After finally getting approval for the newly designed Conversations with Chromax emails, I sent out emails on Tuesday, October 30th.  This email blast was sent to over 8300 registrations.  Multiple challenges arose on this not the least of which is time.

To start at the beginning, Chromax.com has been doing an email campaign called Conversations with Chromax.  One of the first challenges with taking over a new e-Newsletter campaign system is learning a new system.  Nutrition 21, the owners of Chromax.com were using a system called I Make News.  One of I Make News’s products is a “do it yourself” e-Newsletter system.  While touted as a DIY campaign, IMN certainly takes some time to get used to and is not for the average non-tech user.

With I Make News going away, we needed to shift our focus towards another alternative.  With that in mind we decided to use Arial Software for future of Conversations with Chromax.  Needless to say this posed some major challenges.  Least of which was downloading the entire IMN database of registrants.  Now that I was able to do that, I was tasked with setting up from scratch: a fresh install of Arial Software, a database to house the registrations and tracking information, email accounts used by Arial to send out emails, catch/process bounces, and handle opt-outs.

One issue I ran into is that Arial Software runs its own internal web server.  This poses some issues with running on a server which already has IIS setup on it.  First challenge was that the click through tracking listens on port 80.  That may seem like a no brainer, but IIS is setup by default to listen for traffic on port 80.  So this caused some major headaches for me.  The end result was that we had to disable socket pulling on the web server.  Please note that if you have to disable socket pulling on a server that has multiple IP addresses associated with it, you MUST re-include listening on port 80 for those IPs or they will not work properly.

With all issues resolved and pieces in place, we sent out 8300 emails on Tuesday of this week.  As of Friday Afternoon, we had around 600+ bad email addresses which are recorded as hard bounces.  This does not put I Make News in a good light if that many bad email addresses were left hanging around.  Since the Chromax website does not do a double opt in system, I’m not surprised the number of bad email addresses that turned up.  We were nearing a 10% unique open rate as well.  I try to post more results on Tuesday which will put us at the one week mark.

Tags: arial software, chromax, conversations with chromax, e-newsletter, nutrition21

This entry was posted on Friday, November 2nd, 2007 at 9:36 pm and is filed under Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.