New interface, unsubscribe links, reply-to field and more... Enjoy new features in YAMM!

Post date: Sep 27, 2016 8:49:54 AM

We try to keep our product very simple to use. But this is not easy, especially when we want to launch new features. YAMM UI is quite basic: you select a draft, choose your name, decide if you want to track emails sent and click on a button to start the campaign. But then people want to select an alias, a reply-to email address, personalized attachments, filters and so on… And we do care about all the feature requests we receive on UserVoice.

It is not easy to guess in advance how many people will really be interested in a new feature (even if votes on UserVoice help) and we don’t want to ‘complexify’ the UI with a feature that will only be used by a small percentage of our user base.

So, for example, many people asked us to support personalized attachments (ie. different attachments on each email sent) and we implemented that feature, but you have to create a specific column named ‘Attachment’ in your sheet to activate it. In other words, if you don’t spend time searching our documentation you will never know this feature exists. As a result, only 0.5% of our users are playing with this feature.

New UI to help you discover ‘hidden’ functionalities in YAMM

So we decided to make some of those features more visible in the UI through a new ‘advanced features’ panel:

From this UI, you can change the sender’s address (alias), specify a different reply-to address and activate sheet filters & personalized attachments.

The ability to set a different reply-to email address is new. It was not hard to implement, but as said before we did not want to make the UI more complex by adding too many fields / settings. It is now a perfect fit for our ‘advanced feature’ panel.

Real unsubscribe feature

Our documentation used to mention the possibility of creating a Google Form, putting the link in your draft and asking your recipients to fill it to unsubscribe. You would collect the email addresses in a responses spreadsheet and could then remove them from your mailing list. This was not technically complex to implement but was quite time consuming. People asked for a better solution. Here it is!

Now you simply need to insert a link (https://yet-another-mail-merge.com/unsubscribe) in your draft, activate our tracking feature, and YAMM will automatically record recipients who clicked on the link to unsubscribe. Your spreadsheet will automatically be updated with an 'UNSUBSCRIBED' status in the 'Merge status' column (in the same way we keep track of emails opened, clicked or bounced):

Automatic filters set for each key metric from the tracking report

Speaking of our tracking feature, it is used more and more: 84% of our users are now sending emails with the tracker activated, compared to 58% at the end of 2015. During this time, we added support for click & bounce tracking (we were only handling open tracking before), we made sure our tracker was not impacting your delivery rate (we had issues with spam filters in the past) and we improved our tracking report to make it as reliable as possible.

With that in mind, we have now linked this report with Google Sheets filters so that you can click on each statistic from the tracking report (opened / clicked / bounced / sent) and we will automatically filter the rows matching each metric. For example, if you click on 'opened', you will get on your spreadsheet all the people who opened + clicked + unsubscribed from your emails.

If you have sent hundreds of emails, you can now quickly see who has unsubscribed, opened or clicked them at a glance.

We hope you will enjoy all these improvements!