As you already might know, on February 1, 2012 Magento announced the end-of-life of Magento Professional.

Here is the quote from an article posted on the official Magento blog:”Following an extensive review of our current solutions and projected customer needs, we are making an important change: we are phasing out the Magento Professional Edition.

While Magento Professional was embraced by a significant number of merchants, we have seen much greater demand for our Enterprise and new Enterprise Premium offerings.”

aheadWorks won’t phase out its Magento PE extensions

aheadWorks, on its part, wants to assure all our Magento Professional customers that we are not going to phase out the PE extensions. We will continue to work with our Professional customers and provide them with the best eCommerce solutions and custom support.

If customers running PE-based stores see the value in upgrading to Magento Enterprise or downgrading to Community editions, we are happy to offer a 50% and 25% discount correspondingly for all our Magento extensions and Themes.

All you have to do is contact us and get a personal coupon code.

We are just about to release our new Magento extension which will help your customers easily track their orders from their mobile devices as well as PC’s. Our QA department has already tested it carefully and the extension is on the final stage of preparing for final release.

Now we are looking for some volunteers from the Magento community to finalize our tests. Every volunteer will get a significant discount after the extension official release.

If you run Magento CE 1.5+ or PE/EE 1.11 and have DHL, FedEx or UPS installed and configured, please contact Peter Samoilov at samoilov@aheadworks.com for further details.

We use Advanced Newsletter + MailChimp for our email marketing purposes. The Advanced Newsletter extension allows us to segment our subscribers and send them the information they are interested in only. MailChimp is very cool and useful email marketing service which lets us to successfully send our campaigns as well as thoroughly analyze them afterwards.

MailChimp allows reviewing subscribers’ activity. Don’t forget that this member rating is counted according to email opens and clicks. Here an email is tracked as “open” when recipient has images turned on. Unfortunately, it is not possible to define who has images turned off. So be careful and apologize if the email was sent to your regular reader by mistake

I analyzed the level of our subscribers’ engagement and came to the conclusion that about 50% of them either did not open our emails at all or opened them long ago. Our subscribers’ base is rather “mature”. No wonder that for several years many of our emails readers could move to other CMS, change their area of activity, forget password or get new email address.

I intended to clean out inactive members from our list as we didn’t want to boost our ego with laaaarge list of email addresses, but aimed to work only with those who are interested in the things we share with them. So it was decided to find subscribers with low member rating and send them our last email from aheadWorks.

Email marketing gurus say that you shouldn’t hope for high open rates of such emails. But I couldn’t just delete those people from our list – I wanted to give them the last chance.

When sending an email to people who haven’t read your newsletters for years you have only few seconds to attract the recipients’ attention and single your email out in the everyday flow of messages. So I had to find a “hook” – an emotionally strong phrase which makes people open the email. Such subject can be of any kind, but it should definitely touch people’s feelings and emotions. I found such phrase and got 6.2% open rate!

Great! People opened my email. But what’s next? I had to arouse their interest in Magento and aheadWorks and motivate them to keep reading us. A couple of teasers and 1.5% asked me not to delete their email addresses. So I can assure you – tell people what vitally important information you are going to share with them in the nearest future and get profit!

In my email, I also asked our subscribers to let me know why they had broken off the relations with aheadWorks and stopped reading our emails. I didn’t expect for a single answer but it was nice to get several emails where people told me that they were very busy at the moment and hadn’t a spare minute to check their email. I am proud and thankful that they’ve managed to find time to open my email as well as answer me.

My email sending gave the following results:

• successful deliveries – 98.9%
• opens – 6.1%
• unsubscribers – 0.3%
• asked to keep their email address – 1.5%

So, finally, let’s sum up what I’ve done and what you should do to cut “deadwood” from the subscribers’ list:

1. Use a “hook” in email subject
   to make them open your email.
    
2. Ask your subscribers why they stopped reading your messages
   to analyze what’s wrong.
    
3. Motivate your subscribers to keep reading your emails
   to convert them in your return customers.

Now I am sure that we can build our email marketing efficiently and will get trustworthy results. And the same I wish to you

Plundor.com initiated its first Magento Extension Bundle with a huge discount of 86%. It’s a great deal for new Magento merchants whose initial budget is restricted.

The bundle contains Knowledge Base Magento extension by aheadWorks plus five more commercial extensions modules from other Magento developers.

This bundle is now available until the end of this week for only $150!

Now through January 9, get 15% off all Magento extensions at aheadWorks.com. Save on our latest releases from Custom Stock Display to Product Images Slider, Advanced Search and 50+ modules for your Magento store.

Just use the coupon code in the shopping cart during checkout.

COUPON CODE: AWNY2012

2011 was another booming year for aheadWorks. It is particularly heartening that this year we’ve launched thirteen new extensions, and the leading ones among them are the well-liked Points & Rewards, Image Slider and Group Deals.

This year aheadWorks has become the first provider of Magento Professional extensions on the market. 50+ aheadWorks modules are now available for any PE store. Moreover, we’re very excited to become a Magento Industry Silver partner joining the fastest-growing wave in the eCommerce market.

We’ve also launched a new pre-order system, which makes all Magento store owners able to order the upcoming extensions half price. For example, everyone had a chance to get Advanced Search and Custom Stock Display with 50% discount.

The achievements above are only just a start, a good start! We have many plans for 2012

“The room is full of orange badges!”
“Never seen so much orange in one place, like an orangutan’s birthday party…”

Roy Rubin gives the keynote and shares amazing numbers at Meet Magento: 100+ new Magento Enterprise customers every single month; 18% annual growth rate of e-commerce in the UK; 1 billion parcels from e-commerce in the UK.

In his open speech he also says that UK is the leading commerce market and announced Magento 2.0 coming q4 next year.

Meanwhile, our company’s representative, Max Krukovsky, is already at our booth 16 getting ready to answer all the questions our friends, partners and clients might have and give away $100 coupon values for all comers.

The conference is in full swing. Stay tuned!

We apologize for this inconvenience, and thank you for your patience and understanding.

Guess the last two numbers to win $100

Not going to the conference? You can take part in our awesome promotion right here! We know that many people like to play with numbers. Give your brain a workout and guess the last two numbers (between 0 and 9) in the MMUK coupon code below to win $100 added to your aheadWorks account.

Try your luck and share the results in the comments to this post. Anti-cheating measures are undertaken.

Take part in our awesome promotion at Meet Magento UK

Here’s a sneak peak on what we’ve prepared for the Meet Magento UK attendees. The participants will have the chance to win $100 too. All they have to do is to fill in a small questionnaire and claim their coupons! As simple as that.

Be sure to visit our Booth 16 for the chance to get the prize amount to spend on the best Magento extensions by aheadWorks.

Meet our team

The aheadWorks team will be at our Booth 16 throughout the show. Be sure to stop by to meet Artyom Rabzonov – aheadWorks CEO, and Max Krukovsky – Lead Account Manager.

If you have any questions or want to set up a meeting, please feel free to contact Artyom at rabzonov@aheadworks.com

We look forward to seeing you in London!

aheadWorks is proud to announce our Silver Partnership with Magento! We are happy to be a part of the fastest-growing wave in the eCommerce market.

The Industry Partner Program is focused on technology product and service companies that provide new functionality and solutions complimentary to Magento, help establish greater awareness, and drive broader adoption of Magento in the market.

aheadWorks extensions and development group is the most active in Magento world and we are extremely happy of this fact. We are working hard to fulfill the ecommerce needs of our clients and are pleased that Magento store owners do appreciate this.

We’re really looking forward to further expanding Magento-based solutions to end users enabling store merchants to offer completely smooth experience for their customers!