Bounces and Feedback Loops

I have signed up for the Feedback Loops of AOL, Yahoo, and Hotmail. Now, whenever one of their users reports an email as SPAM, a copy is sent to us. I have code which will, at that point, read our postmaster mailbox and send this data on to the website that sent the email. This works similarly to how Auto-Bounce Detection from 4.0 works.

You can now search for leads who have bounced, who've reported email as SPAM, or by verification status.

On the search results or other similar views, you can now see the status of their email.

A leads summary page now also displays a flag next to their email address indicating the status.

If you (or the lead) edit the email address of a lead who has bounced, they will be marked as "un-bounced", to handle cases where someone fixes a typo.

You can no longer send an email directly to a lead through the backend if the lead has unsubscribed, bounced, or reported.

After discovering some clients were re-subscribing any lead who unsubscribed, we've also removed the options on the lead edit screen to adjust someones subscription settings. Resubscribing someone who has asked to be unsubscribed is a violation of the CAN-SPAM act. Leads of course can modify their own subscription settings in the dashboard on the front end of the site.

Double Opt-In

Many of the major email providers strongly suggest that people sending marketing email should use double or "confirmed" opt-in. From the AOL Best Practices:

The Yahoo Best Practices help article says:

We will now be requiring double opt-in for any leads with an email address filtered by AOL, Hotmail, or Yahoo. The list of domains that are covered by this code is easily updateable in the event that we need to add additional domains in the future. The current list is aol.com, aol.ca, love.com, ygm.com, games.com, wow.com, hotmail.com, live.com, live.ca, msn.com, msn.ca, outlook.com, yahoo.com, yahoo.ca, ymail.com, and rocketmail.com.

Any lead who signs up with an email from one of these domains will first need to click a link that is emailed to them before they can access the site. This provides strong proof that they have control of the mail account and accept mail from you. We can use this data when resolving disputes with the email providers if we are blocked. Of course the admin can turn this option on for all the leads in the IDX settings if they wish (and I would appreciate them doing so).

Marketing Mail

The code for the various marketing mail tools on the site has been updated to not send mail to anyone who has bounced, who has reported an email as spam, or whose domain requires double opt-in but has not verified. This includes Saved Searches, Campaign / Drip emails, Mass Mail sent from the backend, and if you have the Control Panel module, Auto-Search suggestion emails. These functions have always obeyed the leads' subscription status.

Old Leads

Leads who have not visited the site in over 12 months will now be unsubscribed and sent an email inviting them to resubscribe. This will help keep you from emailing leads who are not engaged. If they are still looking for a property and wish to keep receiving emails from you, they just need to click the link. The email will be sent from the leads assigned agent.

Subject: Confirm Your Account

Hello John,

It appears you have not visited www.example.com in a while. In order for you to remain registered for our property search (so that you can save your searches and listings, get notifications of new properties, etc.), you will need to confirm your account by clicking on this link:

http://www.example.com/subscribe/0c56e100a6f97cc84e83145adb5ebbe8e347fbb7/?d=eyJvbSI6MSwib3MiOjF9

News and Alerts

In the left-hand sidebar of the backend there is now a News section. This lets us easily provide everyone with news about upcoming server maintenance or known service interruptions. Now you can stay informed without having to check the forums or my blog.

Upgrades

In 4.0 we changed how Auto-Searches (part of the Control Panel module) worked. They no longer create a saved search, but simply invite the lead to do so with some suggested criteria. But I have found that customers who upgraded to 4.x kept the old Auto Generated Searches they had from their previous version. These emails are by far the most often reported to the Feed Back Loops. During the transfer of saved searches to 4.2 we will now be setting the frequency that these Auto Searches are sent to "Never".

Shortly after the site live is completed, the CSR rep who is doing your upgrade site live will run a script to send an email to anyone who has not visited in 12 months, whose email domain now requires verification, or whose Auto Search was disabled, inviting them to confirm their account. This way, any of your leads who are engaged will be able to continue to receive their listing updates and drip emails. The email will be sent from the leads assigned agent.

Subject: New Website Launched!

Hello John,

We've recently upgraded our website, www.example.com, to provide additional features for our clients as they manage their property search process. Once you have confirmed your account (see the link below), please go to our home page and click on “My Dashboard”. There you will find your own personal page to manage your searches and favorites and you will continue to receive your property updates. If you have any questions or need any assistance please contact us.

http://www.example.com/subscribe/0c56e100a6f97cc84e83145adb5ebbe8e347fbb7/?eyJ2IjoxLCJvIjoxfQ%3D%3D

These emails will be queued up in the delayed mailer and sent out at approximately 240 per hour. This slow rate should prevent us from getting a server blocked by alerting all these leads.

Goal

The end goal of all these changes is to ensure that the leads who are most engaged on your site are always able to receive your important emails and stay in touch. We have a brand new server for all the 4.2 sites and a fresh IP address. REW 4.2 is the best converting framework we have ever built and we will continue to make improvements in the future as the avant-garde of email marketing moves forward. If you have any questions please ask them in the comments below so everyone can benefit from the answer.

P.S. - The verbiage of the two emails above is still up for discussion. If you have a suggestion on how it could be worded better please comment below!

We will be replacing our firewall, load balancer, and switches. Rackspace will also provide us with a gigabit connection to the internet. During this time we will loose all connectivity to the internet and your sites will be down.

We have scheduled this for 2 AM Pacific on Tuesday January 31st 2012. The maintenance is expected to last 1 hour and should be no more than 2 hours.

Here is the times in different timezones.

12 AM Hawaii
2 AM Pacific
3 AM Mountain
4 AM Central
5 AM Eastern

Email Validation

The new CMS has much better email validation. Emails used to only be checked for "syntax" or that they were well formed. The problem with this was that someone could enter fake@fake.com and it would work since it "looked" like an email.

We now check that the email has real mail servers and then contact the mail server to verify the address. This will prevent people from signing up to the IDX or filling out a contact form with a fake address. And will prevent the system from sending mail to fake addresses causing bounce-backs.

This is good since a high rate of bounce-backs causes email providers to block our servers and/or more readily put our mail into the junkbox.

There are a few domains that this won't work perfectly for (Yahoo for example), but those few will get handled by the next feature!

Auto-Bounce Detection

The new CMS has built in bounce back detection. Whenever an email is sent from the website, be it campaign message, auto-responder, or saved search update, if it bounces our systems will detect the bounce and automatically unsubscribe the lead from future mailings. It will also email the leads assigned agent letting them know an email to the lead bounced and attach the bounce message. The subject of this email is "Lead Unsubscribed by Bounce Detector".

This system will also catch Vacation auto-responders from some mail systems. These will be forwarded to the assigned agent with the subject "Email Received by Bounce Detector" and have the auto-responder attached.

In the old CMS we had some code to prevent the system from sending mail From an email address not connected to the site. The CMS would use info@ as the From address and add a Reply-To with the intended From address. This was to prevent our sites from "spoofing" mail and sending emails as major email providers like Hotmail or Yahoo. With the changes needed for the Bounce Detector and after some deeper research we no longer need to do this. From addresses will now be set to whatever you have set in the CMS and no longer needs the Reply-To address.

Saved Searches Improvements

When a lead saves a search they can now choose a frequency, daily, weekly, or monthly. They also must narrow their search to 500 results to be able to save it. This encourages nore targeted searches and helps prevent getting huge numbers of new listings every day.

For those with the Control Panel, we have also improved the Auto-Searches. This system used to look at a leads 20 most recently viewed properties and create saved searches for those that did not have a saved search of their own yet. It would then send them a Control Panel message telling them about the search. The problem with this was that few would read their Control Panel message and would consider the daily emails about new properties matching their search spam.

This has now been changed to simply email them a suggested search and ask them to save it or to refine it and save it. This provides the info in a clearer way (CP messages were kind of obscure if the lead wasn't expecting them), and make the process opt-in. It also encourages the user to refine the search to match their exact needs and helps expose that functionality of the site. Here is an example of the email the lead would receive:

Hello John Doe,

Thank you for using www.example.com for your real estate search! Did you know that you can save your search parameters? Save this Search is a time saving feature that makes it easier than ever before to find homes that meet your needs. Save this Search eliminates the need to fill out a search form each and every time you'd like to view listings, as it not only saves your customized search preferences, but you'll also be notified by email as soon as new properties enter the market that match your criteria.

Based on your previous searches and properties you've chosen to view in detail, it appears that you're looking for homes with the following attributes:

Property Type: Residential
City: Orlando
Max. Price: $150,000
Min. Price: $125,000
Min. Bedrooms: 3
Min. Bathrooms: 3
Min. Sq. Ft.: 4000

If you would like to be notified when new properties with these characteristics are listed on the MLS, simply click Save this Search! You can also Refine this search to meet your exact needs!

Emailing from Lead Manager

In the old CMS there were only a few options when emailing large groups of leads. You could pick a group, or pick leads by status, or by agent. We have removed this old page and added the email function to the lead search page. The search page has been improved allowing you to search by many attibutes of your leads such as Last Active Date, Number of Visits / Favorites / Searches / etc, and IP address. Once you have performed a search you can click a link to email all the leads that match your search. This gives you greater control and granularity when sending out large emails.

Pretty Error Pages

We made it standard for MySQL error notifications to show as valid pages on the website (similar to 404 pages), instead of showing as an esoteric error code on a blank page - this makes for a better user experience on your website, and helps to prevent them thinking that the site is "broken" or unmoderated. It also responds with the proper headers to tell search engiens to not index the site during the outage.

You can dontate to our team here!

You can see all our photos over on the fourm thread!

And Kim one of our Mo Sistas

Gerry as a Caveman

Tracy as Bob Ross

Lisa as LIzzie Borden

Kim as Black Mail

Kathryn as a Pirate

Moriah as a Jedi

Steven and Andy as Bunsen and Beaker

Anthony H

Pat

Anthony Clark as Data

Niki as Dr Evil

Phil as Andy Warhol

Dawn as Medusa

Yesterday I got an email saying that my test was canceled due to low attendance. The next time the test runs in Vancouver is November 25th. THREE MONTHS AWAY!!! And it could get canceled too!!

So I call to see if I can get my course rescheduled to a date closer to my test and am told that since its less than 15 days till the start, I would have to pay 50% to get it moved. So an extra $1,050 because they canceled my test. WHAT JERKS!

So I guess I'm taking my course next week and my test in 3 months. AND AM NEVER USING REDHAT TRAINING AGAIN!

As you may have heard, Microsoft and Mozilla have just released new versions of their browsers.

Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 launched on March 14th, but won't be pushed out to end users until the end of June. IE9 also requires Windows Vista or Windows 7. There is no version to run on Windows XP.

Mozilla Firefox 4 launched on March 22nd and many users will soon be getting the prompt to update.

We at REW are excited for a new round of browsers and their new features including faster JavaScript and better CSS3/HTML5 support, allowing us to do some cool new tricks. Our R&D department is working on getting our upcoming REW Framework 4.0 and LEC 6 to be fully compatible with both of these browsers. We are also working on making the backend able to detect an iPhone or other iOS-based device and to switch to a simplified interface. The REW Framework 4.0 will of course be compatible with IE8 as well.

REW Framework 3.x

If you have a 3.x versioned site, we are looking into what may be required to allow your backend to work in the new browsers without issues. Since these browsers just came out (they're new to us, too) it will take us a little while to figure out any issues and how to fix them. Then we'll patch our codebase so that future installs are fully compatible. If the patches are fairly simple (and we hope they will be) we will start patching your sites (at no cost if possible).

As for the front-ends of our pre-4.0 sites, they were built for the browsers that were current at the time of development. If they are not appearing properly in the new browsers, they will require a work order to be updated.

If you are having issues with IE9 or Firefox 4 on your 3.x site, please email Support with the words NEW BROWSER in the subject and we will add it to the known list of issues. This will help us to make a patch for the backend, and will help us find the issues in the frontend, reducing the time needed for your work orders to just the time needed for repair.

What about Chrome, Sleipnir, or "browser X"?

We simply can't build in support for all known browsers into our products. Having said that, remember that anything can be done with a work order. If you are finding that a large number of your site's visitors are using a particular browser and some feature isn't working, we would love to team you up with one of our skilled developers to find and fix any issues you may have. Want an iPad specific version of your site? We can do that! Just contact sales to get an estimate.

Known Issues

• The TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor in pre-3.0 backends has issues with some of the functions that use popups (Inserting images or links) in FireFox 4
• The TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor in 3.0 backends has issues with some of the functions that use popups (Inserting images or links) in IE 9
• The images in the IDX (3.x) do not reliably load in IE 9
• LEC 5 Button text is missing in IE 9
• MS BirdsEye View in IDX (3.x) does not load in FF 4
• LEC 4 sidebar does not show the sub-nav links in IE 9 or FF 4
• Listings Manager Photo Upload does not work in IE 9

The main purpose of this is to help us enforce some rules so we can keep our servers off the spam lists and keep them from getting blocked by major mail providers. One major thing you can all be sure to do is make sure you get bounces when someone signs up with a fake email, and then to delete those leads that do. If you are sending saved search emails or drip campaigns to a dead address that bounces every day, then that mail server may start blocking all the mail from your whole server.

A single bounce wont kill us, but if you get the same 100 bounces every day we have a problem.

All of our sites come with a Content Formatting Test page to show what the built in styles for things like headings and paragraphs look like. These styles were created by our skilled team of designers to look best on your website. You should use these built in styles for your content. Put most of it in a paragraph and use the different levels of headings to outline your page. Use the important and highlight styles to make some divs or paragraphs stand out.

If you really want something special like a styled box, such as can be found on Jim Olenbush's site, just contact sales and we can create some fancy styles just for you.

The most important thing is to keep your formatting consistent across your site and keep it clean.

If you insist on changing your font color or font face, you will need to learn HTML.