge time saver.

Click the image below to see a full-size view of the new image re-sizing features:

5. Picnik image saving
For users editing their images using our integration with Picnik, we've also made a nice little change that you'll see when editing images saved within your Image Library. Now when you edit, re-size or customize an image using Picnik you'll have the option to save that into your email without overwriting the original one from your library. This solves a problem that was, well, kind of annoying so hopefully you'll like the new solution.

So there you have it, some great new image editing upgrades (based on top customer feedback and requests).  Please keep the feedback coming, we love to hear it! Does now feel like a good time to go create an email and test out these new features?  We think so too, go ahead and click here to login into your VerticalResponse account.

5 Common Email Mistakes to Avoid

VerticalResponse provides tools and resources to help you create your emails and get them delivered to your subscribers inboxes. And, we pesonally approve every email sent out through our system. Yep, you heard that right; we look at all emails sent out to ensure compliance with both the CAN SPAM law and our own policies.

After approving millions of emails in our system, we've seen the same common errors that cause emails to be declined. The good news is they're easy to avoid!

Here are 5 Common Email Mistakes to Avoid:

1. Postal Address - The number one reason for email declines is lack of a full postal address. The CAN SPAM law requires a valid postal address  for the email sender. This is added to a footer at the bottom of the email, along with the unsubscribe information. We automatically pull the From Address from the Profile in your VR account (click Account in the blue navigation bar at the top to access this), so complete it in your Profile to avoid delays later.

2. Subject/From - The Subject Line and From Address are similar and both can be declined about as often. There are rules governed by the CAN SPAM law so it’s important that you set them up correctly. Your From label has to be the sender of your email, and again we pull this from your Profile. The subject line has to be related to your email content and shouldn't be misleading in any way. "Free Sushi!" is a great subject line as long as your email has something to do with free sushi. Get other great subject line writing tips in our Savvy Subject Line Writing for Success guide.

3. Extra Unsubscribes - Your recipients can get confused if you include extra unsubscribe options in your email. VerticalResponse processes all unsubscribes for you and updates your account with this information. We include this information in the reporting for all your sent emails, and it's also marked in the list section of your account. You can access this information any time you need to, either by checking it in your account or by downloading the data for use outside of VR.

4. Personalization - One of many great features in a VerticalResponse account is the ability to personalize your emails. But you need to make sure the field you are trying to merge in the email is also present in the lists you are mailing to. We won't send out an email with an improperly formatted personalization field, so double check that you have it all set up correctly. Wondering how?  First, check the merge fields in your tests, then on the launch page our system will let you know if there are any bad merge fields for you to edit.

5. The Use of "RE:”, "FWD:", and "ADV:" Within a Subject Line - This ties in with popular decline number 2 because this is a misleading subject line. These acronyms are used when responding to an email that was delivered to your inbox. Since any email being sent through our system is a new email, and not a reply or forward of a previous email, this is deceptive or misleading to your recipients and against the CAN SPAM law.

VerticalResponse has policies in place to ensure that all email sent through our system won't damage our mailing reputation. Most of the emails are great, but every now and then there is one that goes against our policies and we need to decline it. When creating your emails keep in mind that we don't allow make money from home, pornography, pharmaceuticals of any kind or multilevel marketing emails. In addition, we don’t allow the use of purchased or rented email lists. And, we don't allow phishing schemes or anything that is blatant spam.

There they are! 5 common email mistakes to avoid. Most are easy to avoid by taking just a few minutes to accurately set up your VR account before you get started sending your emails.