JangoMail

In the News


New Features: Looking Back at 2007 and Ahead to 2008

It's been a busy year 2007 for us, and we've added many new features recently that I would like to share with you. We've been so busy enhancing JangoMail that we haven't had the time to do an official newsletter to you in a long while!

Hopefully you've been reading the JangoMail In Progress blog at http://www.jangomail.com/blog where we post frequently about enhancements to JangoMail, but in case you haven't, let me summarize our latest additions now.  As always, I love getting feedback back from you, so feel free to hit Reply and let me know your thoughts.  Also, if you have ideas for features that you'd like to see in the future, just let me know!

1. Complete overhaul of how Groups are stored

We made some gigantic internal changes to how Groups are stored in our core database.  The changes we made internally give you the following benefits when using Groups:

1. The ability to have up to 240 fields in a Group with no performance degradation. Previously, you were limited to around 40 fields before sending to and segmentation on Groups would under-perform.

2. Much faster segmentation of Groups when using the Filter and Send feature.

3. The "Delete All Members" button will now work almost instantaneously. Previously, this could take several minutes with large Groups.

4. Search your Groups. You can search one specific Group or you can search all of your Groups at once. You can search on any field in a Group (such as E-mail Address, or First Name, or Company Name, for example), and you can search based on partially matching expressions. So if you want to find e-mail addresses across all Groups that contain "yahoo" in them, now you can!

5. Much faster Group imports. You may have noticed that since October, Group Imports have been 3-5x faster than before.

6. Store full text data in Group fields. Previously, Fields in Groups could store a maximum of 8,000 characters and the total amount of personalization amongst all fields within any single e-mail campaign could not exceed 7,900 characters. Now a "large text" field in a Group can now store virtually an unlimited number of characters and there is no limit to the amount of personalization within an e-mail campaign.

2. Tracking when a Group member was last edited

If you are using JangoMail Groups to store your e-mail list, it might be convenient to know when that Group member was last modified.  There is now a "Last Modified" field in every Group that is automatically set whenever a Group member is edited.  This field will also be exported if you export your Group via our web interface or via our API.

For more information on this feature, see our blog posting.

3. New API methods for Groups

There are many new API methods to retrieve and edit Group member information:

4. Tracking the source of new Group Members

If you're using JangoMail Groups and you've placed a sign up form on your web site to allow people to subscribe directly to your Group, you may be interested in knowing the IP address from where the person signed up, the browser he/she used at the time of sign up, and the exact URL he/she came from.  All three of these pieces of information can be captured directly into your Group.  All you have to do is add fields to your Group with these exact names:

IPAddress
WebBrowser
ReferrerURL

If those fields are present in your Group, JangoMail will take care of the rest! For more information on these features, see our blog posting 1 and blog posting 2.

5. Auto-generate a Plain Text Message at run-time

You've seen the "Set Plain Text Message Automatically" button next to the "Plain Text Message" field on our "Send Email" page.  If you have specified an HTML message, then clicking this button will automatically generate an accurate version of a Plain Text Message and fill in this box for you.  However, there may be certain cases where this isn't good enough...cases where your HTML message isn't even assembled until long after you push the "Send" button.  In these cases, you can set the Plain Text Message field to the word "auto-generate".  This will cause JangoMail to generate a Plain Text Message automatically for you at the time our SMTP server sends the e-mail message.  This feature is advantageous in the following situations:

1. When using Embedded URLs. What's an embedded URL?
2. When using the Web Service / API.
3. When using Conditional Logic statements. What are Conditional Logic statements?

For more information on this feature, see the blog posting.

6. Behavioral Targeting Enhancement

When filtering a Group by those that have clicked on a particular URL, you can now use wildcards in the URL.

For example, in the "Advanced Filter Mode", the filter criteria based on a clicked URL would normally look like:

emailaddress in (##clicked-http://www.jangomail.com/features_top10.asp##)

but now you can filter for anyone that has clicked on any URL that contains jangomail.com:

emailaddress in (##clicked-*jangomail.com*##)

For more information on this feature, see the blog posting. For more information on how to segment your Groups based on member behavior, see the tutorial.

7. Sharing data between Master and Sub Accounts

You can now designate individual sub-accounts to use the master account's unsubscribe list when an e-mail campaign is sent from the sub account.

Master account users can manage the unsubscribe settings for individual sub-accounts by going to the "Account Info" tab, then clicking the "Manage Sub-Accounts" button. From here, the master account user can toggle on and off the ability of sub-accounts to use the master account's unsubscribe list when sending e-mail campaigns.

Extra Extra! What's coming in 2008!

We've spent a lot of 2007 re-architecting JangoMail to make it more robust, scaleable, and super fast.  You may have noticed recently that page loads in JangoMail are now lightning fast! These architectural changes have also paved the way for a whole host of industry-leading features arriving in 2008.  The theme of 2008 is "Transparency" - we're going to allow you to peer into our system's internal functions like never before.  Soon you can enjoy the following:

1. An Enhanced Reporting interface with more insight into your campaigns and subscribers like never before. Just a few of the new features will include:

   a. Deliverability reports showing a breakdown of Opens, Clicks, and Bounces by domain and by SMTP sender.

   a. Reports showing the SMTP logs for any particular recipient of any campaign.

   b. Reports showing a time analysis of recipient behavior, such as clicks, opens, bounces.  See the breakdown of how many recipients clicked in the first hour, second hour, and third hour after launching an e-mail campaign.

   c. Reports with graphical pie charts and bar charts

   d. The ability to export to a CSV or a PDF document.

   e. Historical tracking by recipient.

   f. The ability to drill down and search large Reports.

2. Integration with more external database and CRM platforms, like Salesforce.com.

3. Enhanced deliverability tools that let you a. See how your e-mail will render like across a number of e-mail clients and b. Send your campaign to a seed Group that will tell you where your e-mail message ended up in the Inbox vs. the Junk Mail folder.

4. Coming in 2008: Share Groups and other functions between master and sub accounts, with varying permission levels on each individual Group.  Multiple types of logins that allow different levels of access to a single account.

Questions?

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact us.