Starbucks & Email Campaigns

How do you take your coffee?

As I’m standing in line at the global giant, Starbucks, I realize we’ve come a long way from a simple “black” or “with-cream-and-sugar, please.” And I wouldn’t be surprised if you said one (or several) specialty choices, like: tall or venti, iced or hot, soy milk or nonfat, flavored, an extra shot of espresso with whipped cream or without.

But what about your email campaign?

Sometimes you need to customize an email and your entire campaign, just as you do your tall, soy, caramel latte, no whip. Just as with coffee, there is a growing need, a lasting trend for personalization email campaigns.

The GreenArrow team has developed a feature that provides an extraordinary amount of flexibility in sending email. We call it: Special Sending Rules.

A Special Sending Rule is a piece of user-defined computer code that is run for every message and can customize every message in a campaign. All information about the subscriber and campaign is passed into the Special Sending Rule code, and the code instructs GreenArrow on how to customize the email.

You can customize:

• the email content,
• the subject line,
• the from address and recipient name,
• the reply-to address, sender address, and bounce address
• the IP that the email will be sent on, and
• the domain name used for click and open tracking

GreenArrow’s Special Sending Rules can also:

• add attachments, specific to your client,
• instruct that the email to a given recipient be skipped

Our team has yet to find another email sending software offering anything similar to all of their customers.

And the real beauty? You can use Special Sending Rules to implement ideas we haven’t even dreamed up yet. In fact, that’s what makes it so successful — it’s your cup of Joe! Why not order it the way your taste buds — or rather your business — needs it? Many of our customers used Special Sending Rules to:

• Send account statements (bank, tax forms, etc.) to each recipient as a PDF attachment, by using a Special Sending Rule to get the statement from an external server and then add it to the email.
• Customize the IP address used to deliver the email based on custom field values, so different segments of the list are sent using different IP addresses to manage IP reputations.
• Geo-target an advertisement in an email newsletter to specific cities by modifying the email based on a custom field containing the recipient’s city.
• Send job alert emails using job information pulled from an API call to an external database.
• Limit how many emails a subscriber may be sent based on custom rules, by using the Special Sending Rule to instruct that the subscriber be skipped once the limit is reached.
• Customize the content of the email message based on information gathered about the subscriber.

Because you can run individualized computer code to meet your business needs — including talking to other databases or APIs — the things that can be accomplished are almost limitless.

“Special Sending Rules” is all about solving thorny, real-world email problems. Just like soy milk in your coffee can solve a milk allergy. So tell us, are you percolating with ideas?

Some of our customers have already streamlined and enhanced their email sending by using Special Sending Rules. How can adding these rules work for you? Tell us. We’d love to hear and share with users like you. Maybe over coffee?