All posts by Octeth Team

Coming in August: Oempro v4.5 and road map

Hi Everyone,

It’s been long time since our last blog post which shows that we are not good at blogging :(

Anyway, we are working diligently on the new Oempro v4.5 release which is scheduled for August. This new version will include a series of new features such as smart conditional personalization, advanced global suppression list for administrator and better media library.

We will be releasing this new update in August.

In the meantime, we are also working on Oempro v5 development branch which is scheduled to be released before the end of this year. Some cool new features are on the way.

We always appreciate feedback and new feature requests from our customers, if you have any, jump to our forums and join discussions.

To take a look at our Oempro version release log, please click here

By the way, have I mentioned that we are also working on moving our online user documentation to a better service for a better customer experience :)

Oempro v4.4 is released

We are excited to announce the release of Oempro v4.4 update which includes bug fixes as well as new features.

The change log of v4.4 release can be found here

Some new features in v4.4 are;

  • SendGrid service integration. You can now send your email campaigns through Sendgrid.com service and track bounces/spam complaints/unsubscriptions.
  • “Save” button in email campaign content editor
  • Deployable SpamAssassin spam filtering system
  • Reduced Ioncube encrypted files. 99% of Oempro source code is now open for customization

With the release of Oempro v4.4, the 30-day trial version can be downloaded from our website as well.

Thanks for your support by providing valuable feedback.

Make email design testing easy for your users

Designing an email,which will be shown same on all popular email clients is a difficult, and time taking process. Making a change on your email design and testing it across all email clients.

To make this process easy and straight forward, PreviewMyEmail.com offers a unique service. You can test your email on 44+ email clients (including Hotmail, Gmail, iPhone and many more) within a minute. You will save your valuable time.

The good news is, Oempro is fully integrated with PreviewMyEmail. You can integrate your PreviewMyEmail account with Oempro and run email design tests within Oempro. When creating your Oempro campaign, you can pass your email from PreviewMyEmail’s email design testing service with a single click .

There are many use cases for Oempro and PreviewMyEmail integration:

For email marketing service providers;

  • Offer email design testing service to your Oempro users
  • Charge them for extra fee to use this feature
  • Provide free access to this feature to differentiate your self from competitors

For email marketers;

  • Save your time when previewing and testing your email on different email clients
  • Get screen shots of your email on different email clients within a few minutes, with a single click
  • Optimize your email design to be compatible with all popular email clients

How Oempro and PreviewMyEmail integration work?

Quite straight forward. Visit PreviewMyEmail.com sign-up page and open a free account. Your account will be ready in a few seconds. Then login to your PreviewMyEmail account.

On the top right, click “Plan Information” link:

PreviewMyEmail Account Upgrade Plan link
Account Upgrade Plan link

On the account plan subscription page, scroll down to “Oempro” section and click the big yellow Subscribe button:

Plan Subscription
Plan Subscription

Once you complete the plan subscription payment process, your API key will be generated for you. This API key can be gathered from your Account Information page:

Account Information link
Account Information link

Copy your API key:

PreviewMyEmail API Key
PreviewMyEmail API Key

Now, login to your Oempro admin area and click “Settings” link on the top right:

Oempro Admin Settings
Oempro Admin Settings

Click “Integration” settings option on the left side:

Integrations Option
Integrations Option

Paste your PreviewMyEmail API key and hit the update button:

PreviewMyEmail API Key Setting
PreviewMyEmail API Key Setting

Once you enter and save your PreviewMyEmail integration settings, a hidden feature will be unlocked. Your users will see “Design Test” button when creating a new email campaign (in review step). Once they click that link, Oempro will pass the email through PreviewMyEmail in the backend and display real screen shots taken from 40+ email clients.

Watch the following video to see how email design testing process works:

This ScreenFlow video requires a more recent version of the Adobe Flash Player to display. Please update your version of the Adobe Flash Player.

 

To activate this unique feature, simply head over to PreviewMyEmail.com and sign-up for an account.

Lessons We Have Learned From Our $29 Oempro 1-User License Discount

On October 28th 2011, we started a big discount on our 1-user Oempro license. The regular Oempro price of this license type was $299 and we reduced it to $29. Yes, we made a big discount. It was a big risk for our sales revenue. Even though 1-user license sales have a small impact on our Oempro revenue stream, it was still a big risk.

When making this decision, we were inspired from Atlassian’s JIRA pricing model where they have $10 10-user license. To those who don’t know JIRA, it’s a well-known enterprise level issue tracking software. We decided to give it a try and started the big discount on 28th October. The discount period ended at the end of November 2011, which means it last for around ~34 days.

In this period, we sold 25x more Oempro 1-user licences. In just 34 days, we gained new customers whom were being gained in 10 months. It was a big success from customer-base and sales quantity side. However, was it really a success?

This was the first time we were reducing our enterprise level email marketing software to a low price level. There were some risks such as;

  • Damaging Oempro’s brand. Selling a software with a low price may cause to position it on a “Personal” category instead of a “Professional” or an “Enterprise”.
  • Acquiring customers who don’t believe in our product. When you keep the entrance barrier low, anyone can purchase easily which means your product will loose its value on customer’s side.
  • Loosing the customer feedback. When you purchase a product, which is cheap, you tend to provide feedback to developers less likely. You see it as a time loss.
  • Loosing the customer loyalty. They purchase it almost free. So, they can easily switch to an alternative solution, because their loss will be nothing. Just $29.

These were the main risks involved in our big discount period. However, we wanted to give it a try, because it was working well for Atlassian and many other successful software companies.

In the beginning everything was great. We were making lots of 1-user Oempro sales and our charts hit the ceiling. We were selling tens of 1-user Oempro licenses every day. We were getting tens of new customers every day. We were quite happy and believed that this pricing model was working.

However, a few weeks have passed and we were measuring our success (or failure), we noticed something weird. Even though our customer base was increasing dramatically, the numbers of provided feedbacks were decreasing. The numbers of support requests were decreasing. We decided to wait a week more to see the big picture. On the third week of November, we started to analyze every single parameter and noticed a few things;

  • Our 1-user Oempro sales volume has increased dramatically. We sold almost 25x more 1-user licenses compared to previous periods.
  • Other Oempro license sales decreased a lot. 1-user license sale was great, but our high profit licenses such as 10-user and unlimited-user licenses were going down. Everyone was purchasing our 1-user license, which was $29, but they were not purchasing $699 or $1979 licenses.
  • Numbers of feedback shared with us through our community forums and support desk didn’t increase just like our customer base and sales volume. This was pointing to a warning, because softwares cannot live without feedback provided by users.
  • Our revenue didn’t increase a lot. Even though the number of units sold increased, our revenue had no valuable change.
  • Support requests didn’t increase. This seems to be good in the beginning (considering customer maintenance costs), however support means questions and questions means feedback for the future of the software. We were loosing this advantage.

So, this “easy entrance barrier” pricing model didn’t work for our software and we decided to stop the big discount at the end of November.

1-User Oempro license is now $299 again just like before the discount. We also have higher licenses with the following prices:

  • 5-User Oempro License – $499
  • 10-User Oempro License – $699
  • 20-User Oempro License – $1099
  • Unlimited User Oempro License – $1979

We are still not happy with our pricing. Oempro is one of the best and most powerful email-marketing software designed for ESPs mainly. With Oempro, anyone can build a new ESP business. And it’s the only ESP software which is being used by its developers to run another successful ESP business; Sendloop.com. We believe that we are leaving money on the table.

We are now working on a new pricing model on Oempro. We will announce new pricing in following months but until then we will continue experimenting and measuring.

I want to learn your thoughts. What kind of pricing model do you apply and how do you measure your success. Feel free to share by posting comments below.

Last days to get Oempro 1-user for $29

The special BIG Oempro discount is about to end at the end of November’11. You have still time and you can get Oempro 1-user license for $29 instead of $299.

Click here to purchase Oempro 1-user license for $29 now

This is a special opportunity to get Oempro with such a big discount. Hurry up and do not loose this opportunity.

By the way, this special discount is available for almost 5 weeks. During 5 weeks, we have sold hundreds of Oempro 1-user licenses and gained a lot of experience about distributing an enterprise level software with such a low pricing level. We will share our experiences and observations about this pricing strategy on a separate blog post in coming weeks.

Hurry up, promotion is about to expire!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Keep an Eye On Your Competitors, but Do Not Copy Them

I love doing competition on research on all levels. The secret brings you the success is simple. You need to research your competitors in order to reach success. Successful businesses always have an eye on what their competitors are doing. But do not copy what your rivals do, instead you try to observe and learn how they do their business, what tactics they use. Social networking sites are great places to watch your competitors closely. By doing this, you will see their wall posts, pictures, their latest links. You need to use also keyword research and it shows how they use effectively their words. Look at your own newsletters and blogs; and consider running your own promotions and thrill your customers.

 

Save Big Buying Oempro Today!

We made the biggest discount for our lovely Oempro customers. We think that it’s about time that everyone can purchase Oempro 1 user license for just $29 instead of $299. This offer ends on 31st Oct.’11. You can visit our website to purchase this great offer!

Why you do choose us?

We offer advanced services and solutions to all your marketing needs.  Unlike other email marketing softwares, which only offer software, we also use Oempro for running our hosted email marketing service.

What are the advantages about this special offer?

  • You can easily purchase multi license Oempro with our special one time discount.
  • Buy it for only $29 and name your own price and make a profit each time a client buys from you.
  • We produced Oempro but you can rebrand to make it appear as if you made it.

You can visit our website to get the advantages of our biggest discount.