Introduction
Hi everyone. Welcome to the September 2009 issue of our newsletter - now called Interspire Insider Monthly.Why the new name? Well, from this issue forward we've decided to go with a new format for our newsletter. Each issue will include a table of contents and a few short paragraphs on different topics related to Interspire, including our partner program, new product releases, upcoming events and more.
In this month's newsletter I'll discuss the latest release of Website Publisher and our new support form - which will allow our engineers to resolve your support issue faster. I'll also link you to our new video and guide for upgrading between different versions of Email Marketer, and we'll take a look at SMTP.com, the perfect outsourced mail server solution for customers using Email Marketer who don't have their own mail server.
I'll also share some exciting news for partners, as well as details on our affiliate program (which pays up to $554 per sale). If you're a webmaster with a site relating to design or marketing you wont want to miss this section.
Finally, I'll spill the beans on some extremely exciting features our development team is working on for the next version of Shopping Cart (including Google Website Optimizer integration, zoom on product images, a nitfy YouTube search interface to add videos to your product pages and the option to take a payment when adding a phone order).
Thanks in advance for reading and I hope you like the new newsletter format!
Cheers,
Table of Contents
- Website Publisher 5.1 Released
- Our New "Open a Support Ticket" Form
- New Video: Upgrading Interspire Email Marketer
- Featured Partner: SMTP.com
- News For Partners
- Our Affiliate Program
- Stay Connected With Us on Twitter
- Inside Interspire: Upcoming Shopping Cart Features
Website Publisher 5.1 Released
Website Publisher 5.1 was released a few weeks ago and now lets you create more than just content-driven websites. You can publish calendars and events, customizable feedback forms, photo galleries and multi-level dropdown navigation menus in just a few minutes.
If you or your clients need an extremely flexible content management platform for your next project, you should give Website Publisher 5.1 some serious consideration - it's now suitable for a much wider variety of uses. From small business websites to intranets, extranets, booking systems, customer surveys and more - they're all so easy to setup and if you're a web designer or agency your clients will love you.
Interspire Website Publisher 5.1 is a free upgrade for existing customers. To upgrade, just login to the
client area and click the "Downloads" page. The
upgrade guide will assist you in upgrading an existing website.
For more information on Website Publisher 5.1 see the
release blog post,
what's new page or
video tour demonstrating all of the new features.
Our New "Open a Support Ticket" Form
If you've logged into our
client area in the last few days to submit a support ticket, you would've seen that we've changed the "Open a Support Ticket" page substantially.
After careful consideration and consultation with a key group of customers, we decided to redesign the form to ask for more information about your support issue up front, instead of having the constant back-and-forth in situations where our engineers couldn't replicate the problem locally because of a brower/operating difference or incorrect FTP details being received.
As well as redesigning the support form, we're also now using a Google Custom Search solution to search our entire website, forum, knowledge base and documentation for answers to your support issues before they're sent to our engineers. This simple change has allowed an extra 16% of tickets to be resolved up front with answers from the content on our website.
Overall, these two changes have dramatically reduced support response times - in some cases by up to 37%. We attribute this to our support engineers now having all of the information they need about your support issue upfront, instead of having to constantly come back to you and ask for more information.
We're still working on improving our support response times, but I'm confident the next time you send through a support ticket you'll notice a speedier response time from our dedicated team of support engineers.
New Video: Upgrading Interspire Email Marketer
As part of our ongoing effort to improve all aspects of your Interspire experience, we regularly get together our (rather large) Austin, Sydney and London teams to discuss ways we can improve everything about our operations. Fredrick Gabelmann, one of our super talented support engineers out of our Email Marketer team in Austin noticed that quite a few customers were having problems upgrading between releases.
To assist our customers with making upgrading as simple as possible, he set about rewriting the upgrade guide to provide more detail on permissions, using FTP to backup files, etc. We also had Rick Carlisle, our resident technical writer put together a short video demonstrating the simple steps to a painless upgrade. You can read the improved Email Marketer upgrade guide and see the video tutorial
on this page.
Nice work Fredrick and Rick!
Featured Partner: SMTP.com
If you're an Email Marketer customer and need to send thousands of emails without worrying about your web hosting provider, then our partnership with SMTP.com might be what you need.
SMTP.com are a leading provider of fully managed SMTP servers at very reasonable rates. An SMTP server (or Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) takes the emails and autoresponders you create in Email Marketer and actually sends them to your contact's inboxes.
If you're only sending a few hundred emails at a time then your web host's SMTP server may just do the trick, however if you want to step it up and send thousands of even hundreds of thousands of emails at once, then a service like SMTP.com (or the setup and configuration of your own SMTP server) is definitely required.
All Interspire customers get a generous 36% discount on SMTP.com's regular pricing, so if you need to improve the reliability and quantity of your email campaigns, you might want to check them out. Go to
interspire.smtp.com to see plans and discounted pricing.
News For Partners
If you're a web designer or digital agency with clients then
our partner program can help you win more clients and complete projects such as building web sites or online stores in record time. By rebranding our private label PHP software, what used to take months of custom development can now be launched in just hours.
Already over 1,400 web designers and digital agencies like you are offering Interspire products to their clients. Benefits to you include:
- Generous discounts on Interspire products
- Promotion to over 35,000 customers worldwide
- Dedicated partner managers who are always available
- Quality support, training and sales assistance
- NFR licenses to help you learn about and promote our products
- Marketing material and assistance to maximise your sales potential
- Leads for prospective customers in your city/country
If our partner program sounds like something you might be interested in, you can
learn more here or even
apply online from our website in just a few minutes.
For our existing partners, we'll be making changes to our partner portal in the upcoming week or two. We're redesigning the portal, pricing pages and online cart/checkout systems so it will soon be easier to purchase for your clients - without having to login to the partner portal first. This means less clicks and a quicker ordering experience for you.
We'll keep you posted in the partner blog and via email, so keep an eye out for the announcement.
Our Affiliate Program
If you've got a website or you're an experienced affiliate marketer, then our affiliate program was designed for you. When someone clicks on your link and buys (even up to 180 days later), you'll receive a 15% commission. You will be paid that commission as long as the order is not fraudulent of course, and makes it through Interspire's exceptional guarantee of a 60-day, no questions asked refund period. It is then paid straight into your PayPal account automatically during the next payment processing run.
Here are the benefits you'll enjoy as an Interspire affiliate:
- Earn great commissions of up to $554 on a single sale
- A dedicated affiliate manager with 10 years experience
- Double commissions (30%) for the first 90 days
- Innovative, industry leading and popular products used by 50,000+ companies
- Industry leading conversion rates
- Automatic monthly payments straight to your PayPal account
- Performance incentives including increased commissions
- Real time reporting on CTRs, conversion rates, etc
- Two-tiered setup to earn money from affiliates you recruit
- Profitable marketing content to help increase click thrus
Our affiliate program has recently skyrocketed to over 2,800 active affiliates. If you'd like to join them by driving targeted traffic to our website and making a 30% share on all sales for the first 90 days, you can
learn more or
apply online in a few minutes. Our affiliate program is one of the best converting in the industry and our top affiliates make tens of thousands of dollars each and every month.
Stay Connected With Us on Twitter
In between our newsletters and blog updates you can learn what's going on at Interspire and ask us questions by following us on Twitter. You can follow
@interspire for general company news,
@mitchellharper (Chief Product Officer and co-founder) for my tweets, or
@eddiemachaalani for Eddie's tweets (Chief Executive Officer and co-founder) - we'd love to hear from you!
Inside Interspire: Upcoming Shopping Cart Features
Our development team has been extremely busy working on the next release of Shopping Cart. While they're not quite there just yet, I can let you know that upcoming features include Google Website Optimizer integration, a YouTube search interface to add videos to your product details pages, a complete overhaul of how product images are displayed in your store (including zoom and support for uploading unlimited images!), the option to process a payment as you take a phone order and much more.
For now the team is deep into the development phase, but we'll be posting screenshots on
our blog over the coming weeks as we get closer to finishing the first round of features so make sure you
subscribe to our blog so you don't miss the post!
Have questions or comments? Please
contact us via phone or email.
