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Last week we announced a fully integrated newsletter system for LR v3. It’s going to completely change the way you think about, and execute, newsletter sending. This week, we want to talk about Campaign Tracking.

Right now there’s a very big hole in social media, ads, and newsletter. We have no idea how all this translates into sales. No one knows if their post on twitter is working better than their post on some old forum. Now you might say, “Who cares, I’m going to post on them all anyway.” Well there’s 2 things to think about here: One is, if you knew what post did better, then you’d know which community you should nurture more. And two, if you knew which post did worse, then you could tweak the way in which you posted it, the next time around. For instance, maybe posting day or night matters. Maybe you need to make it shorter/longer, or use more/less graphic language. Maybe you want to get someone else to post it under their username, and compare those results to yours. There’s a million ways to go about it. But the main issue surrounding all this is, without a way to track it to sales, you have no idea where to start.

Campaign Tracking

Introducing, the way to track it! With our Campaign Tracking app, you’ll be able to decipher exactly how all those posts and emails are affecting sales. And what’s great about it, is it works off the very simple UTM Parameters standard. Here’s a link to the Google UTM Builder. All you're going to do is create the link, with the link builder, post it as usual, and we do the rest. It's really that simple.

Another slick little trick in the Campaign Tracking app, is that blue sold number is clickable. And when you do click it, it takes you right to the sales area, and shows you all those sales.

And finally, we've made this incredibly easy to use with our Newsletter feature. in fact, you don’t even have to do anything but click a checkbox. That’s right. You click a checkbox, and we automatically create the UTM links for you. Then as soon as one registers in the Campaign Tracking App, we start tracking sales.

Google Ecommerce Tracking

Another way we’re letting stores track sales is with Google Ecommerce Tracking integration. This is a free Google product, that works alongside their Analytics product. Much like how our campaign app works, it lets you track sales, and how they worked with campaigns. This is going to allow stores to work more closely with marketing companies, who have a lot of experience with Google and their offerings. To read more about this product, head over here.

If you have any specific questions, please get in touch. Thanks Everyone. See you next week!

Last week we announced a brand new direction for Limited Run, and we promised that the features we’d be releasing would blow you away. And the first feature we want to blow you away with, might be the most important one we’ve ever released. That feature is Newsletter.

We spent nearly all of our free time in 2016 on a Newsletter system that’s so powerful, we’re going to change our entire branding to promote it. Here’s a small part of what it can do:

Subscriber Groups

Probably the most amazing part of our Newsletter system is Subscriber Groups. This will allow you to email nearly any combination of newsletter subscribers imaginable. For instance, let’s say you wanted to email everyone who bought something from the band Field Mouse, that’s also in a 100 mile radius of New York City. You can do that in a few clicks. This would be extremely helpful if a band that you signed to your label, had a 30 stop tour, and you wanted to setup 30 unique tour stop emails. You might say, "Hey why don't I just email everyone the entire list of tour stops?" Sure, you could do that, but bombarding people with info on a band, they might not be interested in, is a great way to lose subscribers. And emailing only people who bought a product related to that band, is a great way of targeting only the people who are interested.

You can create a group based on the most simplest condition, to the most complex. What if you launched a pre-order for the vinyl version of a new album. There's 2 colors, black and green. The black is coming to you from the plant on time, but they're having trouble with the green. Maybe you want to ship the black out on time, then email everyone who bought the green copy, tell them about the delay, and give them a 10% discount code as an apology. Whoa!

Let's combine the 2 above ideas, into one pinpoint accurate newsletter email. What if you wanted to email a 5% off discount to everyone who has ordered a product from the band X, but HASN'T pre-ordered their new album yet. That's not only possible, but extremely easy.

Fully Customizable Templates

You can use one of our great templates and customize it with our editor, or even tweak the source with html. And if you’re feeling lucky, you could build a template of your own from scratch.

Switching From Another Service?

No reason to worry about email addresses you've collected from your previous store or newsletter service. We'll let you import all of them, so you can manage everything from your Limited Run store.

MailChimp Template Import

Our system is compatible with MailChimp, so if you wanted to switch from them, to us, just choose "Import Mailchimp Template" when creating a new one.

What Are The Limits and Cost?

Now when we tell you this, I don't want you to lose your mind. It'll be impossible to use this system, if you have no mind. There are no limits on this feature. You can have as many subscribers as you want, and you can send as many emails as you want. And how much extra are you going to pay for it? Nothing. Zero. Nada. There are no feature restrictions with v3. If you're on it, you get unlimited EVERYTHING.

This is just a taste of what's possible with our fully integrated Newsletter system. You'll also be able to see stats, schedule emails, and much more. It's a complete replacement for whatever you're using now, and not only that, but it's most likely twice as good! If you have any specific questions, please get in touch. Thanks everyone.

What's Been Happening?

When we started Limited Run back in 2009, we had one goal in mind: Create a place for our friends to sell some records. We never dreamed that we'd be powering stores for the biggest artists and labels in the world. But now we are, and in 2016 alone, we handled close to $20 million in sales through stores.

What about stability? Well, over the last 4 years we've had zero downtime. This means that our software has never once, not even for a second, had an issue that took down the platform. Not during some relaxing morning, or when our stores were selling out in seconds. You'll be hard pressed to find any platform that can even sniff that uptime.

But how much investment have we taken? And how many employees did we need to achieve this? We're extremely proud to say that we've never taken investment, and we're still only 2 people. You might see that we rarely tweet, email you or write blog posts. Now you know why. We don't have the time! But that needs to change, and hopefully in the future we can add a third or even fourth person to the team.

So What's Next?

For the last year or so, we've been working hard on a new direction for Limited Run. This new direction will be launching soon, and part of it will be new pricing. It was very hard for us to come to terms with the fact that we needed to make this change. We've had a monthly fee for all 7 years of our existence. But without risk, there can be no growth. The new pricing plan will be 5% of sales. No monthly fee, no product limit, no digital fees, no storage fees, no feature restrictions. Just a straight 5% of sales. Anyone on the platform before that, can choose to stay on LR v2, at their current price and plan. If you decide to make the switch sooner, rather than later, we're going to have some promotional discounts that you'll be able to take advantage of.

While we'd love you to switch to v3 out of the goodness of your heart, we realize it's going to take features. So our job over the next couple of months is to convince you that the features are worth the change. We believe they're worth that, and more. And we're betting our lives on it. Stay tuned.

Some of our older customers might remember us launching a side project called Card Included, back in 2012. Some of our newer customers might be thinking, "What in the world is this?!". We can explain. Card Included is a self-serve download card service. It began as an easy way for labels and bands to include a download card with vinyl, but it's grown into something a lot bigger. Now, some people are using it as a way to promote their music in person. They hand them out at shows, or keep them in their pockets like business cards. Others are giving out private download URLs online. We even get the occasional author, looking to promote their book.

Card Included has been chugging along happily for the last couple of years, without a single update. And until recently, we never felt like it needed to be changed. It was basically perfect. Now it's not basically perfect, it is perfect. Here's what we've done:

Embeddable Redemption Widget

It's been a long time coming, but we finally did it. We now have an embeddable redemption widget for your own site. So if you know HTML, and can add the widget code to your website, there's an option in Step 2 of the designer, that says "I plan on using the embeddable widget". If you check that, we'll provide you with the necessary code, after your purchase. This also means that we'll be using your own URL on the cards we send you! Pretty awesome, we know. You'll also get an easy way to customize the widget's colors. You'll only need to do this once. For future orders, just check that box, and if you're using the same URL, you won't need the widget code again.

Digital Street Date

This new feature, works just like on Limited Run. You can specify a date you'd like us to prevent downloading until. It's an important feature for people sending records to stores, distros or out on tour with a band on your label.

Fan Location Downloads

Any time a fan uses a code to download a release, we automatically get their approximate location. With this new feature, we allow you to download a list of these locations. This list is a great way to help you plan future tours.

Artwork Support in Overlays

A while back we came up with a super slick way of letting people use any website as their download page, without needing to know or use HTML. Basically, you give us a URL, and we load that website, behind an overlay. In that overlay, it has your release's info, and a way to download it. Now, we stepped up our visual game, and let you add artwork to that overlay. To get the artwork just right, we added a spot to upload it in Step 1 of the designer.

Mobile Download Override

There's so much confusion about how mobile downloading works. The easiest way to explain it is, it doesn't. The experience is terrible on mobile. This is why we block downloads when a fan goes to the link on a mobile device. A lot of people don't realize how bad mobile is for downloading, especially on iOS. They contact us, wondering why their fans are prevented from accessing the files. They believe we're the reason it doesn't work, which isn't true. But, at the end of the day, we don't want to leave anyone hanging, so we decided to make this possible with a secret feature. If the user believes they can download and unzip the album, on their mobile device, all you need to do is tell them to add "?m" to the end of their download URL. This will unlock the download, and let them proceed. But we need to stress this, it's a bad idea.

If you have any questions, please get in touch. Thanks everyone.

We have a bunch of things left to tell you about for our final post of the week. Let's do this in list form:

Daily SoundScan Reports

Yes, we do SoundScan reporting! I know it's not on our homepage, but we do it! We do a lot of things that aren't on our homepage. Sometimes we even think the homepage has too much info on it. But that's a discussion for another day. So on the reporting change, SoundScan recently switched from weekly reporting, to daily reporting, and we've updated our system to reflect that. If you didn't know that we already did SoundScan reporting, check out this help doc.

Support For New TLDs

If you want to use one of those wacky new TLDs like .coffee and .design, in your custom domain, then you'll be happy to know that we now support all of these.

Uploading Your Own Fonts

No surprise here. We now let you upload your own fonts, while editing files in your custom theme. The way we handled this in the past was just embarrassing, so we're glad this is taken care of now.

Reversed Search Results

This one seemed so obvious when a customer pointed it out, but it was the first time anyone has ever said anything. We used to return products oldest first when searching a store. That made no sense. We should have been returning the newest products first! Search for a band, and you want to see their newest preorder, right at the top. Duh.