Red Hot Internet Marketing

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Category Archives: Autoresponders

Use Outlook As an Autoresponder

I was trying to think of a quick and easy way to get a bonus to people in return for them providing a review on one of my websites.

I didn’t want to have to setup landing pages and thank you pages and all the rest because I already have them on my database list.

Auntie Google to the rescue.

http://www.timeatlas.com/email/outlook/create_auto_reply_emails_with_outlook_rules_a_template

Very clear step-by-step instructions on how to set Outlook up to automatically deliver a message (and in my case an attachment) to people who send and email to a specific email address. I used a subject line based rule, tested it and it seems to work perfectly.

Here’s what I did.

1. set up an email in my autoresponder to send people to the website to volunteer their review

2. when done, they are instructed to send me an email with DONE in the subject line

3. my outlook will receive that email and process it by setting up an automatic response with the attached bonus document and sends to the recipient.

All thanks to (a) thinking there had to be a quick and easy way, and (b) the instructions from Productivity Portfolio – thanks guys!

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Custom Fields and Their Limitations

iContact has a range of standard fields you can use.

  • prefix – First name -Last name – suffix – Business name – Email – Phone – Fax – Address1 – Address2 – City – State – Zip

You also have the capacity to include extra fields beyond the standard ones provided. This is useful. One of the issues with it is that you can only set up two field types:

  • a checkbox
  • or text

So, if you want to plug in for example birthdates, they have to be text. The challenge with this is that when you want to search them, it’s problematic. I was advised that you can search the text field by using eg 4* in the search field to return the contacts with eg April in their birthdate field. It didn’t work.

At this stage I also can’t find where I can view my contacts data fields other than the basic ones ie name, email address, date added

Watch this space. I’m still hunting a solution.

Update:

  • To view all of the data fields for a contact in iContact go to My Contacts, Browse Contacts and click on the paper and pencil icon to edit the contacts information for each individual.
  • To view all the data fields for all of the contact you have to export the contacts by going to My Contacts, Browse Contacts, scroll to the bottom and choose Export.
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Email Marketing Systems

I’ve been testing out email marketing systems for ages. And as I test there are even more new ones coming on to the market.

My focus was on having a robust reliable system with no advertising, easy to use (I want to delegate the task eventually to someone else), and above all low cost – it may be my Scottish heritage coming out but I love to get the best deal I can!

Here’s what I’ve tried:

  • GroupMail – probably my first attempt outside of using Outlook. It has a free version but it’s limited to 100 and its free version limitations annoyed me after a while. I wasn’t persuaded to buy their upgrades because of the nuisance value but I know people who use it and love it.
  • Campaign Monitor – I love the work these guys produce and it is a great standard pricing model but I found it was too techie for me  to be able to delegate the email marketing to a novice later. A lot of people use CM (links are ‘createandsend’) without realising it because they are using a reseller version through a web developer or similar. It works well if someone else does the back end for you. I just didn’t devote enough time to setting up templates for myself etc.
  • Interspire – again, these guys do great stuff and they have both an online and a self-install system. I shied away from the self-install job again because I want to simplify and automate things as much as possible and the online version wasn’t as competitively priced
  • Mailchimp – I was an early adopter of MailChimp and they were fast and streamlined. For me now though they seem to have become less easy and flexible. I couldn’t find a way to just send plain-text autoresponders for example. I’m still using MailChimp because they have a good free version – I’m just not sure I’ll go with them for my volume mailings
  • Constant Contact – a great reliable system and one of the early email marketing companies. Just not price competitive enough for me
  • YourMailingListProvider  seems promising but I didn’t really give them a red hot go. Since I first looked at them thought they have become more professional
  • VerticalResponse  I liked them, I really did but I had trouble getting access to my account and couldn’t resolve it. I don’t think I’m even on their mailing list anymore!
  • iContact – I signed up with these guys recently for a 12-month package at a really good price. What I like about them is the simple interface  I can train a monkey (sorry, MailChimp) how to use their system and I can do either text or html for broadcasts or autoresponders. I’d like an easier way to access support but following their tutorials pointed out a couple of things that made life easier. Not as intuitive as you think (like a lot of them) but works when you know how!
  • PHPList – I avoided self-install packages as I said even though this was a free and respected one (feel free to go this route if you’ve got a techie bent and time). Today I just noted that they have a beta-test version of a hosted solution. Best part is there is a free version and their upgrade plans are very competitive. One to watch as it rolls out.
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Take Control of Your Content

One of the big issues I’ve had with owning sites and blogs is continually adding content and keeping it fresh.

First I’d create my own posts but my publishing was quite erratic. I’d post a few things one day then nothing for a few days and then eventually nothing for weeks on end. My blog effectively ‘died’.

I then tried a few different automated content fillers. Ones where the tool would grab content from other sites and post it to my site. That worked in keeping fresh content coming to my blog. What I found though was the feeds were unreliable in terms of the type of information they would post.

Next I tried joining SEOLinkvine – you sign up, tell it the kind of topics you want articles on. Other people write articles on their topics and SEOLinkine basically matches what you want with what others are writing.

Again that worked for a while in filling my blog with content but I found the main issue was the articles had text links within the article which again took people to sometimes totally unrelated topics areas.

I came to the conclusion that I wanted more control over the content that was appearing on my site than was occurring through automated submission from outside sources.

I decided I had to create the content if I wanted uniqueness, highly appropriate topic content and to keep my site sticky.

Back to the original problem – inconsistent posting.

00446922Wouldn’t it be great if you could create your content in batches and with one click have it publish when you want it to, how you want it to? While it’s doing that, you can kick back on the beach!

Well, you can. And more. Drop by tomorrow for the solution! Until then, start putting together a batch of posts on a favourite topic. I’m about to show you how you can post that content automatically to drip out when you want it to AND have a corresponding email automatically generated to let your readers know to check out your post. And that’s not all.

See you tomorrow!

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