Archive for Development news
The reality is that most of the emails we get from businesses are lame. And, if you are sending out emails yourself you may have already resigned to the fact that you get a low response rate. It’s just the nature of email, right?
No.
The reason we can accept poor response rates from email marketing is because we are lazy. Creating and sending an email is just too easy these days. So, type away, drop it into a nice template, fire it off and see what happens.
No wonder response is weak. You’ve earned it.
Want to get some killer results? Read on.
To get the big numbers, you are going to have to do a bit of work. For an email to be super effective it must achieve three things (please note that I am going to avoid all the technical stuff about deliver-ability and getting through spam filters and just focus on your campaign):
- The email must be opened (attraction)
- The email must be read to some extent (engagement)
- The email must inspire action from the reader (response)
So let’s go through each stage and see what is needed.
Getting Your List To Open Your Email
Getting your list to open your email is often the biggest challenge. Many experts say that a provocative subject line is the best way to get your prospects to open your emails. I agree to some extent. Hey, if you have a great subject line then use it. But if that’s all you have and the content of your email does not match the excitement or anticipation created by your subject line then you will only fool them once.
And this leads to my first insight into email marketing. The key to getting people to open your email is to create the condition that they will want to open it—before they even get it.
Yes, before.
How is this possible? It is possible because all of your previous emails have offered them some great value.
You see, too often we write emails from our own selfish needs. Perhaps you want to up-sell customers to another program, or simply want to sell them something. Now there is nothing wrong with that but what is in it for them?
In every instance you emails must offer your prospect some value. This can range from some good information, insights into their business or even some good entertainment value.
A good example is the email we launched at FreshBooks back in January 2008. At FreshBooks the currency of our business is our relationships with our customers. It’s our lifeblood. Now we’d done a great job at connecting with them through our phone, email and forum support channels and also had a growing blog readership, but no newsletter.
What we did know was that our customers were always interested in what we were up to and how we worked. The blog revealed that to some extent but we thought that a more “intimate” and personal view might be a good idea for a newsletter. One of the things we do at FreshBooks is take our customers out for dinner whenever we are in their town. It’s a wonderful and intimate environment to really get to know our customers and them to get to know us. So we thought we could extend that experience to a newsletter and voila, the Supper Club newsletter was born.
FreshBooks Supper Club from July, 2009
Getting Your List To Read and Respond To Your Email
Now, the Supper Club is not opened by everyone, which is just fine because it was expressly designed for the group of customers that were interested in the goings on at FreshBooks. What we do have is a very loyal and consistent readership month after month. And we continue to get accolades from our customers about how much they enjoy it and look forward to it every month. We feed them the exact stories that reveal the goings on inside FreshBooks with photos, fun stuff and a very casual and fun writing style.
Importantly, pretty much every Supper Club includes an interactive element where we ask them to vote on something, participate in a fun contest or even volunteer for stuff. Heck, these are folks that want to take their relationship with FreshBooks to the next level, so we do our best to serve that up and get them participating.
Their response tells us that we’ve delivered what they were seeking. And that’s what we are after.
Can you do that? Yes.
You just need to think from the perspective of your prospect, not from your own selfish needs. What email can you send them that would add value for them? They may not buy anything with the first email, or even the second or the fifth, but over time, if they continue to open your emails and get good value from you they will come calling whether it’s to buy something or share their great experiences with your brand to someone else, or just be really happy they found you in the first place.
Feel free to read through all the Supper Club Newsletters to get some ideas on how we engage our audience every month.
Stay tuned for part 2 where I am going to share with you my very first email where I managed to get a—wait for it—98 percent open rate.
This morning, the Authorize.net payment gateway went offline preventing thousands of vendors from accepting credit card payments including many FreshBooks customers. With their website and phone system unaccessible, Authorize.net has been fielding questions with their Twitter account this morning.
For FreshBooks customers using the Authorize.net gateways to automatically bill their customers, Authorize.net transactions that failed this morning will automatically be retried tomorrow morning. You will know this has happened as the status of your Authorize.net invoices will have changed to ‘retry’.
However, if Authorize.net is not back up by tomorrow morning, your invoices will change to the ‘failed’ status and the status will become a red active link. The ‘failed’ status link allows you to retry the payment any time in the future giving you to option to retry the transaction when Authorize.net becomes available.
Please note that although Authorize.net remains offline, all of our other payment gateways continue to function normally such as PayPal, Google Checkout, and Linkpoint.
This morning we’ve released one of our largest changes in some time; a huge overhaul of our Settings area. Here’s a summary of what’s changed:
New look and feel
Thanks to the J-Team (that would be Jaco and Jeff), the Settings area is rocking a fresh new design. Navigation links are clearer, with easy to click target areas. Form elements are neatly aligned, with slightly larger input areas, and helpful explanations below.
Priorities, priorities
Everybody needs to edit their tax settings. So why did we bury that 3 clicks deep? No matter – taxes are now their own tab, so you can get there right away.
Introducing “My Account”
We’ve moved account-related pages into a whole new area called “My Account”. Here you’ll find your current billing package with FreshBooks, the administrator account, API token, and Basecamp account details. Getting there is easy; just click the “My Account” link on the top-right.
Redesigned payment gateway page
Most folks only have one payment gateway enabled, and having to scroll through a giant list of gateways you don’t use was a bit of a pain. So now we’re emphasizing your enabled gateways, and hiding the rest.
Colors and logos become one
Behold the colors and logos page, which holds … your color and logo settings. We’ve replaced our aging color picker with something more in keeping with the times (can you say saturation-slider?), and added big, sharp images that show you where your logos go.
This is just the tip of the iceberg, really; we’ve made a ton of small changes throughout the Settings area. Login to your account and take a look, and as always, your feedback is both welcome and encouraged.
Early this morning we released version 4.6 which includes some new features we hope you will enjoy.
What’s new in this release?
A Redesigned Generate Invoice Page
Your generate invoice page has been redesigned to be even easier to use. In addition, you can now choose which details you wish to display or omit when generating invoices from your timesheets.
An Improved Search Interface
Your search tool in your account has been upgraded from a pop-up window to a slide-down interface which will hopefully save you even more time when searching for information inside your account.
There are more details about the release inside the application. Be sure to click your “4.6” link at the bottom of your account for more information on this release.
While our dev team is busily working on our next big release, we’ve decided to release some new functionality that you can enjoy in the mean time. This morning we added a new vCard import tool which allows you to import client records from vCards into your FreshBooks account. vCards can be exported from a number of programs including Mac OSX’s Address Book.
To try out the new vCard import tool:
- Login to your FreshBooks account.
- Click on your white “Settings” link on the top right corner.
- Click on your blue “Import/Export” link under “Step 3″.
- Click on your blue “vCard (e.g. Mac OSX Address Book)” link.
- Select the vCard and click your Upload button.
- Review your data and click on your Import button when finished.
Early this morning we pushed out a new release affectionately dubbed “Animal House”. Here’s a quick rundown of what’s new:
Tax management for your expenses
Now you have the ability to add taxes to your expense categories. The benefit of this is that once you set the taxes you want to associate with a given category, all you need to do is enter an expense total and we will backwards calculate the amount of tax on the expense for you. This will come in handy at tax time – especially for UK and Canadian based companies.
Staff time-tracking via the API
When we first released our Mac OS X time tracking widget, only admin accounts were supported. Now your staff can join the party with their very own API token. Here are the steps they’ll need to retrieve their token and get rolling:
- Login.
- Go to the “Profile” link in the top right hand corner.
- At the bottom of the page, collect your URL and token.
- Input these values into the widget.
Note: You (as the administrator) must have enabled the API in your account and agreed to the API terms of service before your staff can retrieve their token. But if you are already using the widget or another FreshBooks add-on, you’re good to go already.
There are other additions to the API relating to projects, credits and some other goodies. Check the developer blog for those details a little later today.
Improved “Assign Client” page
We’ve made the “Assign Client” page easier to use, which is great news for accounts juggling permissions between clients and staff.
More e-mail customizations
In this release we also added the ability to further customize your emails. You can now include invoice/estimate numbers and amounts in the body of emails sent to your clients.
So, that wraps things up.
Hey folks, just a quick note that FreshBooks will be briefly unavailable this Thursday morning while we perform an upgrade.
When will FreshBooks be unavailable?
The upgrade takes place Thursday, May 15th at 11:30 AM GMT (that’s 4:30 AM PT, 7:30 AM ET, et cetera). It’s expected to take half an hour. During this time there will be periods when you will be unable to access your FreshBooks account.
Once the upgrade is complete, watch our blog and your e-mail inbox to find out what’s new!
This morning we deployed a new release: Version 4.4 which we’re calling “Footloose”. Why footloose? In honor of Daniel who broke his ankle a month ago and just got his cast removed.
What’s in this Release?
Better tracking of billed hours. Prior to this release, we relied on date ranges to figure out which of your timesheet hours were billed or unbilled. This caused problems if you logged hours the same day you created an invoice. Now we track exactly which hours appear on what invoices, making the process much more intelligent and user-friendly.
Sexy login pages. Your login pages now feature your system colors, and your company’s logo!
Complete list of currency codes. FreshBooks now includes all currency codes and symbols, and when you choose a currency, we’ll pre-populate the symbol.
Time Tracking Widgets. We recently launched our own Mac OS X widget for tracking time, and pointed out that Goran – a FreshBooks community member – has built a Windows desktop time tracker.
There are more details about the release inside the application. Be sure to click the “4.4” link at the bottom of your account for more information – especially as they pertain to how we are handling logged hours – past and on a go forward basis.
Happy Monday.
After much eager anticipation and endless waiting, the FreshBooks time tracking widget for Mac OS X is complete!
This widget means you can track time worked for your clients with a click of a button, without logging in, and even when you’re on the road without an Internet connection — though you will need one to actually submit the time to your FreshBooks account, of course.
Download it now »
Attention Windows Users: You may wish to check out TimerSync, a 3rd party time tracking application that’s received good feedback from our customers!
This morning’s upgrades are complete, and version 4.3 of FreshBooks has arrived on the scene with lots of great improvements and a few exciting new features.
Here’s a quick summary of what’s new and improved:
Expenses
- At long last, you can now manage expenses inside FreshBooks using the “expenses” tab.
- Expenses can be assigned to a client which allows for easy application to invoices.
- Expenses can also be assigned to a project, and you’ll be prompted to include any associated expenses when generating an invoice for a project.
- There are new expense reports under the “reports” tab.
PDF invoices and estimates
- You and your clients can now view (and save) your invoices and estimates in PDF format.
New and improved client import
- Our client import tool has been completely re-designed! You can now import your contacts directly from Microsoft Outlook, Gmail, or Yahoo! Mail.
“Save and add another”
- We just made life easier when adding multiple expenses, items, tasks and support departments.
Minor updates
- You may now choose to have no currency symbol.
- Invoice numbers can now contain the following symbols: ‘:’, ‘-’, and ‘.’
- Uploaded logos are now automatically (and optimally) resized for better presentation.
- Status legends can be permanently turned on or off.
- Help boxes can be permanently turned off.
We’ll be highlighting a few of these new features in greater detail over the course of the next couple weeks.
To see these improvements now, log into your existing FreshBooks system or create a new one for free, and enjoy!
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