10 years ago, on 13th February 1999, me and my partner Mert founded Octeth that targets global web application market. As I remember those days, managing a business online was almost a night mare, there were only a few payment gateways, slow internet connection, expensive infrastructures, no Google :p, etc. In 10 years, lots of things have changed but Octeth achieved to be one of the best in email marketing. Thanks go to our fellow customers.

Thank you for being a loyal customer of Octeth! We couldn’t be here and providing leading web applications for email marketers without your help.

Mac/Windows/Linux compatible Campaign Tracker desktop application for Oempro4 is released today. This application allows you to view statuses and basic reports of your email campaigns on your desktop without opening a web browser. Campaign Tracker is a free application for Oempro4.

For more information and download link, please visit http://octeth.com/addons/applications/ page.

Thanks.

Oempro v4.0.3 update covers bug fixes and some improvements. Click the following link to view change list of Oempro v4.0.3 update:

http://octeth.com/forum/showthread.php?t=3351

We will be releasing frequent Oempro4 updates and new plug-ins in following weeks. Stay tuned for updates.

While we are preparing for Oempro v4.0.3 update this week, a quick update for Translator Plug-In is just released. This update includes a fix that causes some problems with special HTML characters in translations. Please download Translator Plug-In from your client area and overwrite old files with new ones.

Visit http://octeth.com/addons/ to browse Oempro4 add-ons such as plug-ins, language packs, email templates and more.

Thanks.

I wanted to share a jQuery plug-in which we have developed in previous months to use on our applications. This jQuery plug-in will take all selected textareas and textfields and apply a default value behaviour.

What is default value behaviour?
Default value of a textfield or a textarea is displayed inside the element itself by default as you have guessed. But when the element has focus, default value is cleared so user can enter a new value. When the element loses focus, if no value is entered, default value is displayed again else new value is displayed.

How to use?
Using this plugin is simple as any other jQuery plugins. Plugin gets default values from elements’ values. So first, you need to add values to your input elements on the page. Then run the code below when your page is loaded.

$("input[type=text],textarea").addDefaultValueBehavior();

Options
“Default Value Behavior” plugin has two options which are self explanatory.

var options = {default_color:'#a0a0a0',focus_color:'#000'};
$("input[type=text],textarea").addDefaultValueBehavior(options);

Download

Download normal version and compressed version files here.

Happy New Year to everyone out there!

Octeth Team is ready for another successful year. 2008 was a milestone in Octeth’s 9,5 years of history. We achieved several objectives such as opening a successful permission based email marketing service Sendloop.com, researched and developed real-time email screen shot taking service PreviewMyEmail.com, opened the new version of Wridea.com, changed our primary website Octeth.com design and most importantly released 4th version of Oempro. Besides project developments, 2008 was a great success for us. We gained thousands of new customers and became a bigger, stronger company.

For 2009, we planned a brand new application to be released, tens of Oempro plug-ins and monthly periodical updates for our products and online services just like in previous years.

2009 will be a better year for Octeth Customers because we will start offering more services and opportunities in our products.

More importantly, I want to thank all of our fellow friends who support us by purchasing our products and services. I wish 2009 brings happiness, health and success to all of you.

On behalf of Octeth Team,

Best Regards,
Cem Hurturk
Co-Founder, CEO
Octeth Ltd.

The Deliverability Golden Rule: Send only email to others as you would have email sent to you…

Ensuring that your solicited newsletter is successfully delivered to your recipients entails a tricky scuffle in this age where spamming is an intensifying issue. Your newsletter is sent to only those who subscribed to it, but the risk that your email is not delivered and is marked as SPAM is present. This depends highly on the way you format your emails and how you write your subject line. Your email deliverability is an important issue as the acquirement of customers and prospects is intricate and undeliverable emails imply a loss of those subscribers. After having crafted a perfect newsletter, its deliverability as a whole is what matters. Undeliverable emails and email bounce backs are requiring more and more concern. Open rates can experience a drastic decrease due to incorrect spam filter classification. Generally, the CAN-SPAM act applies to commercial emails which are sent to advertise or promote products or services. If your newsletter includes advertisements, the recipient can view it as being commercial and hence the CAN-SPAM act can pertain. So, how can you prevent your legitimate newsletter from being marked as SPAM?

• Never send unsolicited emails. Ensure that people on your subscriber list are willing to receive your newsletter before sending. Provide an opt-out option in your newsletter to allow recipients to unsubscribe if they wish to.
• When collecting names and email addresses from your website, ask the new subscribers to add your email address to their address book. This will prevent SPAM filters from blocking your newsletter.
• Whenever a subscriber wants to be removed from your subscriber list, delete his email address from your subscriber list. Else, you will henceforth be recognized as SPAM.
• HTML emails are becoming more popular and most SPAM is HTML formatted. Thus, differentiating between opt-in newsletters and SPAM messages is difficult. Therefore, if you are sending your newsletter in HTML format, send a plain text alternative newsletter as well.
• Investigate about newsletter advertisers before placing their advertisements in your newsletter. Your newsletter will be filtered in case their website URL has been previously used to send SPAM.
• Your language used in your newsletter should be appropriate. Do not include topics such as making money or pornography which make your email look like SPAM. Do not use extra punctuation or odd spelling in your message.
• Use images scarcely as messages that are entirely images are considered as SPAM.
• Include a link to files via a website URL instead of making use of attachments. With the growing of insertion of viruses in attachments, the recipient can tag your newsletter as SPAM to avoid virus intrusion.

An effective way of ensuring that your newsletter is delivered and not marked as SPAM is to use an email marketing firm to distribute your newsletter. Octeth is a recognized firm and its product, oemPro, grants the anti-spam rating feature which determines if your newsletter will be tagged as SPAM. With features like bounce management and use of strong permission policies, email deliverability will hence not be of high concern.

The most effective way to promote your business and products is to send a newsletter to all your customers and prospects. Newsletters is a tool of dire importance in the internet marketing strategy as they convey information. However if your newsletter is suffering from a low readership, you have to be creative to cure the problem. You need email addresses to send your newsletter, that is you have to find ways to increase your newsletter subscribers. Most businesses gain readers from online sources but subscribers can also be found away from the internet. If the proper attention is given to your newsletter subscriber recruitment, your mailing list can grow larger than you have imagined. If you are contemplating in increasing your newsletter subscribers, have a look at the following tips:

• The content of your newsletter is the key element in growing your subscriber list. Your content should be written with utmost care which will attract subscribers so much that they will be impatient to get the next issue and will even forward your newsletter to their friends and associates. Create interesting content.
• Make use of your website to grab new subscribers. Offer a free subscription link on your website. The enrollment process should be make easy and simple.
• Prompt your subscribers to forward a copy of your newsletter to others. Allow readers to reprint your newsletter or cite about it in other articles or newsletters.
• Maintain your schedule of publication. If you usually offer a weekly newsletter, preserve the schedule. Stay in touch with all your subscribers through regular mailings.
• Whenever you are mailing business prospects, invite them to sign-up for your newsletter and include your free subscription information in your signature. Try to collect as many identities as you can.
• Keep all your published newsletters to your web site to enhance search engine rankings. If more people visit your website, the number of subscribers should increase.
• Lure new subscribers by offering a bonus, such as a free report. The more efficient the bonus is, the more likely they will subscribe. You can also do regular contests where only your newsletter subscribers can participate. Advertise the contest on other websites to boost your sign-ups.

There are other ways you can increase the number of subscribers to your newsletter. Keep promoting your newsletter and it will bear fruits. Concentrate on the content and format as well. Using email marketing solutions like oemPro to create good newsletters which can attract subscribers facilitates your task.

Months are spent in developing your product. If you upload the product to your website and wait for clients to purchase it, the sale rate is very small compared to what you expected. An excellent way of informing registered users and potential customers about your newly released or to-be-released product is to make use of a product release announcement email. It is a primary means of communicating news about your business or company to subscribers and other audience as well. It is considered as a form of publicity. Nowadays, all subscribers rely heavily on announcement email to learn about new products. Your objective of sending one is to have an impact on readers and entice new customers. You should therefore ensure that the information is trustworthy. Obviously, it’s not a good idea to send a product release announcement email when the launch is not certain and has a chance of being delayed.

The release headline is the most important component. It should be written in a way to captivate readers and intrigue them to continue the reading. In the announcement, focus on aspects of your product that distinguish it from products of other companies. You must make sure of including the product name and other key points, such as the cost, and above all how your readers will benefit from your new product. Rather than advertising and showing how great the product is, mention how it excels other products. You can include a short company history section where you can give a brief description of your existing products and how they influence businesses. Real-life examples can be used to back your statement. Another significant thing to note is that your email should be kept short so that it fills one screen. It shouldn’t exceed four paragraphs but should be complete and accurate. The simpler and shorter it is, the better it is. A wise idea will be to provide a link to your website where readers can find additional information.

When sending a product release announcement email, another critical thing is to define your target audience. The content should be relevant to your target and moreover, the announcement email should be sent to likely customers, leaving behind those who don’t show interest to such products. You need to first of all identify people who would be interested in using your product and send personalized emails if required depending on the audience. Your product can assist different categories of people in different ways and these varying benefits have to be emphasized. oemPro helps you send your news or even personalized emails to the right people. Unless you use a sensible marketing solution, the need for vigilance is strictly required about sending your product release announcement email.

Keeping your members active shouldn’t be so difficult, right? Well, in my opinion it is quite difficult to keep them active and loyal to your services without disturbing them so frequently.

There is a very sensitive balance between disturbing and keeping them comfortable in your mail list. If you send out so many newsletters to them, they will get disturbed and attempt to unsubscribe from your mail list.

You must find a good way to keep them active, loyal to your services by sending newsletters but not so often.

In this article, I will give you some examples and ideas for how to keep your members active and responsive to your events.

Competitions

You can run competitions periodically and let your mail list members to attend them. At the end of your competitions, you can offer them free or discounted services or products. This kind of events will let your mail list members to remember you more often and be responsive to your events.

Free Courses or Events

Prepare free, basic email courses which can be completed in a few days. For example, at Octeth, we just published a free email course “5 Secrets Revealed in the Special Report on Mail List Building”. This course takes 5 days to complete and at the end of the course, attendant gets 30% discount for any Octeth product. Visitors and mail list members will only click a link to subscribe to this course. It’s totally free! Once subscribed, they will start receiving one secret every day until the end of 5th day. On the 6th day, they will get a “thank you” email with a 30% special discount. To handle this email course system, we use our powerful and popular email marketing solution, Oempro. By the way, do not forget to personalize your course based on member information. This will increase response rate. Also, always include “unsubscription” link in your emails

Requesting Help or Contribution

If you are opening a new service or releasing a new product, send a short newsletter to your mail list members and describe the coming event on your side. At the end of your newsletter, request help from them by trying your new service or product. You can offer a special discount or opportunity to them for their help. This will help you to introduce your service to your customers and mail list members in a better way.

Whatever method you choose, you must be sure that your newsletter will not disturb your mail list member. You must always include unsubscription link, introduction to yourself and personalization based on your member data. For this, we strongly recommend you to use a powerful, feature packed email marketing and mail list management solution such as Oempro.

Every month, we send our monthly newsletters to more than 40,000 mail list members with Oempro. Each newsletter is personalized according to recipient information and includes very important announcements and news based on member interests. That’s why, our newest service Wridea.com has been so popular just in 7 days and had more than 2500 members and 92,000 search results in Google.