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White Label Setup FAQ

by | Jan 13, 2022 | Help

White labeling BigMailer platform offers several benefits, but may not be necessary to meet your needs. This article helps you understand the pros and cons of using a white label and any limitations to supporting your use case and requirements.

BigMailer unsubscribe page customizationsSome email platforms refer to white label as an ability to brand your unsubscribe page and setup a a custom domain for links in the email and to host your unsubscribe page. This option is available to BigMailer customer on all plans at no extra cost.

In BigMailer you can customize the Unsubscribe page for each brand by adding a logo, custom message, and message types to manage it as an email preference center.

What BigMailer calls white labeling, only offered on Agency and Enterprise plans, is ability to host the platform on your own domain with your logo and all references to BigMailer removed.

White Label Setup

Here is a list of features you can expect with white label:

  1. All users (team members and clients) access the platform via login on your own domain.
  2. All users see your logo in the header, login page, and activity notification emails (account activation, password resets, imports, etc).
  3. The platform will NOT be branded with your colors or styles, but you can still brand your unsubscribe pages (see above).
  4. Error messages and help section will not have any references to BigMailer.
  5. No live chat support from BigMailer team.
  6. Optional: you can provide a link to your own help section if you prefer to manage your own.

What BigMailer white label does NOT support:

  1. Billing your clients for use of the platform. Our white label is not intended for resellers.
  2. Loading the platform or any screens in an iFrame inside another website or application.

Possible Integrations

A lot of businesses are interested in integrating email marketing features into their existing suite of tools. The challenge with a deep integration like that is that you need to re-create a lot of the UI and functionality of an email platform (e.g. email template management, configuration checks, and error handling) and it would likely take many months to deliver. A white label platform allows you to just send the users to the platform that has your branding and uses your business domain in the URL.

Here is a list of APIs you can use with your white label:

  1. Contact management (add, update, delete lists and contacts)
  2. Transactional email campaigns. You can pass entire message body with an API call.
  3. Create new brands, send user invites.
  4. Coming soon: send one-time bulk campaigns.

White Label Assets You Need to Provide

In order to set up your account as white label we request the following assets from you:

  1. White label domain to be used in all URLs
  2. Business name (text label)
  3. A full path to the logo image you want to use – 3 versions:
    a) A logo to appear in the site header, ideally simple and icon like
    b) A logo to appear on the login page, and in transactional emails (login activation, password reset, etc.).
    c) Optional: A path to your favicon
  4. Administrator/support email address that will be referenced in cases of errors (permissions, billing limits, etc.)
  5. Optional: A link to your own help document as an alternative to the help section we manage.

Want to Discuss Your White Label Requirements or Ask Questions? 

Schedule a Demo

Want to explore BigMailer features and UI on your own? Get started with a free account, no credit card required.

 

How to manage Brands on BigMailer

by | Mar 26, 2021 | Help

BigMailer is a platform designed and built for managing multiple brands, which benefits digital marketing agencies, email marketing consultants, franchises, multi-location businesses, and large companies that own multiple brands.

Some email marketing service providers offer “sub-accounts” feature where standalone accounts are linked together and can be accessed with a single login. In this type of setup you login once and can switch between accounts, typically via dropdown in the header.

What is a Brand?

You can think of a brand as a business entity with its own unsubscribe page. So in cases of franchises or multiple locations, each owner or location would become its own brand. The lists can not be shared across brands and billing is based on unique contacts under each brand. A user can be assigned access to multiple brands.

BigMailer allows you to add unlimited brands and users at no extra cost. You have a brand dashboard as a starting point with engagement summary.

BigMailer dashboard - brand list

You invite new users to your account and assign brand access and a role – administrator, brand manager, or campaign manager.

User Management

Brand Names

The brand name is typically the name of the business or the domain name of a website. In cases of multiple locations but same business name it’s best to follow the same naming convention to avoid confusion – location name, or “[main brand] – [location]”.

The brand name is displayed in plain text on the Unsubscribe page unless a logo is uploaded, in which case only the logo is shown and no text. If you don’t upload the logo it’s best to have the brand name label in BigMailer to include actual brand name and not just a location. Below is an example of BigMailer unsubscribe page with logo and custom message types.

BigMailer unsubscribe page

Custom Message Types

Custom message types help manage subscription preferences for your subscribers and can retain more subscribers on your list compared to a single global unsubscribe from a brand.

You can create custom message types under each brand by clicking on the brand name in the header and selecting “Message Types” from the menu. You will not be able to edit message types once you create them, so put some thought into the names before you add them.

Ideally, message types would indicate mailing frequency, if you have a set schedule, for example:

  • Weekly Newsletter
  • Monthly Product Updates
  • Daily Digest
  • Company Announcements (Quarterly)
  • Occasional Offers From Our Partners

You can specify a message type when you create a new campaign and BigMailer keeps track of the subscription preferences.

Gmail Outage Causes Erroneous Hard Bounces

Gmail Outage Causes Erroneous Hard Bounces

by | Dec 16, 2020 | Email Marketing

You may have heard by now that Google services have experienced major outages on Dec 14 and 15.

Not only Gmail users had difficulties logging into their accounts, but emails sent to Gmail accounts have been rejected by google with:

“code”: “550”,

“extCode”: “5.1.1”,

“message”: “The email account that you tried to reach does not exist. Please try double-checking the recipient’s email address for typos or unnecessary spaces. Learn more at https://support.google.com/mail/?p=NoSuchUser”

 

This means that if you had been sending emails to Gmail addresses during the outage you likely had a high bounce rate for your Gmail addresses and possibly your campaigns and accounts overall. Since BigMailer pauses campaigns with high bounce rate you may have received notifications about your campaigns being paused due to high bounce rate.

You should review engagement by domain report on any campaigns you sent on Monday-Tuesday.

You might see a high hard bounce rate for Gmail.com domain:

high hard bounce rate for gmail emails

If your Amazon SES account got suspended you should reply to the email you received from Amazon and explain that most of the bounces were erroneous from Gmail due to outage (if this is in fact the case). A screenshot of the report, like the example above, and a link to this post may help with a faster resolution and account re-instatement.

While the original issue is outside of our control and influence we are monitoring situation and exploring ways we can rectify it by possibly reseting the bounce status on the affected addresses.

We will post an update once we take any action on this situation. If you need a faster advisory on rectifying this yourself please reach out to us via live chat once you log into your BigMailer account.

UPDATE Dec 17: BigMailer had addressed this issue by reseting the hard bounce status for affected contacts.

UPDATE Jan 6: Most marketers are not even aware of the issue as per the poll we ran on Twitter.

How to Segment Your Email Lists

by | Jun 27, 2020 | Help

What is Segmentation and Why Use It?

Email list segmentation is a technique that email marketers use to send highly targeted emails by dividing their list up into smaller groups, or “segments.” The goal of segmentation is to provide more relevant content to your email recipients.

You want your marketing campaign to be as precise as possible so the right message can hit the right people at exactly the right time. For this, email segmentation is an absolute must.

How to Segment Your Email Lists

In BigMailer, you can segment your campaigns on:

  1. Your custom fields. For example, last order date or subscription status.
  2. Pre-defined fields like DateAdded and Email, specifically email domain (e.g. gmail.com or yahoo.com).
  3. Campaign engagement – sends, opens, clicks on a specific campaign or any campaigns in a given time period.

Here are some examples of segmentation rules you can use in BigMailer with screenshots:

DateAdded – this value is added when a contact is added to BigMailer:

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Campaign engagement – sent/not a specific campaign:

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Campaign engagement – opens on a specific campaign or any in a given time period:

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Campaign engagement – clicks on a specific campaign or any in a given time period:

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​You can combine your inline conditions and your pre-defined segments with either ANY or ALL rule.

how to segment your list

If you’re reading this, that means you’re serious about creating the most targeted email campaigns possible. And we are here to help.

Before you’re able to segment your audience, you need to get their emails and collect relevant data. Using BigMailer webforms to collect your subscriber data gives you a few advantages. For example, we automatically capture your user’s IP address (but we don’t save or store it) and convert it to non-PII data points (country, state, city, zip code, and latitude and longitude), which allows you to target your audience by location.

Need ideas on how to leverage segmentation? Check out this article – 50 ways to segment your list from OptinMonster.

Want to learn more about email marketing? Head over to our email marketing automation or email deliverability guides.

Happy email marketing!

How to Setup an Automation (Drip) Campaign

How to Setup an Automation (Drip) Campaign

by | Feb 9, 2020 | Help

There are many terms used by marketers to describe automated emails – marketing automation, auto-responders, drip emails, email sequences, and more. Whatever you call your automated emails, BigMailer supports them. While RSS to email and transactional (via API calls) email campaigns are technically automations, in this article we focus on auto-responders and sequences.

Examples of Automation Campaigns

There are many different type of automation campaigns – here are some of the most common examples:

1. Welcome Email

This can be a single email or a sequence. The 1st email can set expectations on the the type of emails to expect and frequency of updates, and any special offers or coupons that may have been promised for getting on a lit (common for online retailers). Consider including links to your most popular content either in the 1st email or in the follow up email.  Email Marketing Automation Example - Newsletter Signup

2. New Subscriber/Customer On-boarding

These type of emails help your customers get started with a product or service by addressing friction points, answering FAQs, or providing links to helpful resources, and often reduce the number of support inquiries. Email Marketing Automation Example - User On-boarding

3. Nurture Sequence

Feature highlights, usage tips, learning resources, review/rating requests, and customer case studies can help build product loyalty and encourage ongoing use of service and/or upgrades.

TIP: Consider giving your customers sufficient time to use your product/service before asking for a review/feedback.

4. RSS-to-email Updates

BigMailer allows you to send new blog post email updates via RSS. This type of campaign goes out automatically when a new blog post is published.

Setting up an Automation Campaign in BigMailer

An Automation campaign in BigMailer can be a single email (e.g. a signup confirmation or welcome) or a sequence of emails, that are typically triggered based on something happening to the subscriber record or an action performed. In addition to action, an automated email can be triggered with a time delay in hours, days, or weeks, or have no delay.

After the Automation campaign sends the 1st email the future steps in the sequence can be scheduled in 2 ways:

  1. Relative to the first email, e.g. X days after the same trigger as the 1st email. For example, you can send a welcome email immediately after someone signs up for your newsletter or creates an account, then send weekly emails after 7, 14, 21 days, etc.
  2. Relative to the previous email and/or action taken, e.g. X days after a previous email in the sequence is sent or after a contact opens or clicks on the previous email.

Ready to get started? Here are the steps to setup your Automation campaign.

  1. Log into your BigMailer account and select a brand you want to create a campaign under. Don’t have a BigMailer account? Create a free account – all accounts start on a Free plan, no credit card required.
  2. Click on Campaigns tab in the site header, then on “Create Campaign” button.
  3. Click on “Create” under the Automation section.

Once on the Campaign page you need to give your Automation campaign a name, click on small “rename” tag next to name.

Automation Campaign name

Click on “Add Email” to create your first email step, then click on “Edit” links to define each element of an email – trigger, message type, and segment (optional).

The most typical trigger for a 1st or only step in an Automation campaign is subscriber record being added to a specific list.

TIP: Create a List named Test and always use it for testing your automation campaigns before finalizing against customer list.

How to Add Contacts to a List:

There are several ways to add new contacts to a List in BigMailer.

  1. Manual import of a CSV file.
  2. An email collection webform that sends customer data to a List. In BigMailer you have 2 options, embed the form into your website or just link to a form as a standalone page on BigMailer.
  3. An API call (e.g. to create a contact when someone makes a purchase).
  4. An integration (when someone performs an action on a 3rd party platform a record of contact is created at BigMailer). So the data can first enter your CRM or a Google spreadsheet, then pushed to BigMailer.
  5. Manual adding of records one-by-one, useful for adding your own records for testing.

How to Setup an Double Opt-In Confirmation

BigMailer does not support built-in double opt-in (DOP) functionality because it benefits traditional ESPs more than marketers (see this article from Litmus). Mailchimp switched to SOI as their default in 2017 because their data showed that marketers were loosing up to 60% of their subscribers to the DOP process. However, you can setup an DOP automation campaign yourself.
 
To setup a DOP you need to create an automation campaign first, following the steps outline in the section above. Your trigger would be a subscriber being added to a specific list you are adding your subscribers to. Your DOP confirmation email should only have ONE link it it – linking to your website’s confirmation page. Then, you create a segment based on clicks in your DOP campaign. 
clicked segment
You can use this new segment on any future campaigns, as you see fit – all or some. 
Segment DOP
 
If you are worried about bot signups you can add re-CAPTCHA on your forms as an alternative to DOP process. 
 

Automation Campaign Analytics

Automation campaigns have the same analytics as marketing campaigns, once they are set live and emails are sent. As soon as you set your email Live and it’s no longer in Draft mode you will see “Report” option next to the email step in the email list view (see screenshots in the Automation Examples section above). You can see engagement metrics like open and click rates, as well as unsubscribes, bounces, and complaints for every email in an Automation campaign.

The stats for Automation campaign do NOT reset when an email is modified or moved around in a sequence. So if you want to track performance of a single step in a sequence you may want to pause the step and create a new version to replace it so you can compare engagement stats before/after the changes made.

Automation Campaign Types

1. A single welcome email sent when a new subscriber is added to the list or a sequence of emails.

2. An email sequence, for example on-boarding or nurture sequence with tips on using a product or advice from experts. This type of sequence can start with an event outside BigMailer and contact record is pushed to BigMailer via an integration or via an API call from an internal web application.

3. A marketing automation – an email or a sequence triggered by a customer interaction with a website or product. For example, if a subscriber visits a specific article they are tagged as interested in a given topic and sent relevant content or promotional emails. To set this up you have to add code to your website to fire an API call to BigMailer to either a) update your customer record with info on the action or interest or b) add that customer to a new List which can trigger an Automation campaign.

Automation Campaign Sending Logic and Troubleshooting

The emails in the Automation Campaign get sent if the there is an active email step when a trigger condition evaluates. When you create an email it starts in Draft mode until you set it live by clicking “Set Live“.

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If you use a trigger based on adding contacts to a list the email step needs to be active before the contacts are added. To trigger an email the contacts can be added to a List either manually one by one for testing, in bulk via CSV import, or via on ongoing basis via signup forms.

The automation emails are scheduled at the time of the trigger event, ignoring any delay rules. So if the trigger for an email step is “after previous email is SENT” then the email is scheduled as soon as the previous email is SENT, regardless of delay rule.

Making and Testing Changes to a Sequence​

Re-arranging steps for a live sequence, or changing delay rules, will not have impact on emails already scheduled.

One way to make changes to a live sequence is to copy the step you want to move, then pause original in its place and set live the new step in new place. This way you preserve stats for the original rules used. Using the copy and pause method doesn’t prevent any subscribers from receiving the same email twice, it’s just one way to not mix up stats for states before/after change is made. You can exclude subscribers from the new version using campaign engagement on a segment as “didn’t open any campaigns in X days” if there are no other emails being sent to subscriber (e.g. transactional).

Ready to get started? Click on Campaigns tab in the site header, then on “Create Campaign” button and select “Automation” campaign from the list. Don’t have a BigMailer account? Try out BigMailer with a free account.

Need assistance with your Automation Campaign? Reach out via chat icon once you log in, help is available 7 days a week.