Auto Mail

How does it work?

There are two sets of records that are maintained for your mailing.

The first is the Mail List. You can have one or more lists. For example, one list may be for customers and a second for prospects. You might have different lists for customers that purchase different products.

The second is the Auto-Mail List. You can have one or more responses for each mail list. You must have at least one Auto-Mail response for each list that gives the recipient the option of opting out of the list. Someone else may have signed them up as a prank. You can have as many responses as you want in your Auto-Mail List.

If you signed up for our "Seven Steps To Successful Online Sales" you've received eight emails with the steps.

Another use is to do occasional mailings to your email list(s). You can do a newsletter or just product announcements from time to time to remind you customers and prospects that you're still there and interested in their business. It's really simple to set up. The One Time Mailing will allow you to select the list(s) you want to send to, the date to send it and an upload of the email you want to send.

Subscribing and Unsubscribing

Subscribing is very straight forward. You can subscribe via email or directly to a sign up page.

The link to the sign up page is http://wwa.asafeweb.com/optin.asp this is the action address in your form. In addition to the fields for the email there are two additional fields in your form.

NOTE: The colons(:) in the field identifiers in the list below are NOT required for updating to the optin page. In fact, they should NOT be in the field name.

ListId=NNNN - this is required and is the number of the list that you want this person added to.

Continue=URL - Optional address of the web page that you want your person sent to after the sign up has been completed. Typically, this is a thank you page or sends them to your web site. It requires the http:// to operate correctly

Subscriptions can also be sent to an email address... subscriptions@1elist.com. The subject line is SubscribeNNNN where NNNN is your list number. When a person is subscribed to your list, they will receive an identifier(ID). When subscribing to the list the following fields can optionally be part of the data sent to the subscribe function
Email:
FirstName:
LastName:
CompanyName:
Address:
Address2:
City:
State:
Postal Code:
Country:
Phone:
Option1:
Option2:
Option3:
Option4:

To unsubscribe from a list add a link to

http://wwa.asafeweb.com/unsub.asp?unsub=%%ID%%

where %%ID%% is the customer ID. The customer will be flagged as inactive. The customer will see a message that they've been removed from the list. They will NOT be physically removed from the list, but you will not be able to email them again from this list.

Setting up your email messages

You can send either plain text messages or html messages. In any case there are two keywords that MUST be in each email Subject: and Body:. the text following the Subject keyword up to the Body keyword will be placed in the subject line of the email.

All text following the Body: keyword will be in the body of the message.

You can create your messages with a word processor, notepad, or any editor you want. I recommend using a word processor, like Microsoft Word, to create the messages. Not only will it spell check your work, but it will show grammatical errors as well.

When I want to send text only emails - I've been told they have a higher percentage getting through spam filters and getting opened - copy the the text from Word and paste it into Notepad. Save the text for uploading to your auto-responder.

If you want to send HTML emails you CAN use the output from Word. Personally, I don't care for the HTML that word produces. So, I copy and paste the text from Word and paste into Notepad. Then I copy the text from Notepad and paste it into my HTML editor, which happens to be FrontPage. Once the text is in an HTML editor you can format it with BOLD and Headers and whatever else you wish to do.

When it's complete save it for uploading to your auto-responder.

You can also personalize the message with the following fields.

%%ID%% - The customer's Identifying number
%%Email%%
%%FirstName%%
%%LastName%%
%%CompanyName%%
%%Address%%
%%Address2%%
%%City%%
%%State%%
%%Zip%%
%%Country%%
%%Phone%%
%%Option1%%
%%Option2%%
%%Option3%%
%%Option4%%
 

So, for example you might have the first line of the message: %%FirstName%% - here's an update that you'll want to know about. So if one of your subscribers is Ralph he would get a message that starts with: Ralph - here's an update that you'll want to know about.

You can also use these fields in the subject of the message to catch the users attention. For example: %%FirstName%%- Check this out!

These fields can be used anywhere in your message to personalize the message.

When you upload your file to eCOMpal, you enter the Subject line for your message at that time. And, you'll see when you upload you can send a test message to yourself to see how it will look to your recipients.