How often do you and your speakers prepare for a webinar?  Once, Twice, more than that?  Do you do a dry run of your event and show everything that will be shown on your live event?  If you do (and you should) when do you have your dry run…a month out, a week, a day, the morning of the event?  Part of what we do is teach best practices, so here is a quick rundown of answers to these questions.
 
You should prepare for your events as much as possible so you are very familiar with the technology and how to use it to make your meetings more effective.  You also want to make it as easy as you can on your speakers as well.  This means making them do at least one full dry run about a week before your event.  This way you can make sure the slides are completed and still have time to do any tweaks that may be necessary before your event goes live, either to the slides or adding interactive components like polling.  The day of your event, you also want to test out all links, websites and apps that you may show during your event.  This will hopefully eliminate any last minute snags that may have occurred since you created the links or last visited the website.
 
This last tip is one that very few clients take advantage of, but it can be a life saver….have a backup plan.  Plan for PC’s to lock up, Internet connections to go down, webinar technologies to break, and phone lines to get disconnected.   It happens, be prepared for it, and have a plan on what to do if any of these scenarios happen.  We can help you prepare for all of these little ‘ooops’ moments, just ask us how.

Your HighRoad account has a very complex way of determining once an eMail address is no longer good or invalid. What are you doing with this information? What should you be doing with this information? If you do not have an internal policy pertaining to data hygiene and invalid eMail addresses, let’s get the ball rolling now!

If you want to learn more about how bounces are handled and can eventually resolve an eMail address to being invalid click here.

To start, navigate to subscribers>search>invalid subscribers.

Once you click on “Invalid Subscribers” it will pull all eMail addresses determined to be invalid into the search interface.

Under “Bulk Search Actions” you can select the “Export All Results” radio button and create the export file. If you are an integrated client, we recommend including your AMS unique identifier in the export as shown in the example below.

Many of eMail addresses for your members and/or non-members may be determined to be invalid. This may be because some eMails were incorrect, correct & bounced too many times or correct & blocked by incoming eMail server.

Possible Next Steps:

Bump the file exported from your HighRoad account against your AMS database. Flag a bad eMail address in your AMS to prompt member services to collect a new address if they have member on the phone.

If you have a fair number of invalid eMail addresses, your organization could implement a data analysis to determine if the eMail addresses are truly incorrect or if they were determined to be invalid for other reasons. There are services available outside your HighRoad account that allow you to ping the eMail address without sending it an actual eMail. It’s called LeadSpend and if you’re interested in this service, please call your Account Representative for pricing.

Reach out to members who have invalid eMail addresses either by phone or mail to collect the correct eMail address or to have them add you to their safe sender list. For an example of a direct mail letter your organization could use, click here.

If issues have been resolved with a particular invalid eMail address, you can go into their subscriber profile by going to subscribers>search>custom search, dragging “eMail” to the yellow search criteria box, leave drop down menu at “matches exactly” and paste the eMail address into the blank field and hit submit. Then click on “Individual subscriber results” and click on the eMail address to bring up their subscriber profile. From there you can click on the Invalid link to validate the eMail address and the system will again send eMails to that eMail address.

If issues have been resolved with a particular domain and you have multiple eMail addresses with that domain in your eMail-marketing database, there is no way to bulk validate subscribers in the system. There is a way to delete them from the system and reintroduce them, however this will delete all the history for those subscribers. You would only want to go this route if you know for a fact that the eMail addresses are valid and the administrator for the domain has whitelisted your IP address and organization otherwise it will negatively impact your deliverability. If you want to move forward with this approach, please contact HighRoad Support at 1-703-297-8886 to be guided through the multi-step process.

At HighRoad Solution, your data integrity is high priority. Let us know how else we can help.

Authorized Locations allows us to capture your location based on your IP address and associate it with a valid user.  When the system encounters a location it is unfamiliar with, the system will block your access. If you’re able to access the system you may not see all system functionality such as the ability to send or edit any drafts. You may also encounter the access denied screen.

What Should You Do?

First if you don’t know your IP address, visit http://www.whatismyip.com. Write down your current IP address and contact the HighRoad support team. They will whitelist the IP address you provide.

Another option is to create an additional user for yourself to access from your home office. If you don’t have rights to add an additional user please ask your HighRoad’s eMail administrator to set one up for you.

Q:  Where can I manage my user name, password, security questions, and
contact information?

A:  You will find all of this information under the “My User” link of the
Administration tab within the system. 
 
Q:  Where can I manage my Authorized Locations list?

A:  You can find this list under the “Authorized Locations” link of the
“My User” page on the Administration tab.

There is a lot of new buzz in the Webinar world about Social Media and how to use it properly for your Webinars.  While there is no ‘perfect’ answer to this…I’ll give it a shot.

It should go without saying that you need to promote your event through all of your social media outlets.  You should also get your registrants to promote your events as well.  Have them share a link, forward an email and let their friends and co-workers know that they are going to participate in your awesome educational event.

One of the newest trends, is to have your webinar, directly on your Facebook page.  That’s right, embed your event right on your Facebook home page.  That way, you do not have to send them elsewhere on the web, they can see the other interesting things on your Facebook page, and they now know where to go to get in touch with you in the future.  

You may also choose to embed the webinar on your website.  No longer do you need to link to an external Webinar platform like WebEx or GoTo.  No more plug ins and proprietary downloads.  Just an easy way for your participants to join, in a spot on the Web that is already familiar to them.  There are a small group of Webinar and WebCast providers that can do this, and we are partnered with them.  So if your event has 20 participants or 2000, let us show you ways to help integrate social media to your next webinar.

How do you prevent eMail recipients from hitting the spam button inside their eMail clients? Start sending eMails with content your eMail subscribers want, when they want it. Don’t send them what they don’t want, when they don’t want it.

It seems easy enough right? Even if you do have a full-blown eMail preference center to allow people to choose what they do and do not want to receive from your organization, how will you know if people are clicking the spam button instead?

Member driven organizations, whose membership benefits include eNewsletter subscriptions and membership information via eMail, are not immune to the spam button. Because of feedback loops already in place from server to server, if a member clicks on the spam button, they are automatically routed to the opt-out table in your HighRoad Solution Campaign eMail account’s database.

 
If you regularly export and review the opt-outs from your account, it is not always possible to tell the difference between who opted out by clicking on the unsubscribe link in the footer of the eMail received or who clicked on the spam button. In many cases, the Opt Out Source is the same for both. This is done by design to protect the anonymity of the spam reporter.  

As an organization, you rely on eMail to communicate to your member base. Many of your members may not understand why they are no longer receiving eMail’s from you. HighRoad recommends reaching out to anyone on your opt-out export with a direct mail piece to give them instructions on how to receive your organizations eMails again. Click here for a sample letter.

How can you as an organization have insight into spam complaints and what deployed eMail caused them to hit the spam button? If, and only if, you have a dedicated IP address for your HighRoad Solution Campaign eMail account, you can sign up for feedback loops. They are free and only require a bit of time/effort to set-up:

• Set-up an eMail address to receive feedback loop eMails. We recommend abuse@yourdomain.com (example: abuse@highroadsolution.com)

• Have your dedicated IP address and link to your privacy policy handy

• Register for each feedback loop you are interested in from the list below

AOL Feedback Loop Information

AOL Feedback Loop Registration

Excite/BlueTie Feedback Loop Information

Excite/BlueTie Feedback Loop Registration

Comcast Feedback Loop Information

Comcast Feedback Loop Registration

Cox.net Feedback Loop Information

Cox.net Feedback Loop Registration

Earthlink Feedback Loop Information

Earthlink Feedback Loop Registration

MSN/Hotmail Feedback Loop Information

MSN/Hotmail Feedback Loop Registration

Outblaze Feedback Loop Information

Outblaze Feedback Loop Registration

RoadRunner Feedback Loop Information

RoadRunner Feedback Loop Registration

Netzero/Juno/United Online Feedback Loop Information

Netzero/Juno/United Online Feedback Loop Registration

USA.net Feedback Loop Information

USA.net Feedback Loop Registration

Yahoo Feedback Loop Information

Yahoo Feedback Loop Registration

The new HighRoad Campaign eMail tool “Marketing Calendar” will display, at a glance, all standard sent, scheduled and recurring messages on a daily, weekly or monthly view. This allows marketers to see all sending activity in one consolidated view ensuring marketers are not over sending eMail messages to members on any given day or week.

Our marketing calendar is not configurable on a per-user basis. With the calendar default view being set as a monthly view, this will not affect all other users’ view. When clicking on a message in the calendar, will not un-schedule the message unless a user chooses to edit the message from the “Review & Send” page.

Look for more changes in the upcoming months to include a break-up of messages using different colors as well as fly-out feature showing message details, including opens, clicks and number of subscribers your message was sent too.

Don’t rely on <html>, <meta>, <doctype>, and <head> tags for rendering elements of your design and leave them out of the markup you deliver.

Use Inline CSS Styles with Table Layout!

• You can attach inline styles to <td>, <a>, <p>, <div>, <span>, <strong>, <em>, etc. tags.
• CSS padding only works if placed inline with <td> cell directly (not in <div>, <p>, <span>, etc.)
• Use HTML width (not CSS width) when applied to cells.
• Align all cells top, left, center, bottom, etc. so they align properly.
• Define font styles in all table cells through inline styles and don’t rely on the style of the parent table cell (nested tables and cells need to have the fonts defined as well)

Assigning Link Colors

• For link colors to be applied correctly in most browsers, define your link colors in the body tag as well as in a stylesheet reference inside body (without comment tags).
  FIX:<body text=”#000000″ link=”#CC6600″ vlink=”#CC6600″ alink=”#CC6600″>
  <style type=”text/CSS”>
  a:link {color: #cc6600; text-decoration: none}
  a:active {color: #cc6600; text-decoration: none}
  a:visited {color: #cc6600; text-decoration: none}
  a:hover {color: #cc6600; text-decoration: underline;}
  </style>
• Gmail renders all link colors as a dark blue unless applied directly to the link as in the below examples:
• To force all links to be a color (when not working in some eMail clients using the method above), one must manually add in a span inline style or font color inside the <a> tags so that the text is forced to take on that color no matter what.
  FIX 1: <a href=”link”><font color=”#993300″>link text</font></a>
  FIX 2: <a href=”link”><span style=”color:#993300;”>link text</span></a>

CSS & HTML Backgrounds

CSS & HTML backgrounds do not always work (Outlook 2007 fails both tests)
FIX: Use HTML background (which repeats by default) with bgcolor as backup for readability purposes, and make sure no important content is in background or render as an image instead.

Avoid Rowspan & Colspan

If creating multiple rows in left side column and one row on the right using rowspan, the left side may try to compensate for the length of the right and pull down the table cells, regardless of height specified. Lotus Notes does not support the colspan/rowspan attributes at all.
FIX: Place multiple rows inside of a table for your left hand column so there is one column on left and one column on right with a table inside the left column that is aligned top. In other words, nest your tables.

Table Borders

Sometimes using CSS to create borders on table cells simply don’t work correctly (Have seen this in Outlook 2007 and 2010).
FIX: Force the border by creating a 1px wide/high table cell using a spacer.gif and then fill with a background color that you wish for the border color like so: <td bgcolor=”#cccccc”><img src=”spacer.gif” height=”1” width=”1” /></td>

HTML bordercolor does not render in multiple clients.
FIX: Use CSS borders like so: <border-left-style:solid; border-left-color:#8D2C1C; border-left-width:2px;>

Background Color for Entire Template

Body background colors only work in Outlook 2003 and AOL, no other eMail clients, even if in the CSS styles or body tag itself;
FIX: Move layout inside a table with 100% width and apply bgcolor to it.

List Styles

List-style-image doesn’t always work.
FIX: Use a table with two columns to align your images and content.

Image Maps

Image maps don’t display links in Outlook 2007 and sometimes other eMail clients.
FIX: Place the image map code directly after the  code for the image it is connected to. Make sure they are contained within the same table cell.

Image maps don’t work in Gmail with safari browser.*
FIX: Slice images into multiple parts and assign links to each part.

CSS Margins with Images

CSS margins applied to the <img> tag do not work. (hspace/vspace don’t work either in Outlook)
FIX: Place image inside a table with padding applied to the td, or add padding to the image itself.

CSS Long style vs. Short style

Short styles sometimes don’t seem to work in some clients (ie. font: 11px/17px Arial, Helvetica, Times; color:#333;)
FIX: font-size: 11px; line-height:17px; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, Times; color:#333333;

Unwanted Spacing Around Images

Hotmail when using Firefox browser creates a vertical space between images separated by a <br> in the same <td>. Gmail creates unwanted vertical space around lone images inside an otherwise empty <td>.
FIX: Add style=“display:block;line-height:0px;” to the image directly. You can also use line-height=0px with the <td> assuming there is no text in the <td> that would be affected.

Most Common Problems why Templates Break

• Long urls
• Too-large images
• Too-large tables
• Table cell widths not defined by spacer.gifs

FIX: link words to a url instead of the url itself, fix table and image widths to fit the cell they are inside of. Use a row of 1px high spacer gifs in each table and give each gif the precise width it needs in order to add up to the table width total.

Outlook 2007 Problems

• line-height does not work
• image hspace and vspace do not work
• animated gifs only show first frame, so
  FIX: make sure all relevant info is in first frame
• CSS positioning and CSS width tags do not work
  FIX: use table widths instead
• Two adjacent cells with different padding values set in the style cause the tops of each cell to not line up properly, due to inheriting the padding value of adjacent (sibling) <td> cells.
  FIX: Make sure all adjacent <td> cells share the same padding value or nest them inside different tables with different padding values.
• Make sure to specify background color for all nested tables. Nested tables don’t often inherit the background color of the parent table or cell.
• Place image map code directly next to the image it is referencing as explained above.
• CSS borders sometimes do not work correctly; use spacer gifs if needed as explained above.

CSS Attributes with Limited Support

• float tag has limited support
  FIX: Use align=left
• clear, position, display, overflow, visible have limited support
  FIX: Use nested tables to support your layout

While there is not a clear cut definition for any of these names of your virtual events, I will try and break it down for you from an industry perspective.  Web conferencing was the first generation name given to showing PPT slides to a small group of participants.  Then when the audience got larger, providers of the existing technologies decided they needed a new name for the increased capacity that they could offer, and a Web seminar was born.   Since Web seminar was such a long and tough to say two words (yeah right) it was shortened to Webinar.  That and Webference just doesn’t sound right.

Webcasting is generally reserved for a large audience (500 participants and up) and many times includes a video or the speaker along with the standard PPT presentation.  More recently Webcasting has been used to name real time broadcasting of a live face to face event, like a keynote speaker at your annual conference.

No matter what you decide to name your virtual events, HighRoad can help you manage them.  From a small 5 person committee meeting, to a 5000 person webcast, we can help you choose the right technology.  When you pair that technology with our decades of experience running a multitude of different types of events, we can make sure that your event will run smoothly and be a great success for everyone involved.

Statistics was not a college class favorite for most (It certainly wasn’t for me), but looking at eMail metrics can actually be fun when you know what you’re looking for.

What can you learn from a great open rate? What is a great open rate? What is a great click through rate? Most published industry benchmarks combine sending activity and recipient behavior for retailer, B2B, B2C and maybe, if you’re lucky, have some member-driven organization’s communications thrown into the mix.

Member driven organizations enjoy, on average, much higher deliverability, open rates, click thru rates and higher overall eMail recipient engagement than other types of businesses. So if comparing your metrics to published benchmarks for retailers or other types of businesses, you’re not looking at the big picture.

HighRoad Solution analyzed 14,723 separate eMail deployments with monthly sending volumes from 50,000 – 2,000,000 from member-driven organizations just like yours to show you metric averages so you know where your sending activity fits in the bigger picture.

Analysis Breakdown:
4,700 separate deployments in Q2 2011
4,934 separate deployments in Q3 2011
5,089 separate deployments in Q4 2011

Metric Averages:

*Open and click rates are unique opens and clicks.

If you want to learn more about how to improve your metrics, feel free to review more data & delivery articles here.

If your organization has much higher metrics and you’re interested in sharing any tips & tricks in a HighRoad Solution Case Study, please contact Jenny Lassi.

Do you ever send yourself eMail tests and not receive them?

If there are so many messages coming from the same IP address to your eMail address, your tests may begin to get more scrutinized by your eMail server’s filters. From a server perspective, so many eMails from the same IP address has spam-like characteristics so it analyzes subsequent eMails a bit more and most of the time will route them to your in-box after it determines that the eMails are safe and not spam.

Filters also take a look at graphic to text ratio and sometimes also look at keywords in the message subject line and content.

If you sent one test and then sent another after that, received the second one but not the first, most likely what is happening is that your filters are looking at graphic to text ratio or keyword content.