Did you know we have great power email marketing capabilities? While FeedBlitz is best known for its RSS feed powered email automation (corporate engineering motto: If it moves, automate it), we’ve been steadily increasing FeedBlitz’s traditional email marketing capabilities as well.
In case you missed it, here’s a quick summary of our “Newsflash” emailing function, which is used for “traditional” (i.e. manually produced) newsletters, updates and sales pieces:
- New: Draft mailings from blog posts, and then edit before mailing;
- New: The ability to mail multiple lists at the same time;
- New: The ability to apply multiple suppression lists to a mailing;
- New: The ability to suppress mailings using active or unsubscribed members of other lists;
- Use custom fields to send mailings to specific segments;
- Real-time and scheduled mailings.
To round this list out for completeness, FeedBlitz also offers:
- Multi-step autoresponders;
- Triggers to automate transitions between lists;
- Shopping cart and third party system integration via API and parser;
- And, of course, the industry’s most capable RSS to email marketing service, period.
There’s a lot to this side of FeedBlitz, and in this post I’m going to briefly explore the new Newsflash dedicated email blast capabilities.
How to send a mailing
To send a mailing that isn’t being produced by an RSS feed as its source, go to the main list’s dashboard. Click the large green “Send a Mailing” button upper right, then choose “Newsflash Email Blast.”
You’ll end up at a screen asking you how you want to create the content for the mailing before you start to edit it.
New: On-Demand for curated newsletters
This option lets you pick and sort the posts to include in the mailing. Unlike the “On-Demand” option from the screen where you picked “Newsflash,” this choice drops these posts into the Newsflash email editor. This gives you the chance to add editorial, make changes … and turn your blog posts into a curated newsletter. What it eliminates is lots of tedious copying and pasting for you, which makes producing your newsletter faster and less error-prone. If you have a newsletter that is a basically your blog posts but with extra commentary and specials for your newsletter subscribers, this is a great option for you.
New: Include other lists
No matter which option you choose from the starting screen, you can readily mail multiple lists with the same content. Better yet, you don’t have to worry about sending mailings to the same subscriber multiple times, or having to go to the hassle of creating a master list.
In the “Audience Selection” area you can now pick one or more other lists to send the mailing to. When the mailing is sent (important and worth repeating: Not when you schedule it, but when the mailing actually starts); FeedBlitz sends the mail to every active subscriber on the list just once. It’s a great time saver! Here are the details:
- If the subscriber is on multiple lists and on the “main” list (i.e. the one you’re nominally sending the newsflash from), the newsflash will appear to come from the main list;
- Otherwise the mailing will come from (one of) the other list(s) you picked;
- No subscriber will be mailed more than once;
- Metrics (sent, opens, bounces, unsubscribes, complaints etc.) will all be reported under the main list only;
- Mailings will be sent formatted with the template of the list the subscriber was pulled from;
- If the subscriber unsubscribes it will be from the list they were pulled from.
New: Go wild with subscriber suppression
We’ve had suppression lists for a years, but what’s new is that you can now use:
- Multiple suppression lists in a mailing;
- One or more of your email lists as well as / instead of one or more dedicated suppression lists.
For example, say you have a main marketing list, and a smaller list of people who’ve bought product X from you. You don’t want to email those who’ve already got the product something that says “Buy Product X” — so you use that smaller list to suppress mailings from the main one.
You can choose multiple suppression lists, active subscribers and unsubscribed readers. Like the multiple list mailing feature above, those to exclude are determined when the mailing starts, not when it is scheduled, so it’s safe to schedule an offer days or weeks in advance.
Finally, it’s worth emphasizing that suppression always wins out over inclusion. In other words, if a subscriber is active on any of the lists / segments you define, but is also on one of the suppression lists you pick, then that subscriber will not be mailed.
FeedBlitz: Going Beyond RSS to Email
Want to go beyond automated mailings? These new capabilities make targeted delivery and traditional curated mailings a breeze in FeedBlitz.
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