Having lots of memory is always good for the overall computer performance and not just Campaign Enterprise.  2GB is minimal for today's operating systems, and though it would work, you should have 4GB or more if possible just for overall machine efficiency.  More memory can be very important if you do a lot of click-throughs or open tracking because the Campaign Enterprise system needs to respond quickly,  and if the operating system is taking a lot of time trying to clear out more memory it can degrade performance. Memory is very inexpensive today, I just purchased 8GB for $50, so a small investment can reap great benefits.

Campaign Enterprise will use one core for each mail sending thread.  The management program can use a different core than the sending thread, it is really just up to the operating system on how it distributes the workload. Since up

Version 11 of Campaign Enterprise is still only 32-bit but it will work fine on a 64-bit machine.  There is no technical benefit to Campaign Enterprise running in 64-bit because Campaign Enterprise should normally use way below the 4GB memory ability of 32-bit operating systems.  Campaign Enterprise version 12 will have a 64-bit version, but it will not help performance but will help with compatibility of support files, etc.

Many email professionals use Microsoft's Exchange server to send out their emails from Campaign Enterprise or Email Marketing director.  The number one complaint we get is usually that it is very slow even though they are on "a super fast system on a fast internet connection."  By default, Exchange Server is not setup to be a mass email system. In fact, they have created many settings by default to stop email from being accepted at a rapid pace. Depending on your Exchange Server version, there are settings you can look at to stop this throttling.  A prominent term used is "tarpitting."  Now the subject of tarpitting mainly concerns a set of parameters you can set in your Exchange Server so that it will accept emails at a rapid pace.  Because of all the version of Exchange Server out there, and with them trying to deal with the SPAM issue through time, there are different settings for each of these versions which we cannot cover, but hopefully this article will uncover a nagging problem you might be having.  Now keep in mind, many Exchange Server administrators may not even know what you are talking about because it is a rare occurrence and they probably have not encounter it before, so you may have to prime the pump with some Google service on "Exchange Server SMTP slowness" and show them some of the settings they will have to deal with.

By: Chris Lewis

Email bounces that occur when you send out email from any email software sending program can occur in two different way:

An Error During Sending - During sending, if your SMTP server deems a certain email address as permanently undeliverable, then your SMTP server will return a 500-series error code which tells Campaign Enterprise or Email Marketing Director to hard bounce that email immediately.  These kind of immediate hard bounces usually only occur for two reasons: The email address was malformed or the mail system you are sending through has "authority" over the domain of the email being sent and can just right on the spot if the email address is good or not. We see this happen a lot with Exchange servers where you both you the Exchange Server for receiving and sending emails.  If your company domain is hosted on the Exchange server then the SMTP server of the Exchange server will only allow valid email addresses to be sent with those domains.

Returned Email - This is the most common way bounces are recorded because most of the time your SMTP server does not have the immediate authority to say whether or not an email address is valid. In this scenario your SMTP server simply relays the email message you sent to the SMTP server that has authority for the domain (from the MX record). When your SMTP server is talking to the target SMTP server, the target SMTP server might say "that email box does not exist" which is a 500 series error.  This triggers your SMTP server to send the email back to you (or your bounce account).  This can take seconds to hours to happen.

So, overall, bounces are somewhat difficult to deal with since they may happen from several different source, and since there is no standard for the formatting of bounces, it become the task of our software to decipher a bounced email which may have all or just part of the original message. In the next article, we will discuss the different ways to deal with the returned emails.

By: Chris Lewis

Starting with Email Marketing Director 5.2.207, you will notice a new entry box on Extras tab when editing a campaign called Character set.  Now this entry has always been available in Campaign Enterprise but is now available in Email Marketing Director.  The box will normally default to the normal character set ISO-8859-1 but you can change this to any character set including double-byte character sets like Japanese and Chinese.  You can download a new version of Email Marketing Director by clicking here.

Some people are calling with problems with their MySubscribe accounts and forms. Several months ago, the site switched from www.arialsoftware/mysubscribe.com to mysubscribe.arialsoftware.com. If you have an old bookmark to the old site, you should be able to go to the new site and log in there. The list of emails you have gathered should be available at the new location. During the recent move, some of the image references need to move over, clearing your cache may help.

If your web form has quit working, you will need to log in and create a new one, then post it on your site. Password recovery can also be performed if you do not remember your information. If you cannot recall anything, please use the contact form to get a hold of us to see if we can look you up on our system.

By: Jim Kinkade

To keep email deliverability high, it is very important to be aware of the possibility of getting blacklisted. By following good email marketing practices and being diligent in keeping your list clean and up to date you can lessen the chance of getting on a blacklist. Being aware and understanding behaviors that can get you listed on a blacklist is the first step to getting your email into the inbox and out of the junk or bulk mail folder as well. Here are some things to consider when sending marketing email, if you want to stay in good standing, and off of the "spam cop" block lists.

No email software program can keep your mail server and domain from getting blacklisted if you not following good practices. There are features built into our programs that will help you stay in compliance with the CAN SPAM law and even help with keeping on the good side of the "spam cops". But to really understand how this all works it is important to know that the CAN SPAM law and the spam cops are not the same thing.

The CAN SPAM law is a US law and is a legal entity, non-compliance can get you fined or arrested, although this happens rarely and only when the offender is a true "spammer".

Spam cops are more like self-appointed "cops" or vigilantes who watch and report behaviors that are considered to be "spam" like. Because so many ISP's use the information provided by the spam cops to police the emails coming into their servers; it is important, if not imperative, to comply with the "unwritten laws" of email. Complying with "best practices" as well as making sure you are complying with the actual CAN SPAM law is your best defense against getting blacklisted.

We recommend using a "home grown" list, if possible, but renting and buying lists are also common practices. Renting or buying a list can pose problems. The quality of the list is the primary concern. Your list is only as good as the list broker who sells it. It is important if you ever rent or buy a list, that you ask certain questions of the broker. The best list is a list that you have compiled from customers either coming to you and making a purchase or at least signing up with you and requesting information. When someone makes a purchase or requests to be added to your list you will want to respond promptly. An email sent very soon after their request or purchase makes it less likely that they will forget your company or organization and possibly mark your message as spam as they delete it. Send them an email quickly so that it imprints with them that you are a known company, one that they want to receive information from. Also asking your customers to whitelist you or add you as a contact will help too.

But in cases where you or your client wants to use a rented or purchased list these questions (at least) should be asked of the list broker before purchase of the list has been made. Even when the answers to these questions are positive, proceed slowly. That way if there is an issue you will know after sending 1000 emails rather than after sending 20,000.

1. Is this list opt in? If so, how did the person opt in and when? The broker should be able to provide this information or at least have it available if you ask.
2. Has the broker ever harvested emails or is there any possibility that a harvested email could be in their list. The answer to that should be an absolute NO.
3. Is the list checked frequently (at least monthly) for hard bounces and are they removed? This answer should be YES, certainly.

Once our program is set up properly, it can track unsubscribes and mark them in the list so that you do not send to them again. This is necessary and required by the CAN SPAM law which governs email marketing in the United States. You need to look over the CAN SPAM law and follow the rules closely. There are many things that this law requires, and noncompliance can get you blacklisted or blocked at the very least.

Again, when configured properly our program can track hard bounces and mark them in the list so that you do not send to them again It is extremely important to track and filter out any hard bounces of your list. Hard bounces in your sent can hurt your deliverability. While this is not a law, it is one of the things the spam cops watch. Also the incoming mail servers look closely at your hard bounce rate, if they see a send coming from your mail servers with a high percentage of the emails being hard bounces (and that can be 10 % or less) they may look more closely at your message before delivering it, deliver it to the junk folder, or even not deliver it at all. Spam cops also track high hard bounce sends and having a lot of hard bounces in your send can get you into trouble with them.

Our software does have the ability to throttle the sends (limit how many get sent to your server per hour). Sometimes sending very fast is not the best option There are times you may want to throttle your send, especially when sending to certain domains such as hotmail, yahoo, gmail, AOL and many others. Targeted throttling for specific domains may be a function available on your SMTP server.

One of the biggest factors in getting on a blacklist is the list you use. There are many things spam cops track with relation to your list. Is your list rented or purchased? That can count against you because when you use rented lists the receivers are more likely to mark your message as spam. If very many people do that, you can get blacklisted. If you list contains lots of older email addresses, that can get you into trouble because it will likely result in a higher hard bounce rate which spam cops also track. Also, if your list ever contains email address that have been "harvested", (and the spam cops have lots of traps out there to track that) you almost certainly will get blacklisted. And finally, if your list has people who are not opt-ins (asked for information from your company) they are more likely to mark your message as spam as they delete it and that is not good, the isp's track this and may report this to spam cops or are at least likely to send your message to the junk folder if they deliver it at all.

Any mail server that has smtp enabled is fine to use with our software. Make sure that your client adds the mail server they are going to use to their domain registration, so that the reverse dns checks out. Many of our customers use either PowerMTA by Port 25, Ironport or Ispwitch for their mail servers.

You are eligible for free upgrades when you maintain an active support plan. Updates are free whether you have support or not.

To recap, Campaign Enterprise:

1. Helps you manage bounces
2. Helps you manage unsubscribes and includes list-unsubscribe headers, which are important
3. Message personalization helps you create relevant emails based on your client's interests
4. Database interaction helps you hone your message personalization for more targeted, and therefore more relevant lists

If you have any additional questions, please feel free to call our office at 949-218-3852.

Many of our support issues concern database writebacks. Since Campaign Enterprise has several different methods of writing back to databases I will explain two of the most used methods with the pros and cons of each.

Single Field Writebacks
The first and most basic method of writing back to the database is just simply select a field in your database that will increment (add one to the existing value) if event occurs. If all you need to know is if this click through occurred once for this recipient, then this method would be sufficient. The number one problem with using this method is that a field is not "seeded" with a zero or some other number. For many databases, even though you select a numeric type of field, it does not put an initial value in the record for that field and is usually a NULL. In order for this value to increment, it needs to add 1 to the number that already exists. If there is a NULL value there, it does not usually increment because it is technically not a zero. So, when you create this numeric field in your database to record the click through make sure you set a default value of zero and make sure when creating a new record that this field does in fact get populated with a zero.

The second biggest problem with single field writebacks is that the field you need to increment may not be "writable". There are various reasons why this can occur. The security of the table may not allow writing access, you can read it but you cannot change the record. Sometimes a new username/password are created just for Campaign Enterprise to interact with the database, so be sure that this username/password has the power it needs to write to the table/folder. Another issue that happens is that the datasource specified turns out not to be writable. This only occurs if you use "advanced" datasource method where you specify the SQL statement yourself. This occurs for many reasons, with the most prevalent being that a one-to-many query was specified which by nature cannot usually be written back to.

Other reasons might be just the complexity of the query, the use of UNIONs, embedded sub-queries, and sometimes the query actually excludes the very record that needs to be updated. I had a customer that wrote a query that would only send emails to people that had not received it yet. Since Campaign Enterprise by default uses the original datasource to lookup and writeback records, when a response from a email recipient was made, and Campaign Enterprise went to look up the record using that datasource, it was not there because it was filtered out because the record had already been sent so the records returned was zero! Now, this was an unusual circumstance because the SQL statement being used had elements in it that were not parse-able by Campaign Enterprise. This leads into how Campaign Enterprise attempts to update the original record. Because of all the various ways and SQL statement can be written, it was up to us to find the most common structure that is used. Here is how Campaign Enterprise attempts to update single field writeback records. Consider the SQL datasource:
SELECT * FROM tblYourTable WHERE SentDate IS NULL

Campaign Enterprise gets all the text in the FROM section of the statement and builds this SQL statement below using the writeback field you specified and the Unique ID field you specified on the Datasource tab:
UPDATE tblYourTable SET YourWritebackField=YourWritebackField + 1 WHERE YourUniqueIDField=<The Unique ID of the Writeback request>

This works for a lot of instances, but is it not perfect. If your FROM section had a complex structure, this method will fail.

Overall for simple single field writebacks, the key is to keep is simple. The minute you start using GROUP BYs, joining tables with WHERE statements instead of JOINS, you have moved into a more advanced area an you will probably need to use the more advanced method of writing back to your database.

Stored Procedure Writebacks
This method is the most flexible, more predictable, and in some ways easier to use then even the simple field writebacks. Though the term "stored procedure" may not be the appropriate term when you are just specifying an SQL statement, we are going to use that term to describe the functionality. This method requires a knowledge of database structure and programming. Overall, when a writeback event occurs, campaign will look to the stored procedure you created and will replace the merge fields in the stored procedure you specified and then send the command to your database. Campaign Enterprise does alter the structure of your store procedure call in any way. There are only a few stored procedure merge fields that are available for each different type of writeback. For example, say for a click through occurrence you wanted to add a record to a table called tblWritebackEvents. In the click through edit section, you would add this stored procedure text:
INSERT INTO tblWritebackEvents (WritebackType,CampaignID,UniqueIDField,ClickThruNumber,IPAddress) VALUES ('CLICKTHRU',{CAMPIGNID},{UNIQUEID},{CLICKTHRUNUMBER},'{REMOTEADDRESS}')

This statement assumes you have a table called tblWritebackEvents with the appropriate fields set and the appropriate data field types. Here is a schema used for this table:

WritebackType VARCHAR(10)
CampaignID INT
UniqueID INT
ClickThruNumber INT
IPAddress VARCHAR(20)

Notice the IPAddress is a text type because it will contains alpha characters (ie. 192.168.1.1)

Also notice the REMOTEADDRESS merge field in the VALUES section of the INSERT INTO statement table. Since the IPAddress is a text type, you must delimit it with quotes. This applies for date-types too. Overall, you need to visualize how the stored procedure statement will look after the merge fields are replaced.

Lastly, notice the WritebackType field. Using this method would allow you do use the same table for all events, like click throughs, unsubscribes, etc.

Creating a stored procedure in your database takes away some of the complexity in Campaign Enterprise and moves it to the database where you can deal with it better. For example, if you wrote a generalized stored procedure, you could use it in all of your writeback instances:
sp_WritebackEvents 'CLICKTHRU',{CAMPAIGNID},{UNIQUEID},{CLICKTHRUNUMBER},'{REMOTEADDRESS}'

As you can see, using this method creates a unique record for this event with more information than with just a single field writeback. You should also add a EventDateTime field that defaults to the current time so there is a date stamp for the record. Also, this method lends to being able to archive these types of events.

Another advantage to this method is that it is the best performance. It is much faster for a database to add a record to a table than looking it up. The single field writeback method takes time because it may have to execute the entire SQL datasource to find that one record.

Here is a list of the available merge fields for the specific writeback events:

Open Tracking
{CAMPAIGNID}
{UNIQUEID}
{DATESENT}
{EVENTDATETIME}
{REMOTEADDRESS}
Unsubscribe
{CAMPAIGNID}
{UNIQUEID}
{EVENTDATETIME}
{REMOTEADDRESS}
Click Through
{CAMPAIGNID}
{UNIQUEID}
{DATESENT}
{EVENTDATETIME}
{REMOTEADDRESS}
{CLICKTHRUNUMBER}
{URL}
Bounce
{CAMPAIGNID}
{EMAILADDRESS}
{RESULTCODE}
{XRESULTCODE}
{RETURNEMAILADDRESS}
Subscribe
{CAMPAIGNID}
{UNIQUEID}
{EVENTDATETIME}
{REMOTEADDRESS}

Take advantage of the powerful write back options available in Campaign Enterprise to help manage your email list and make it more relevant for future campaigns. -- Arial Software

Arial Software has recently been acquired by San Clemente Technologies, Inc. and has a new home in San Clemente, California. As a result, Arial Software recently changed the look and feel of its website in order to streamline information and make the evaluation and purchase processes easier to navigate. While still replete with important information on Campaign Enterprise and Email Marketing Director programs, some of the extraneous pagers were cleaned up. In addition to important pages on the software options available, Arial Software now includes an interactive blog where our customers can read and react to important indsustry news and software updates.

Arial Software, founded in 1993, is the developer of the first personalized email marketing software application designed for the personal computer. As one of the original partners and active president, Chris Lewis continues to lead Arial Software in establishing the company as the leader in permission email marketing. With the transition to San Clemente Technologies, you will find the same great products offered, same customer service, but a new vision for the future.

Since its original success, each generation of the software includes technological and feature advances which continue to set the standard within the email marketing industry.

Today, Arial Software's flagship program, Campaign Enterprise, gives professionals the most advanced permission email marketing software available in the market. They now have the tools they need to implement and manage personalized email projects from any browser, anywhere in the world!

Arial Software products are integrated into e-commerce strategies by large corporations and small businesses alike, to send personalized emails to customers, prospects, members and subscribers. Live and responsive customer support, combined with solid try-before-you-buy product offers and 100% money-back guarantees on all products, has taken Arial Software from a small desktop program developer to an industry leader in today's commercial permission email marketing arena.