Outsourced lists no longer exist in Oempro4.

In Oempro3, you can create outsourced subscriber lists (lists that are linked to third party MySQL tables) and send email campaigns to your subscriber data which is stored in third party MySQL tables. Even this feature sounds good, there were lots of difficulties and details which were keeping it away from stability.

In Oempro4 development process, we thought a lot about this feature and finally decided to remove it from the application. Besides outsourced list, we will be providing “synchronization” feature which will allow you to keep Oempro4 subscriber lists synchronized with your third party MySQL table(s). This new feature will still provide the opportunity of outsourced lists but also provide reliability and stability.

Oempro4 will bring several enhancements and functionality to your email marketing operations. But there is something else which makes it even more beneficial: Integration Opportunities!

Oempro4 will include full-featured API backend that means that you can easily integrate it into any system, project or application. It uses basic HTTP POST and GET methods to accept data and returns JSON or XML data. So simple, so powerful!

Think about developing an Adobe Air application which is based on Oempro. Think about developing a Mac OS X widget displaying your campaign statistics. Think about running a completely seperate online service which is based on Oempro4 in the backend. All of these and more is possible with Oempro4.

Oempro4 API includes 99.99% of functionalities that are included in Oempro4. It’s easy to use, it’s easy to integrate.

With the release of Oempro4, we will be opening our new website and developer connection area.

Stay tuned.

As we are coming to the end of Oempro4 development, the upgrade procedure is getting more important for us.

It’s our primary goal to make the upgrade process quite straight-forward for all our thousands of fellow Oempro3 users.

Oempro4 backend and database structure is developed from scratch with latest techniques and methods. Therefore, we will be providing an easy-to-use upgrade utility with Oempro4 which will analyze your Oempro3 data and convert it to Oempro4 data.

We believe that upgrade process will not take more than 10 minutes for an Oempro3 owner which has huge Oempro3 data.

The cost of upgrading from Oempro3 to Oempro4 will be free if you have an active service subscription. So, if it’s expired, I strongly recommend you to extend it for $59 / year now.

Just a quick update about our office working hours during National Holiday. Octeth HQ will be closed between 29th September and 6th October. We will not be able to answer phone calls but we will do our best to check our emails frequently as much as we can for urgent support requests.
Octeth Team will again be available on 6th October 9am GMT+2.
We thank you for your patience during the Holiday period.

While we are finalizing Oempro4 development process, just wanted to share some screenshots with you regarding list management.

Above screen lets users to browse all their lists and view quick snapshots of the current status including subscription trends, bounce statistics and more. You can access to list sub-sections with shortcut links.

New list can easily be created and you can start customizing your list settings

Web services allows you to integrate Oempro with your system on the fly.

Website integration is easier than before.

Creating and managing custom fields are easier and more powerful. More powerful validation rules are now available.

Create list segments and filter your subscribers. Make more targeted email marketing campaigns.

Create auto responders based on events. Create unlimited amount of sequenced auto responders for each event.

Well, these are just a few screenshots from the user control panel list management section. We will be publishing more screen shots from email content management area, campaign area and administrator area in following weeks.

Don’t hesitate to contact us anytime for your questions via sales {at} octeth {dot} com.

A common misconception is to place the unsubscription link to the bottom of the email and style it with a very small font-size, so small that your recipients can not notice it at the first.

This is really dangerous. Making your unsubscription link (the link which lets your recipient to go away from your service) invisible or difficult to notice will push your recipient to click on “Report as SPAM” button on the email client. This means your mail servers and domain will be banned, black listed. This means $$$ to waste on monitoring your mail servers and domain against spam filters.

Instead, make your unsubscription link noticable by your recipients. Put it on the top and bottom. Make it bigger. In this way, you can let your recipients who are not interested in your services to go away from you. Just focus on loyal subscribers let the others go. Give them freedom. Believe it or not, your unsubscription rate and spam complaint rate will decrease.

In your Sendloop campaigns, you can insert unsubscription link tag to anywhere you want. You can style it based on your newsletter layout design and make it even more noticeable. To help you at this point, we verify every outgoing campaign against properly inserted unsubscription links and provide suggestions to make your newsletter more recipient friendly.

Well, it depends. We are in email marketing industry since 1999 and we receive the same question almost every day: “How much can send Oempro in one hour?”. The answer is easy: Ten thousands, even more on a standard server. But is this good for your email delivery rate?

Today, many email services such as Hotmail, AOL, Yahoo! and Gmail are running very complex filters against junk and spam emails. One of them is “number of emails that are received from one source at one interval” filter.

Let me give you an example: Let’s say you have 50,000 recipients pending in your email campaign. 40% of them are Hotmail email addresses. 30% of the rest are from Yahoo! mail, 20% of the rest from Gmail and the rest are regular POP3 addresses.

When you fire email campaign to those 50,000 recipients, if you send too fast, Hotmail and similar web based services will start blocking your delivery. They will temporarily “block” and return you an error message indicating that your delivery has been blocked and it will be resumed not later than 48 hours.

It seems better to send millions of email in 1 hour but it’s always better to control your sending performance and limit the sending with a few ten thousands such as 50,000 per hour (which is around 13 emails per second).

Of course, my suggestion is not feasible for “time-sensitive” email campaigns such as sending a discount coupon which will expire in 1 hour to 500,000 recipients. This kind of campaigns require more professional email server setup environment.

Always keep an eye over your subscriber lists. Always know which email services are being used by your recipients and adjust your delivery rates based on those popular services in your lists.

In Oempro, you can generate email service usage break-down statistics for your lists. This will definetely help you.

Our affiliate program has been launched almost 2,5 years ago. It was one of the best decision we made in our marketing plans. Hundreds of affiliates signed-up in 2,5 years. Some affiliates are really working good and making more than $2,500 a month from our affiliate program.

We thank to all our affiliates for promoting our products accross their communities.

If you are not one of our affiliate but interested in earning 30% for every sales lead you will generate, just submit the application form at: http://octeth.com/affiliate/signup.php

We decided to write a checklist article for anyone who is interested in sending opt-in mass emails but worry about the email delivery. If you are targeting the highest delivery rate, we strongly recommend you to follow this check list.

• Mail Server IP Address(es)
  Use a consistent IP address to send bulk email. Be sure that your mail server IP address(es) are clean and not black listed. Use http://dnsstuff.com/ for detailed reporting and monitor daily.
• Reverse DNS
  Be sure that valid reverse DNS records for sender IP addresses set correctly. This is a must-have.
• From: Email Address
  Be sure to use the same “From:” email address for your emails. Never change from email address when sending bulk emails. You may be banned from email services and considered as a spammer.
• SPF/SenderID Records
  Publish SPF record for your sender domains (http://spf.pobox.com/wizard.html)
• DKIM/DomainKeys Authentication
  Sign your domains with DKIM/DomainKeys (http://antispam.yahoo.com/domainkeys and http://www.dkim.org/)
• Unsubscription Link
  There should be clearly described and noticeable unsubscription link inside your emails. Don’t afraid about inserting remarkable unsubscription links inside your emails. Let your recipients go if they don’t want to read your emails. Otherwise, you will let them to mark your emails as “spam”. Unsubscription process must be a single-click process.
• Bounced Emails
  Ability to filter and delete bounced email addresses. Never send emails over and over again to bounced email addresses.
• List-Unsubscribe
  List-unsubscribe email header. This header will let your recipeints to unsubscribe with a single click through their email clients or services usch as Hotmail/Live Mail.
• Recipient Email Address
  Explicitly indicate the recipient email address inside the newsletter. By doing this, you may avoid misunderstandings when the recipient forwards your email to a friend.
• Reply-To Address
  Be sure that reply-to email address is being monitored. All replies will be sent to reply-to email address. So, be sure that it’s being monitored.
• Multi-Part Email
  Be sure to include plain version of the content if you are sending HTML newsletter.
• Bulk Sender
  Precedence:bulk header should be included. In this way, email services will consider you as a bulk sender and it will decrease the chance of marking you as a spammer.
• Individual White Listing
  Request recipients to add the “from:” email address into their contact lists. This will help you to pass spam filters easier.
• Abuse Registration
  Include abuse email address in the email body. And don’t forget to register your abuse email addresses in http://abuse.net/
• Domain Life-Time
  Be sure that your sender domain WHOIS record information is up-to-date and on abuse.net. Be sure that your domain expiry date is not close as this will decrease the reputation of your domain.

We hope this checklist help you to maximize your email delivery. Every item in this list is a must-have for professional email marketing.

Addition to this check list, don’t forget to follow all terms written in http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/buspubs/canspam.shtm

Yes, that’s right. We heard you, all those hundreds of requests about hosting Oempro on our servers and providing you access with an affordable pricing table.

We are aware that many of our visitors are hosting their websites on a shared or on a very limited VPS (Virtual Private Servers) and they don’t enough experience/know-how about running an email marketing application with a maximized email delivery.

Now, you can get benefit of the most trusted and popular email marketing application even you don’t have a powerful server. In fact, you don’t need a mail server right now. Oempro Hosted Edition gives you all capabilities of Oempro but keeps you away from all those technical stuff.

Just focus on your email campaigns and leave the rest boring technical details to the experienced Octeth Team.

Oempro Hosted Edition starts from $5 per month and there’s no setup or hidden fees.

For more information, please visit http://octeth.com/products/oempro/hosted/

Thanks to everyone who has shared their feedbacks with us and let this new service born.