Business Catalyst Blog

Today we put the final touches on our new revamped email marketing reporting framework  which we will be adding to Business Catalyst. To give some background, email marketing has been a part of our plaform for a few years now and the reporting is definitely due for a facelift. But in that time we've launched our Goals Framework which acts like a brain for all Business Catalyst customers. The new reporting framework will provide customers with information previously near impossible or too time consuming to collect. Email marketing is a commodity and you can expect reports such as: open rates, bounces, popular links, subscriptions and unsubscriptions from almost any provider. Now imagine without having to add a single line of code to your Business Catalyst website, you get stats like:

Of those who opened the email:

• 10% bought product x, 22% bought product y
• 23% filled in your "December Sales Enquiry Form"
• 5% subscribed to your other monthly newsletter
• 22% made a comment on your blog
• Average sale price via the online shop was $344
• and the list goes on..

I'm pretty excited about this improvement and what it'll mean for our customers and partners. I know it'll turn the email marketing game upside down!

As promised, here's a sneak peek of our upcoming interface change.

Keep in mind this is still in the early stages, so things may change. That said, the general structure (tabbed navigation, menu location, action box and so forth) will not change much from here :)

It's been a while since I posted a useful little tip, so I figured it's about time :)

When you're editing a web page - or any content using our WYSIWYG editor for that matter - you can enter full screen mode simply by clicking inside the editor and pressing F11.

Try it out - you'll find that suddenly having all that real estate to work in quite liberating!

When you're done and you want your screen back, simply press F11 to return to the normal view.

How exciting! A new look and feel for the interface...  it was definitely due for an update. Here's the official announcement:

"It's been in the works for a while now, but we're getting ready to start unveiling BC's new look! We started on this project at the beginning of the year, aiming to:

• Increase user friendliness
• Make the interface more intuitive and faster to navigate
• Update to a more modern look and feel

After much consultation and consideration we've come up with a new interface that achieves the goals above while respecting the workflow of current users. In fact, we think all the expert users will love the changes too! In the next few weeks or so we'll start giving you a sneak peek..."

I've seen some initial mock ups and the new interface looks really sweet. The work flow remains largely the same, but the new interface should both save time and be easier for new users to pick up.

Soon I'll post a picture!

Until then...

It seems only yesterday that I introduced Shane and welcomed him to the Business Catalyst Family.

And now once again, I'm proud to announce another great addition to the team and introduce him to you all.

We've spent the last week or two training him on the system, and while there is still much to learn I think he's ready to start answering your support queries. So as of this week, you would have started receiving some emails from our newest Support Engineer, Mario.

Mario has a long history of providing great customer service in various companies around Australia, with experience in a range of industries. We're confident that at Business Catalyst, he'll continue to do just that!

 A few months back I wrote a post called "Curly Urly". In that post I described in a high level sort of way how you can send extra information to a page to do some interesting things, like pre-populate a web form field or jump to a section in the page.

Lately we've been getting a few support emails on this again, and it seems more detail is needed - so I've written a bit more here - Curly Urly part 2!

BC has a module you can use in your web pages that that allows you to capture information that you have appended to a URL. That module is { module_url }
What does this mean? Well say you want to prepopulate a bookings web form with a package name of some sort.

Let's make the URL of the page www.mysite.com/bookingform.htm

So I have a range of packages who's details are on other, different pages. When someone clicks on the links I need to know which package they were looking at, and prepopulate the web form with the package that they actually want to book.

So I can put the package name in the URL, like this:
www.mysite.com/bookingform.htm?package=Platinum
And for other packages it might look like this:
www.mysite.com/bookingform.htm?package=Gold
or
www.mysite.com/bookingform.htm?package=Silver

You get the idea.

Now this is where { module_url } comes in - it allows me to retrieve what comes after "package=".
You use it by putting the module in the HTML of your page, including what you have put before the "=" sign.

So in this case, I would put { module_url,package } to retrieve either Platinum, Gold or Silver.

Below are some steps to use this module.

1. Insert a link to your page with the form on it manually using the link manager, and then modify the link to add "arguments" to the URL. So when you are done, the link would be like this:
 www.mysite.com/bookingform.htm?package=Platinum
 
2. Then go to the page with the actual form on it. Then, in a text box on the form (or in javascript even) you put { module_url, <parameter> }. In this example you would put { module_url,package }. This will then be replaced by the text that comes after the "=" sign - in this case it would be replaced by "Platinum".

Thats it!

How you use this module isn't limited to web forms though. You can use this module in many many ways - it's only limited to your imagination....

Have fun!

From next week, all training sessions will be conducted using Voice Over IP (VOIP) technology. This means that you'll need a microphone and speakers - or preferably a headset that combines the two like this one:

Why are we making this change? Well we need to support our partners and customers from all over the globe, and landline based telephony just wasn't cutting it anymore. Secondly we'll soon be able to record audio and visuals so that in the future we can save training sessions for review at a later date.

So over the weekend, here's what I think you should do:

1. Run out and grab a headset - It shouldn't cost much.
2. Test it out using Skype with a friend - now you can call friends and family using Skype, free.
3. Book in to our Q&A session on either Tuesday or Thursday.
4. Relax and recharge for next week!

Last year we buried ourselves in reams of paper rewriting our help materials to create an extensive training manual. It took a few months (you'll notice how quiet this blog went towards the end of last year!) but we finally got it out.

However, the relentless pace of progress caught up all too quickly, and the manual needed updating almost the day it came out!

So once more we locked someone in a room to update the manual and add new sections to it (this time it was Barry's turn mwahaha...). We've done a whole bunch of other help related stuff too, like...

New Training Manual
You can download the manual from the web admin - just click in the top right corner here:


and then here:

Note that you can download individual sections too.


An Online Version Of The Training Manual
The entire manual can be read online! Here's a link you can bookmark - Read the training manual


Updated Contextual Help
Click on the help tab anywhere in the system and you'll get help in context to what you are looking at right now. This help section really needed some TLC - so we've totally rebuilt it incorporating the new training manual.




Help Search (Search forums, articles and the manual)
This one was certainly a long-awaited, much requested feature! Now you can search the help manual plus all the forums and knowledge articles in the system.


Unfortunately my search for meaning came up with no results....

We often get asked about whether customers should send their email campaigns out in HTML or text.
This is a tricky question! But the first thing I always respond with is this question:

Think about this for a second.

Here's some basic facts.
Text email campaigns can't be tracked. We can't tell you who saw what or who clicked where - only HTML emails allow you to collect extensive analytics on your campaigns.

HTML emails have considerably higher impact. That means customers are more likely to react to HTML emails - they have engaging visuals are are often more eye-grabbing.

Text email campaigns have a higher chance of arriving at your customers inbox. HTML email campaigns are more likely to be flagged as spam, put in the junk mail folder and in some cases not delivered at all.

Now of course you should take care to write your emails well. Get your friends and colleagues to proof-read your copy and avoid that "spammy" feeling as much as possible. Don't SHOUT BY WRITING ALL IN CAPITAL LETTERS. Don't use the word free too much, don't mention any type of medicines that your grandfather might use, and so on. You've read some of those spam emails before - don't make it sound like one of those.

But coming back to my question in the first place, what are you trying to achieve? 

If it's an important announcement, consider using text - it's more likely to arrive, and that's what is most important. You aren't trying to drive a sale or a initiate action.

If it's sales or marketing, it's important to capture attention and drive action. So use HTML for best results.

In the end, the decision is entirely up to you. Run some reports - check your open rates, your bounced emails and have a look at how your hyperlinks performed. Overall, look at the data and consider your priorities to make sure you can make the right decision about your email campaigns.

After all, analysing your reports and testing your results is the key to successful email marketing!

Recently we launched a beta version of our new reporting framework, and so far customers are loving it! It's new, shiny and greatly improved over the previous version in terms of speed and accuracy. Under the bonnet it's an entirely new beast too. We've improved the way the reporting works for you!

• Greater Accuracy. Visitors are counted more accurately and don't include automated visitors (such as search engine spiders)
• Longer timeframes on reporting. the new system equips you with the ability to view stats over significatnly longer time-periods than before
• Faster reports. You might not notice, but the development team cheers when they manage to shave a few seconds of the running time of a report!
• Greater usability. The graphs here now use Flash, which makes the graphs more interactive and flexible.
• More Information. We've got more reports than ever to give you better oversight of your online business.

Here's a screenshot of the new reporting from one of our sites (who shall remain anonymous!) 



As the feature is still in beta, please try it out and let us know what you think, or leave a comment on this post!