In January of 2010 we launched our current social sharing features with much fanfare and excitement. But even when this set of social features went live, we knew we’d soon revisit the concept of “sharing” and integrating with social media platforms. Well, friends, that day is here.
A little over a year after our initial social sharing features went live we’re happy to announce that the next generation of VR’s social media offerings are just around the corner. We took your feedback, coupled it with some new and exciting technologies, stirred in a little secret sauce, and came up with something we think you’re really going to like.
Check Out the New Features! (drum roll, please…)
1) We’re making it drop dead simple to include social sharing icons in your emails so your recipients can share your content with their Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn social networks:
We will offer two ways to do this in each editor. The first one is to toggle the feature on/off at the top of your email:
Or, if you want to get fancy, you can place the three icons wherever you want within your email (the merge tag automatically converts to the three sharing icons when you preview or launch the email):
2) On top of that we’re making it even easier for you to share your email content automatically on both your personal Facebook profile and your business’ Facebook Page(s), as well as on Twitter, when you launch your email. We’re especially excited to use Facebook’s new Open Graph API which allows us to connect to all the pages you control within Facebook with a given login. This means when you launch your email your content goes to all the places you select at once.
3) Now you’ll be able to track the social activity of your content! You’ll know when someone “Likes,” “Shares,” or “Tweets” your email content, and you’ll be able to see how popular (or “viral”) your content is once it is shared on the social networks. Nifty, right?
So you’re probably saying, “yeah, that sounds great – WHEN CAN I USE IT?!?!” Currently we’re targeting Q2 of this year for wide release of these new features. So, “soon!” is the answer. We’ll let you know more as we get closer to the release.
This stuff is on its way, but to carry on the excitement we have even more in the works. A lot more. So stay tuned, VR friends. Your world is about to get even more social.
I’ll need to know, in detail, how to incorporate this new feature with my email.
Why do I not see/have these options? I am working on a draft and do not have the social media options…
Sound great, can’t wait to try it !
These new features aren’t all that important to us. I recognize VR is a broadcast-oriented marketing tool and we are trying to use, or mis-use, it as a community communications tool, so maybe it is our fault for using the wrong tool. But, I really wish it would allow better for community engagement. Specifically, we need user-managed subscription to multiple (topical) mailing lists and significant improvement in the bounced emails problem.
Our lists constitute members of a community who have signed up to receive information relevant to that community, yet a large chunk of the list is in a bounced state. I suspect much of this is because email originates from vresp.com, a well-known source of marketing email. (Is it possible to have the email appear to originate from our organization’s domain?) Also, every auto-response, like an out-of-office email, causes the user to enter the bounced state and we are cut off from the member. It is just about impossible to manage members out of this state – if and when they finally notice that they aren’t hearing from us.
Thats look pretty awesome! looking forward to see that feature implement
Yay! Excellent! This will really enhance our email campaigns. Thanks for offering a great service.
Looking forward to it, guys! Much needed in the modern marketing environment.
I’m looking forward to trying out these new features. We can’t get enough help with our social media marketing.
Hi Monique, this is just a preview of the new features. We will make another announcement as soon as they go live. Thanks!
Hi Lyle, we’ll have plenty of tutorials and how-to’s up as soon as the new features go live.
Glad to hear you’re all as excited as we are! Ralph, be sure to check out our Marketing Blog for lots of great tips on how to get the most out of your social marketing efforts.
http://blog.verticalresponse.com/
You gals & guys rock!
Hi Greg,
You bring up a good point about contact management in our system. This is something that we get asked about a lot and our product team is working on adding some more management tools to our list section. We also understand that a lot of our users have multiple email/newsletter options and would like to have specific opt-outs for each instead of a global setting, and again we are working on adding this to the system. If you want to weigh in on this, click the Feedback button in your account and let us know what you would like to see in this tool.
As far as bounces go there are some things we can do for you. First, by mailing through VerticalResponse you have a better chance of having your emails make it to the inbox because we work directly with ISPs to get the emails to your recipients. The domain mail.vresp.com actually increases your inbox delivery because ISPs are verifying that the domain matches the IP address sending the email. Since this is our domain on our IPs the emails get through the filters set up by ISPs. Having your email address or domain in the From field could actually cause more emails to go to the spam folder, not less. Auto-responses and out of office messages are not bounced, we just process the messages but we don’t bounce the addresses.
A bounced address is one that for whatever reason could not receive the email being sent. This is because there is a problem with the domain, the address is not valid, or they are blocking email, though this rare. I took a look at the bounces on your account a lot of them are due to typos (i.e. gmail.com is spelled gamil.com) or defunct domains (mailcity.com). You can download a list of the bounces on your account and take a look at the ones that bounced and correct any with typos. We can also debounce your account, reset the bounces, and you can try mailing to them again. The addresses that are actually marked as bounced are hard bounces, although we track the soft bounces they are not marked in your account so they remain mailable. Debouncing will allow you to mail to them, but since they are hard bounces a lot will probably bounce again.
If you are interested in resetting the bounces on your account, please contact our support team, they would be happy to do that for you.
For more info on how we handle bounces check out our free guide – Boing! Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Why Emails Bounce on our guides page: http://www.verticalresponse.com/education-support/guides
I’m so glad to hear you will be rolling this out very soon. I love VR and always promote it over your competitors to my clients & friends, but this is one VERY important feature that has been missing. I felt it to be so important that I was beginning to consider that I might need to make a change; I’m very glad to hear that I won’t need to. Thank you!