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Overview
What is OngageConnect™?
OngageConnect™ is an ESP gateway solution that leverages the combined strengths of multiple ESPs.
This gateway enables marketers to manage campaigns across multiple ESPs from one convenient, email marketing command center. Using multiple ESPs, enables marketers to achieve peak marketing performance across global regions and across multiple ISPs*, by allowing them to match and set the best performing ESP for each region and ISP. All this translates into increased ROI at lower operational costs.
* ISP: Internet Service Provider, such as hotmail.com, hotmail.co.uk, yahoo.fr, etc. Different ESPs have varying performance results with different ISPs.
Who should use OngageConnect™?
Anyone with large emailing operations who wants to increase deliverability, inbox penetration, operational efficiencies and ROI
Which browsers does OngageConnect™ support?
The latest versions of Firefox, IE and Chrome
What are key benefits of using OngageConnect™?
What are key features I’ll find in OngageConnect™?
Getting Started
How do I setup my account?
The easiest way to setup your account is to follow our friendly OngageConnect™ setup wizard:
- Step #1: ESP Selection: Choose which Email Service Provider (ESP) and/or SMTP relay you'd like to connect and use from your new OngageConnect™ account. Choose an existing ESP account or set up a new one.
- Step #2: Setup ESP: Setup 'Email Attributes' and 'API Credentials' (optional). For detailed instructions, refer to each ESP wizard.
- Step #3: Define your Image & Tracking domains: You need to define a tracking domain for monitoring email Opens and Clicks. Defining the image domain to use the built-in OngageConnect™ image library module.
How can I compare features of different ESPs?
Use the setup wizard or setting to access the 'Find ESP page'. Find ESP, go to the top of the page and choose 'I'd like to find a new ESP'. Then select and compare multiple ESPs.
What is a DNS? Where and how do I set up a DNS?
'DNS' stands for Domain Name System which lets you point a sub-domain to our system that tracks, monitors and also hosts your images with your own domain. For detailed instructions on how to set up your DNS, visit this page
What are From Name / From Address / Reply Address?
- 'From Name' is the name your users see under the senders 'form' field.
- 'From Address' is the outgoing email address.
- 'Reply Address' is the incoming email address of your users' replies. Ensure that you monitor this email box. You may define as many 'From Name' / 'From Address' / 'Reply Address' as you like and easily choose which one to use for each campaign.
What is Bounce Email?
'Bounce Email' is the Email Address to which bounced replies are sent from the ISPs. As certain ESPs can only send bounces via a bounce email, they will appear in the ESP setup page. In this case you need to configure this email address so that our system can automatically remove hard bounces from your contact list
What is Tracking Domain?
A 'Tracking Domain' is a mandatory setup that lets the OngageConnect™ platform efficiently track the performance of your campaigns by efficiently monitoring and sending your results.
What is Image Hosting Domain?
'Image Hosting' is an optional setup which allows our system to host your images on your domains to be served as part of the HTML templates. This setup helps you improve your spamming score as well as providing you with additional tracking options.
How do I setup Conversion Tracking?
"Conversion Tracking" cannot yet be configured via the interface. Please contact us directly and we will be happy to set up this service for you.
Deliverability Basic Terms
What is the Opened value?
- The 'Opened value' is the number of emails that were opened, entered or viewed by their recipients in a given campaign or over a selected time frame. Technically, there is no precise way of tracking if an email was opened. The most common practice to try and gauge this is by tracking a pixel image that is downloaded when viewing these emails. Since some recipients will open their email without downloading the accompanying images, the 'Opens value' you see in your reports might be slightly lower than the actual number of emails opened.
- Furthermore, to overcome the above limitation of gauging open stats, Ongage will also register an opened email to its count even if a pixel did not occur.
What is Unique Opened?
Users may open their email more than once. 'Unique Opened' counts how many users opened the emails regardless of how many times the email was opened. For example, if a single user opened his or her email three times, the system would count 1 'Unique Opened' and 3 'Opened'
What is the Clicked value?
The 'Clicked value' is the number of times that recipients clicked on links in their emails. This statistic can be provided for a given campaign, set of campaigns, or over a selected time frame.
The 'Clicked value' is the most reliable indicator that an email was opened and was of interest to the recipient.
What is the Unique Clicks value?
The "Unique Clicks" value distinguishes when a recipients may click on the same link more than once. For example, they might return to view your online offering again in the same email. In this case, the 'Unique Clicks' value only reflects the unique count of clicks.
What is the Unsubscribes value?
An unsubscribe link is automatically appended to the bottom of each email you send. This enables all recipients to unsubscribe from your mailing subscription. The 'Unsubscribes value' is the number of recipients who chose to unsubscribe from your mailing subscription. Unsubscribe is also known as "opt-out".
What is the Complaints value?
Subscribers using many web based email services like Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, Gmail, etc. have the 'Report spam' or 'Mark as Junk' option available at their fingertips to report unwanted inbox messages. Whenever your recipients click this button, many email services send back a notification to the email sending platform. In this case, OngageConnect™ retrieves this value from the ESPs you are using in order to calculate this number and rate.
What is the Sent value?
The 'Sent value' is the number of emails sent in a particular campaign or over a certain time frame. Often, this value may be less than the targeted value as some ESPs apply additional email filtering (i.e., blacklisting)
What is the Success value?
The 'Success value' / 'Delivered value' / 'Accepted value' refers to the number of email addresses that did not bounce/were not rejected. The 'Success value' is also known as 'Delivered value' or 'Accepted value' imply put, Delivered = Sent – Bounced. Bounced is comprised of both Hard and Soft bounces. If an email did not 'bounce', it does not necessarily mean that the email was delivered to the recipient’s inbox. Emails that reach a recipient’s junk or spam folder are also counted as 'Success' as they did actually arrive. Your open a click stats are strong indicators of whether or not the email reached the inbox of the recipients
What is the Failed value?
The 'Failed value' refers to emails that were not delivered for various reasons and is the sum of the 'Hard bounces' and 'Soft bounces'.
What is CTR?
CTR stands for Click Through Rate and refers to the ratio between clicks and opens. So if 100 emails were opened and 10 clicks were made, the CTR would be 10/100 = 10% CTR.
What’s the difference between Hard and Soft bounces?
- Soft bounces: A 'Soft bounce' means that an email was sent and processed by the server, processed, but for some reason was returned due to common reasons including. Common reasons include: 'user over quota,' and 'server temporarily unavailable.' Soft bounce is a temporary transient status where the sending ESP determines when to turn it to a hard bounce. This typically occurs, but may vary, after 3 separate repeated soft bounce sending attempts. As long as it’s a soft as opposed to a hard bounce, by email protocol definition, the system should continue trying to send the mail. Some high volume advanced marketers will segment out their soft-bounces and give them a rest for 2 weeks.
- Hard bounces: A 'Hard bounce' means the email was sent and was out rightly rejected by the recipient's server for common reasons including 'Account does not exist,' and 'domain does not exist.' The latter can occur if the email wasn't verified when collected, which is a very poor email collection practice. Clients who don’t verify the emails they collect endanger their email operations. See also: www.ongage.com/anti_spam_policy. To avoid this, we recommend employing a 'double opt-in' as part of your lead collection process.
What is Inbox Placement?
'Inbox Placement' is also known as 'Inbox Penetration' or 'inboxing'. This is a metric that attempts to answer the question, "How successful was this email campaign at being delivered to the targeted inboxes?" There is no clear method to determine the 'inbox placement' ratio. Although you can estimate this number by including a 'Seed List' along with the targeted segment, the best way to gauge this metric is by analyzing your Open and Click (and post click) stats.
What is DKIM? How do I set it up?
DKIM prevents someone from stealing your domain and using it themselves to send their emails. While DKIM is a good security measure, it doesn't improve deliverability. Rather, it is a measure of preventing your domain from getting a bad reputation. Ongage cannot do DKIM automatically as it is s needs to be setup in your DNS and the DNS of the ESP/SMTP.
DKIM is a method to verify the identity of the sender. DKIM can be done in the following ways:
- Putting a public key in the "From domain" DNS
- Putting a private key in the ESP
- Signing each outgoing email using the private key as the DKIM header
- The DKIM is done only in the from domain and only in the ESP. The private part of the DKIM is defined by your ESP.
- The public part is defined on your domain at your DNS provider.
Campaign Module
What is the Campaign Module?
The campaign module is your command center for viewing and launching all your email campaigns.
The module includes:
- Campaign Dashboard is a repository of all of all emails past and present created and edited within OngageConnect™
- Email Inventory: is the same repository as the email library, in the context of campaigns,. This is the inventory of emails that a marketer has at their disposal but the Email Inventory view lacks some features of the thumbnail view available when viewing the email library from the content module.
- Schedule Campaign is the scheduler which lets you select your target segment in 2 easy steps, along with the ESPs you want to use as well as set a time and date for your campaign launch.
What is the Campaign Dashboard?
The 'Campaign Dashboard' provides marketers with information regarding all email campaigns in the system, ranging from campaigns scheduled to go out, campaigns in process, and campaigns completed. The dashboard includes a robust search so that you can easily find the campaign you're looking for. Furthermore, marketers have quick and easy access to everything they need to know about the campaign, including which emails were contained and which segments targeted, as well as which ESPs were selected for delivery.
What is a Campaign?
In OngageConnect™, a campaign is made up of:
- Content: An email that includes a subject and body
- Segment(s) to target
- ESPs which will be used to deliver the emails for this campaign
- Scheduled time and date to send all of the above
What is Split Campaign (A/B) ?
The 'Split Campaign' modules allow you to easily perform A/B tests. You can A/B test segments, ESPs and emails.
What is Configuration Setup?
'Configuration Setup' lets you quickly configure which ESP will be designated to deliver to which domain/s, i.e. (hotmail.com, aol.com, yahoo.com, etc.)
This sub-module provides optimum delivery performance to email marketers with a user friendly UI.
What is an Event?
'Events' are triggers which you can use to launch a follow-up campaign automatically using a few different triggers:
- Date Field: Choose any date field in the database as the trigger for sending a campaign. This is a great way to send personal emails such as special birthday offers.
- Campaign: using previous email campaign performance triggers you may initiate a follow up email. For example, you may choose to send a new campaign to contacts who clicked a link in a previous email campaign, two days after the click.
How do I know why a Campaign failed?
In the campaign status column, mouse over to see a tool tip with details explaining why the campaign failed
List Module
What is the List Module?
The 'List Module' is the place to manage all list members. Members are also known as, or may include contacts, leads or recipients. (The module contains list and segment management tools that enable marketers to easily create highly targeted marketing segments.
This module is made up of 2 key sub-modules
- List Manager manages all members in your contact list/database
- Segment Manager creates targeted email marketing segments
What is the List Manager?
A module where you can manage all membersin your contact list ordatabase. You can search for, import, add, export, unsubscribe or delete members. The delete function is a logical delete only. Ongage will keep deleted data in its database even if it appears to be deleted from the List Manager.
What are Active Members?
'Active Members' actively receive your emails and have not: unsubscribed, complained or bounced. You may view Active Members in the list overview menu
What is the Segment Manager?
'Segment Manager' lets you create and manage all your segments. The dashboard offers the following functions such as:
- Create a new segment, edit or make a new copy of an existing segment
- Easily view segment size
- Search for segments
- View and mark favorite segments
- Find campaigns associated with these segments
How do I Create or Edit a Segment?
The Segment Manager comes with a segment builder which enables marketers to create new or edit existing segments. You can enter the UI for creating and editing criteria for your desired segment by clicking on the 'New Segment' button, or 'Edit Segment' icon of an existing segment. The Segment Builder provides a user friendly UI to easily create criteria in order to derive highly targeted segments for your email campaigns
How can I import members to lists? What formats are supported?
- Visit List Import List tab and define what file format and field encoding you want to use
- Then click the 'Add File' button. You may define the fields of the List. We strongly recommend that you download a sample CSV file for your convenience as well as to prevent many human errors in the list. Uploading a list at the wrong format may corrupt your data and hurt your list hygiene.
- Note: The column headers of the file that you upload MUST match the names of the fields in your list.
How do I manage 'do not mail' list?
Click the top Setting Tab and choose the 'List Manage' option. Click the 'New List' green button and select the 'Suppression List' option. The list you upload will become a suppression list from which emails will not be sent.
What happens to members who unsubscribe?
The member's status changes to 'unsubscribe' and emails will no longer receive emails
Where can I configure 'Removal Settings' of lists?
Click the top Setting Tab and choose the 'List Manage' option. At the bottom of the page you will find the 'Removal Settings' section for handling 'Unsubscribes', 'Hard Bounces' and 'Complaints'. You may apply these options globally or per specific list.
Content Module
What is the Content Module?
The 'Content Module' lets you create, edit and manage all the marketing content of your email marketing campaigns. If your organization employs dedicated content managers, this would be their daily work center. The module includes:
- Template Library of HTML design templates: for the graphic design and formatting of your emails
- Template Editor for quick and easy creation and editing of email templates
What is the Template Library?
The 'Template Library' is a repository of all of all HTML email design templates used for the graphic design and formatting of your emails. It can be used for uploading purchased or professional, custom-created HTML email designs. Similarly, you can create or edit designs in OngageConnect™'s Message Studio and saved directly into the Template Library.
What is the Template Editor?
The Template Editor, including a WYSIWYG HTML editor, enables content creators to create HTML templates. From the Template Editor, content creators, can save their templates directly into the template library
How can I import and manage HTML templates?
From the main menu click 'Content':'Template Library' where you can import new HTML templates and edit existing ones.
How can I import and manage Images?
From the main menu click 'Content':'Image Library' where you can import new images o edit existing ones.
What are Dynamic Fields? and how should I use them?
- Dynamic Fields are custom tags which you may enter into your template to make them personal. For example you may enter {first_name} tag into the HTML – the system will replace the tag with the actual first name of the end user. Please note that you may only use Dynamic Fields basing on data you actually have on your list. If you do not have first name data in your list, the system cannot replace the tag with the real name. In this case the tag will remain s is, which is a bad practice to display to your list members
- You may use the Dynamic Fields while you edit your HTML Template, simply by clicking the 'System Field' button on the WYSIWYG editor. A dialog box with all relevant Dynamic Fields will open. Simply click the one you want and it will be added to your template.
How can I manage my 'unsubscribe link'
When you create or edit a Campaign, at the first step out of three, you will find an ‘Advanced Configuration’ option at the bottom of the page. Click this to access a further Unsubscribe Link configuration. You may use a default link and customize your unsubscribe confirmation text.
Analytics Module
What is the Analytics Module?
The 'Analytics Module' is the command center where you can get an overview as well as an in-depth analysis of your email marketing operations that are managed in OngageConnect™.
What is the Analytics Dashboard?
The 'Analytics Dashboard' provides you with an overview of all key performance indicators of your email marketing operations in OngageConnect™.
What are Matrix Reports?
'Matrix Reports' provide in-depth analyses of the various connected ESP performances, from the resolution of a selected time frame throughout specific delivered domains.
The unique configuration ability of OngageConnect™ enables marketers to achieve optimum delivery performance.
How can I export data?
For each of the reports, simply click on the Export button on the top right to export the report in CSV format at a glance.
What is an Aggregated Report?
An 'Aggregate Report' provides an overview of your performance on the Campaign level. You may see detailed information about a campaign performance or choose to further drill down to see Links Performance.
What is an Operational Trend Report?
An 'Operation Trend Report' provides an overview of the entire list including Success/Fail ratios, Response Rates or the breakdown of the TLD performance of the list
What is an Events Report?
An 'Events Report' provides you with detailed information a campaign's performance per event
What is a Split Campaigns Report?
A 'Split Campaigns Report provides you with detailed information about the performance of a campaign's A/B testing, per A/B test.
What Performance Metric can I use for a split campaign?
When setting up a new A/B Test, you may choose to split the test based on three different parameters; Emails, Segments and ESPs. This is done during the very first step of the A/B Test set up.
What is a Transactional Report?
A 'Transactional Report' shows the statistics for the transactional emails sent via the API.
API
Where can I find API Documentation
To go to the API Documentation please visit this link
What is an API?
API, an abbreviation of application program interface, is a set of routines, protocols, and tools for building software applications. A good API makes it easier to develop a program by providing all the building blocks. A programmer then puts the blocks together.
What type of API OngageConnect™ employs?
OngageConnect™ uses REST API - an API which employs the various methods of the HTTP protocol (POST, GET, PUT, DELETE etc.) in order to provide access to the entities on the client's Ongage account. Some parts of the API are synchronous and some are asynchronous
What are API Credentials?
API Credentials allow OngageConnect™ to communicate automatically with the ESP back-end and perform email campaign actions seamlessly.
How do I setup an API connection?
Each ESP has a different API connection setup. See detailed instructions for each ESP within Setup Wizard Step
Where do I see the leads that I added via API?
For a sure-proof way to check that a contacted was added in the UI, search for a specific email from the list search panel. You can also query the contact directly from the API. The List Dashboard stats is updated twice daily and breakdowns all the contacts in your list, including the grand-total.
Settings
In 'Settings', you can control various aspects of the OngageConnect™ system.
What is ESP/domain routing?
'ESP/domain routing lets you configure which ESP will be designated to deliver to which domain/s for optimum delivery performance.
This setup provides email marketers with a user friendly UI to quickly assign which ESP will be used to deliver which email domain.
What is List Manager?
The OngageConnect™ platform supports multiple lists in one account. The 'List Manager' lets you create, edit, delete and manage lists. This includes "sending" lists which send emails and suppression lists which enable you to exclude members from being sent.
What is Field Setup?
The 'Field Setup' lets you make changes to your list structure like adding a file or changing its name
What is Account Info?
'Account Info' lets you view and update information or upgrade your account.
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