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Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way

April 2009 - Posts

  • Tips for Cleaning Up your Hotlist

    Keeping tidy is something I've always had trouble doing. There's always so much more that I want to do other than take the time to clean things up or put things back where they belong. The spring/summer season is particularly bad, especially with work, sports, and the NHL playoffs happening (Go Canucks Go!), it is hard to find the time to make things tidy.

    One thing that always bugged me was my hotlist and calendar. When I used to work in support, every time a customer service case was opened and not resolved within a couple of days, a hotlist task would get created. Also, we frequently had meetings booked for us in our calendars for various things from technical info sessions to group help sessions. So if you're like me and finish your tasks, but don't mark them as complete, you can imagine how many hotlist and calendar entries built up over time.

    So here are some tips that will help you keep your hotlist and calendar entries a little tidier.

    1. Build your hotlist with a narrow date range. This is like sweeping your other hotlists under the rug. Out of sight, out of mind.
    2. When building your hotlist, disable the option to "carry forward unfinished tasks". This will limit the list of tasks to those that are in the date range you've selected.  This may or may not be good; unfinished tasks sometimes do mean that you really haven't done it. Other times, an unfinished task just means that you've been too lazy to complete the task within Maximizer.
    3. Disable the "show appointments" option.  This option is very handy to see a picture of all your tasks and appointments for the day. It can also make your hotlist really long.
    4. Complete your appointments! Every couple of days, build a hotlist with unfinished tasks, select them all, go to Edit > Mark as complete. Having completed tasks makes it easy for you to sort by this column and group together all your actual uncompleted tasks, or build a hotlist without carrying forward unfinished activities.

     

  • Campaign Manager Statistics: Tracking how many people actually look at your emails.

    Back when I was a popular kid, I used to get around 50-100 emails a day, depending on the time of year. During school, maybe more, during semesters off, maybe less. Usually the more I got, the less I actually read. As my friends and I get older, we work more and send fewer emails. And when the ladies found out I was getting married, I now get maybe 5-10 personal emails a day, usually from the same person, if you know what I mean.  And these are the emails I actually cared about (i.e. non-marketing stuff). Usually, I find myself skimming through emails, not really reading the content too carefully and definitely not clicking on links. And that is the same with a lot of people that I know.

    So it's really important to figure out how many people are opening your emails and actually reading what you have to say. That is usually a good indication that people are interested in what you have to say. I don't claim to be somebody who knows anything about marketing or sales, I'm just a techie who writes blogs. But what I do know is if nobody is reading your email campaigns, than they are not very good, your target audience doesn't read emails, or a little bit of both.

    Maximizer becomes a perfect stalker marketing tool: with the use of the Campaign Manager, you can track how many people opened your emails and how many people clicked the links on your emails. You can also have a link that will allow users to flag themselves as not wanting any more spam emails from you - you will soon figure out who your real friends are.

    There are 3 merge fields that you can add into your HTML email campaigns that will allow you to track Campaign statistics like how many people opened your email, how many people clicked a link, and how many people don't want you to bother them anymore.

    Campaign Opened Email Tracking URL

    If you add the following line to your campaign template, when Maximizer generates the emails, it will fill in the merge field such that every time somebody opens the email, it will hit your server. Your server will count how many people open the link and report that number to you in the show campaign option in the marketing plans tab of the campaign.

    <img src="{Campaign Opened Email Tracking URL?}">

    You'll notice that the merge field is in the middle of an HTML image tag. The image will actually appear as a black dot that is not very noticeable.

    Campaign Redirect URL

    You can add the following line to your campaign template to track who clicks on a specific link. You can have up to 4 redirect links. You can track how many people clicked on each link in the campaign option in the marketing plans tab of the campaign.

    Please visit our website at <a href="{Campaign Redirect URL?}"> www.esconapromotions.com</a>.

    Campaign Remove Subscriber URL

    If you add the following line to your campaign template and somebody clicks on the link, the email option in the do not solicit by field in the Address Book's basic entry dialog will automatically be selected and campaign emails are no longer sent to the Address Book entry.

    <p>To unsubscribe from this campaign, please click <a href="{Campaign Remove Subscriber URL?}">here</a>.

    You can do a search by this field will pull up a list of people who are no longer interested in your campaigns. What you decide to do with this information is totally up to you. Fax campaign perhaps?