21 Nov 11 ITTS News Meeting – November 15, 2011
1. How Informz Email Can Enhance Your Marketing Communications – (Dan Kaplan, Marketing Manager ALA Publishing)
What is Informz?
Informz is an email marketing solution that works directly with or without iMIS, our association management member and customer database system. More information can be found at http://www.informz.com/
Managing Subscribers –
Informz allows you to target your audience:
—Informz can manage lists from the iMIS system or import customer lists from other sources to process alone or combine with iMIS queries.
—use outside lists by importing to one or more interests
—there is a built in subscription forms that adds to lists
—create complex queries within your lists (includes and excludes)
—pull names directly from Informz with queries
—combine all the methods
You need to have an opt-out list. It’s the law. Opt-out is not the same as unsubscribe (blacklist).
Dan does opt-out lists where people are added to a do-not-send-list and then it’s excluded from mailings.
Informz gives you the tools to easily build subscription forms which you can incorporate right into your website or just send readers to Informz.
—Booklist Example has Sign up form / Manage forms
—Dan has found that subscribers are the best performing group within a mailing. You can see that in the mailing activity report.
Campaign creation and templates
Informz makes it easy to build an email, target the audience, schedule the distribution, and report on the results.
—Dan showed tabbed campaign steps
—Easy WSYWIG editors, templates or HTML dump, image uploads
—Two kinds of templates: Pre-designed elements with branding that lets you focus on the content of the current email.
—Personalization (mailmerge) of emails
—Easy A/B Split testing of emails.
—Our templates usually include the promotion of multiple items hoping to increase click throughs and ultimately sales.
—Dan showed ALA Graphics example — balance of image and text, other products
—Dan showed RDA Toolkit example — multiple stories, links to social and website
Reports
—Activity reports in detail
—Deliveries/Undeliverable
—Opens unique/total
—Click thrus
—Conversion tracking
—Viral marketing
—Click-thru report
—Spatial click-thru
—Comparing activity to a target group
Triggered Emails
— Dan explained when to use triggered emails: timed follow up to an email blast, welcoming a subscribing or membership, or various IMIS activities.
Forward to Friend Feature — Assisted delivery
—We can pull lists and target our mailings, but that doesn’t assure that the right people will see our message. The next frontier is to get our contacts to deliver our emails to the right person within their organization.
—There are two methods for tracking forwards. They each have their pluses and minuses.
American Libraries Direct example — 800+ (10%) readers forward
Booklist webinar example — Forward to friend button results
Costs
—ALA is covering all costs for an ALA unit wishing to use this service.
Next steps:
—Hold user group sessions broken out into sections including: using templates, building and sending campaigns, building lists, forms, reports, surveys, and other topics that arise.
—Put in a TrackIT ticket for set up and creation of various iMIS queries
2. Drupal CMS Migration Update – (Louise)
As you may be aware, ALSC, LLAMA, PLA and all the round tables (with the exception of SRRT, whose members asked for a blank site, and Gaming RT, which will also need a new site) have been migrated to Drupal. Louise has been getting inquiries from the balance of units about who’s next.
Here’s the plan that will have the migration complete on December 8th so that units can focus on preparations for Midwinter. Louse has allocated the scheduling according to discussions with stakeholders, but if any division not listed below would like to move up in the schedule, let Louise know. All division sites still in Collage (except ALCTS) can be reviewed on the dev server right this minute and bug reports can be entered by authorized reviewers.
With the exception of Thanksgiving Week, the pattern is:
1. Lockout of Collage Monday evening, final migration of content to the development site overnight.
2. Tuesday & Wednesday, ITTS makes last minute additions and corrections that have to be done manually. Our vendor assists us with bug report resolutions. Wednesday evening the sites are moved from the development to the live server.
3. Thursday the final tasks are done: Shibboleth is enabled on the sites, the rules that ensure that users are taken to the live site and can get back and forth to unmigrated sites are dropped into place, the Google Search Appliance Key Matches are updated to the new URLs and the sites go-live. Staff permissions for the site are set in iMIS.
4. Friday is training day for staff in the mornings, members in the afternoons.
This Week: AASL, ASCLA, RUSA, YALSA migrate; LITA, ACRL & ALTAFF are already in review on the development server
1. Monday 14: AASL, ASCLA, RUSA, YALSA make their final edits in Collage.
2. Tuesday & Wednesday 15 & 16: Manual edits to prepare AASL, ASCLA, RUSA, YALSA to go-live. Migration scripts are set to take Offices & Site Sections (About ALA, Accreditation, Awards & Grants, Conferences & Events, Education & Careers, Issues & Advocacy, Member Groups, Membership, News & Press Center, Online Learning, Professional Tools, Programming, Research & Statistics) to development for review.
3. Thursday 17: Go-live
4. Friday 18: Training for staff in the morning; afternoon virtual session for members.
Thanksgiving Week: ACRL & Choice migrate; reviewers should be entering bug reports for all sites in review
1. Sunday 20: ACRL lockout
2. Monday 21: ACRL manual edits
3. Tuesday 22: ACRL go-live; afternoon training for staff
Last Week of November: Offices & Site Sections, LITA, ALTAFF migrate; schedule same as standard week, above.
First Week of December: Any site remaining or that was delayed because of major bugs or other issues
Brief Tour
Louise gave a brief tour of the sites that have been converted thus far.
3. ALA Connect – (Sherri)
– Preview of enhanced Conference Scheduler was rescheduled. The conference scheduler with enhanced features is scheduled to soft launch at the end of this week.
