Template management
Have you ever been hindered by the difficulty of providing sensible ways to
categorize and filter your email templates? If so, this release is for you! As
VEM makes extensive use of email templates we felt it was important to be able
to manage them in a reasonable fashion. To achieve this we are using an
attribute that is normally unused (importsequencenumber) to define the filtered
views, then we list these as target views on a Copy Template ribbon button. Each
time you copy a template VEM appends a 'datetime' suffix to the title to ease
identification.
You can define as many views as you need and these will be shown dynamically on
the ribbon button. For instance, you can now choose to define a number of master
templates that marketing people can copy to update for each weekly or monthly
newsletter. Remember, if you wish to provide a link within the outgoing email to
'View online' you need to keep a copy of a specific newsletter template for as
long as you might have recipients reading and responding to it, so you might
consider the 'Newsletter Templates' to be an archive for at least 6 months or
so.
Note: The dynamic listing of views exposes an issue in the CRM Outlook client
(web client is OK) that we hope will be fixed in UR6. Meantime target views need
to be statically defined as we have for the ones shown in the screenshot.
Reader / browser type recording
Do you wish you to know what programs your recipients are using to read your
emails and interact with your VEM landing pages? You might wish to know this so
you can test your templates with all these different types of email reader or
browser.
Starting with this release VEM collects the UserAgent string that is offered by
all web devices and reports this within the email click instance. However since
this string is usually lengthy and complex we are also providing a parsing
capability to simplify and reduce the number of types for reporting purposes. So
you can see what types of devices are being used by looking at the email clicks
grid.
VEM uses a regular expression in its solution configuration to parse the
Recipient Client Type. If you see any blanks in this column you can easily
update the configuration to add new types.
Enhanced statistics collection
This release also brings more attributes to the Email Campaign Statistics, so
you know the number of emails from a campaign activity have actually been sent,
and you know the number of people who have interacted (in any way) with your
communication.
Convert online to inline images
Have you ever wished you could deliver HTML emails 'intact'? Increasingly the
first first view a recipient has of your email is like that of a web page with
broken images or placeholders. How do you get around that? Answer: send your
images inline with the message rather than rely on your reader pressing the
'download images' button. With this release we have enhanced the VEM Email
Component to enable this functionality. By simply adding an 'inline' marker to
images in your email the VEM Email Component will download and cache images and
embed them inline as they are sent out of CRM.
Gallery2 image browser
VEM's filemanager allows you to upload and manage a collection of images you use
in email activities. If, however, you have a very large collection of images
that you need to manage outside CRM, you should consider using VEM's integration
with Gallery2, which is a popular open source image management product. Turning
on this integration is as easy as uploading a server-side component to your G2
site and entering the URL in the VEM solution configuration.
|
