Blog

We blogged last week about our advances in customer segmentation but didn’t offer you a visual walk through.

To bring these concepts to life and show just how quick and easy it is, I created a 3 minute video that shows you how to create 3 customer segments that you can use to target your messaging.

 … Keep reading

In 2009 we were were growing fast. Very fast. So fast in fact that we were beginning to crush our MySQL database while running queries against a few tables that had grown to contain between 10 and 30 million rows. We moved the data from some of our largest tables into CouchDB to help us reduce the load on our MySQL server (see this series of blog posts for more info).

The move to CouchDB went well. Pages in our web application that would occasionally time out were now loading in a couple of seconds. And, our MySQL database was much, much happier. We liked CouchDB so much that we started planning a feature that would make heavy use of … Keep reading

The Signal application and messaging will be unavailable for one hour starting at 10 PM Central on Thursday Jan 26. We will be performing system maintenance on our database infrastructure. This maintenance will help us improve database performance and reliability. Please email our support team (support@signalhq.com) if you have any questions.… Keep reading

Have you ever wanted to send a message out to all of your female subscribers? What if you don’t have that information…wouldn’t it be nice to send a coupon for a free compact with makeup purchase to those that you know are women, and send a different offer to those that you don’t have gender data for?

Also, what if your makeup offer is valid everywhere except for Alaska? You know, since those free compacts might just crack in the cold arctic air. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to send a message to everyone in your database that you know do not live in Alaska?  To do this, not only would you need to be able to send the … Keep reading

Congratulations! If you’re searching for a single platform to unify your customer database and email, mobile & social marketing efforts, you already understand the critical importance of using one tool to rule cross-channel marketing. You’re one step ahead of your competition.

That said, you’re probably also struggling with how to make sense of this emerging space. Lots of providers claim to unify these channels and it’s hard to really understand the specifics of what they mean by that.  It’s also hard to know what to look for – what are the key ingredients a provider must bake into their product in order to offer you a successful cross-channel solution?

Enter Signal. In working with our terrific roster of customers, … Keep reading

Despite nearly universal HTML support by email clients and near extinction of slow internet connection speeds, plain text email still has it’s place.  That’s why we’re happy to introduce support for sending plain text emails to complement our terrific HTML email builder.

Why is plain text email still relevant?  A couple reasons:

• Improved deliverability:  It’s well known that some people configure their email clients (and devices) to block HTML.  Also, you reduce your chances of getting dinged by spam filters, as the addition of a plain text option indicates you’re more likely to be a safe sender (spammers are usually lazy and don’t take the extra step).
• Plain text emails work better for certain people and certain situations: Some people

… Keep reading

It’s only 12 days into 2012 and Signal customers are already seeing some exciting changes to the application. We started early this year on our spring cleaning by attacking some core usability issues within Signal, and while these efforts may seem small at first blush, the care and attention to detail in fixing them was significant. Here’s what to look for:

Our new Email, and Text Message Overview pages highlight recent campaign success

The “All Message” views for email and text have seen some exciting improvements to make them more useful.  For starters, we added a consistent view across both channels so now you can easily access your Sent, Scheduled, Draft, and Pending messages in a uniform way across both … Keep reading

Google Analytics is probably the second most effective (free) tool you can use to make your digital marketing work harder for you (guess which is the #1 most effective marketing tool?).  Google Analytics gives you tremendous insight into your website’s audience; it will tell you what keywords brought a person to your website, what page they came to your website on, what page they left your website on, how long they stayed on your website, and more. This is the sort of information that can be vital to the success of your site.

You may already be aware of all the great metrics Google Analytics provides to track vistor behavior on your website, but did you know it can … Keep reading

Our latest feature makes building email much easier; meet our customizable content blocks.

What’s a content block? It’s a way to add pre-formatted, hassle-free content to your email. Essentially it’s a layout — a content block could consist of a headline, an excerpt and a related image. Another could use those same elements, but place the image in a different spot.

To get a better sense of how content blocks work, check out this short video that shows off ‘Spartan’, our first template built with content blocks:

If you’re a Signal customer, you can start using Spartan today to send email.

Here’s what I love about content blocks: they’re completely customizable. You can bake them right into your existing templates so … Keep reading

Before we ring in the new year with that delicious bottle of Andre Brut we’ve been saving for a special occasion, I wanted to start on an important resolution for marketers everywhere.  In 2012, I’d like to put an end to the bad habits text marketing and make next year a more fit and effective year for your SMS! As with every goal, specific objectives are necessary to help you accomplish your feat, and here I will lay out ten ways to help you improve your mobile marketing to grow your lists, build stronger relationships with customers, and impact your bottom line.

1. Pick Better Keywords!

Your mobile call-to-action must be transparent and legible! This is about as simple as … Keep reading