Email Yogi is a great site for hints, tips and email best practice.

Here’s a great post about email communication.

One of our full serve clients, Catch The Fire Ministries wanted the benefits of full serve but with self serve capabilities – they have a number of local church campus’ in Toronto, Canada, but also a number of churches around the world, such as Catch The Fire Raleigh in NC, USA.

So we built a branded version of the self serve system at junctionjhello, with some alterations.

First, they needed to integrate with their own CRM software. The Toronto office uses Everest, an ERP system that runs on SQL. Our system uses MySQL, and we built a sync application that syncs the two databases.

Second, we added a filter system so users can send an email by category, for instance, to all the users who live in Toronto.

Finally, the marketing team wanted to have an area on each church campus email template for a common ad space. So we created an html file that they can update, and every campus email that goes out shows the same ads.

Of course the site is fully branded too. So everyone is happy… Catch The Fire has branded email marketing software that’s super cheap, without the hassles of setting it up or maintaining it. And for junctionjhello income of course, but also for important valuable customer feedback.

It’s almost impossible to get 100% success on delivery… with the best will and resources available, every provider has email that goes into people’s junk mail. We sign up to all sorts of email lists for research, and a number of these end up in our junk mailboxes, even from the largest providers.

This is really because junk mail filters are increasingly tough to get around, and some people have their email set up so that any email that’s from someone that’s not in their address book gets deleted.

There are a number of tips and tricks though, like ensuring your recipients have your sending email address in their address book. junctionj also has a link on their templates to show users how to do that – http://junctionjhello.com/lists/ensure-delivery.html

We’ve been working hard on a couple of projects – ten16entertainment.com was finished last week and we’re please with the results…. the site was designed by Khroma Creative, and we did the build, using a custom Word Press installation.

We’re also working on a client version of junctionjhello, integrating their data with a back office sync. Pretty cool really.

On another note, signed up for a couple of cool things. There is a site called diyseo which is great for search engine optimisation, and also shoemoney has a free 12 week internet marketing course which is well worth it!

We’ve started getting users on the self serve application, and a few more bugs are emerging. I am glad that we can iron out these bugs early on – this is what that beta test is all about!

We have uploaded a page with our known issues - http://junctionjhello.com/home.php?inc=home-issuelog.