MailUp 8.8.3: Preheader Text Support | Quick Send & Sending Wizard Improvements

What did you think of the updated campaign setup wizard from last month? We’ve listened to some great feedback and today we’re happy to share with you new features and improvements in MailUp 8.8.3.

You’ll notice that the sending wizard has been further improved and streamlined; it now only takes 2 steps (instead of 3) to set up an email campaign. And if you’re wondering how to send an email to a handful of email addresses, you can now do so with the much improved Quick send (more on this below!). Last but not least, customizing the preheader text in your emails has now become really easy to do: it matters because it can help you boost your open rates, especially on mobile inboxes.

Let’s look at each of these topics in more detail.

Customizing the preheader text

The preheader is the text displayed next to or below the subject line in your inbox (especially on mobile devices). It can be used to provide more information on what the message is about. Therefore, when used properly, it can help increase the Open rate.

Until today, in MailUp the only way to customize the preheader text in your emails was to add a snippet of HTML code in the message header (as we showed you here). If you weren’t too familiar with HTML this could have been a problem. But not today! Adding the preheader text is now really easy to do! Take a look at this quick video tutorial:

The benefit in customizing the preheader text in your email campaign is that it can improve your email open rates, especially from mobile viewers. Keep in mind that on mobile inboxes the subject line is cut off at around 5 to 6 words, so a long subject line doesn’t always perform well. The recommendation here is to shorten your subject line and customize the preheader text, as it’s typically the third line shown (below the subject line) in mobile inboxes. You should stick to this tactic especially if the majority of your email opens come from mobile devices.

Improvements in the Quick send feature

How many times do you send an email to yourself for testing purposes – or to a handful of email addresses for approval – before sending your campaign? My guess is too many times to count! It turns out that the Quick send is one of the most widely-used features in MailUp. Because of this we decided to make it much more robust, with several new sending settings. Check out the newly improved Quick send in this quick video tutorial:

Notice that the Quick send is now much more versatile: it can be used for sending an email to a single email address (say, to yourself for testing purposes), to a handful of email addresses entered manually (up to 10, and next time MailUp will remember the last ones you used!), and to a small group (so you can quickly send to different groups of stakeholders). If you’re an agency, you can use the Quick send to send the email campaign you’ve been working on to your client for approval, or to your supervisor or team in other scenarios.

With these improvements in the Quick send – and the ones mentioned below for the sending wizard – we hope that you will experience increased productivity when setting up and sending email campaign in MailUp. That’s always one of our top goals.

A faster and improved sending wizard

As we mentioned, we received a lot of feedback after introducing the new campaign setup wizard in MailUp 8.8.2. In version 8.8.3 we’ve turned much of that feedback into improvements to the whole process. Among them:

• We reduced the sending wizard from 3 to 2 steps, combining step 1 and 2 onto a single page (as you can see in the screenshot below).
• The summary section in the top left now includes the message ID, so you know that you are sending the right message, when messages have very similar subject lines.
• When you click on Choose recipients or Send to all, you no longer need to press the Continue button. The system will take you automatically to step 2.

On the second step, a feature for which we received a lot of suggestions was the group selection window. We’ve improved it in a number of ways. Among them…

• The list of available groups shows immediately when the window is opened
• Empty groups are not included in the list, since they are of no use in locating recipients
• Group ID and notes are now shown, so it’s easier to identify similarly named groups
• When you select a group, the selection is now clearly highlighted
• When selecting multiple groups using the CTRL or Command key, the cursor no longer goes back to the beginning of the list, which was (rightfully) driving some of you nuts 🙂

Some customers also asked us to display the number of recipients in the group on the same window: we decided to leave that out for now, because it was having an impact on performance. We can go back to it at a later time.

Further improvements in recipient search

The updated recipient search has been well-received by MailUp users. Segmenting recipients with groups and filters is way faster than it used to be in previous versions. We’ve now extended it to also cover pending and unsubscribed recipients: you’ll be able to search and segment those recipients much more efficiently.

Finally, you can now create a new group on-the-fly when assigning recipients to a Group after performing a search. It’s a small productivity improvement, but it saves a lot of clicks if you are a heavy user of Groups, allowing you to stay on the search results, without having to leave and go to the Manage groups page.

What do you think about this month’s new features and improvements? Let us know your feedback in the comments below.

This article was written by

Sergio Mandrone

Sergio is Associate Product Marketing Manager at MailUp in the San Francisco office. With 5 years of digital marketing experience, he writes for the MailUp blog, manages the Email Design Workshop blog, and is currently working with the MailUp BEE team to grow the line of BEE products.