Forum Moderators: LifeinAsia
Suppose I want to send an email sequence, say a 3 day email course. Naturally I will get people signing up at different times. One way to go about it would be to allocate a time to collect email addresses and sending this course out to the mailing list after the time period.
However, I was wondering if I could actually send out email sequences that start as soon as a customer puts in his email address. Thus I would have Customer A (who signed up on Monday) starting his course on Monday and Customer B (who signed up on Tuesday) starting his course on Tuesday, etc.
I hope that the explanation was clear. Is there an automated process to do the above? If there is, is there a relatively affordable option or if possible, open source option?
Thanks in advance!
What you do is have an online database with two tables. One table holds your mailing list with fields to mark which email was sent to them and their "day" in the system. The other table holds the mail content and what day it is supposed to go out on.
A server-side script is run on a daily cron job. In case you don't know, a cron job is any program run at regular time intervals. In this case, daily would work.
So when the cron job runs every day, an outline of what your script would do is something like this:
- Increment the "day" field for all customers to bring them up to the current day. The day values will be unique to each customer - so when someone buys/joins, that is day 1. Every day this value increments for all customers.
- select and loop through all your letters. (Example, you have a day 1 letter, day 3 letter, etc.)
- Within this letter loop, look for customers that match the day value - that is, select all fields from customer where customer day = letter day.
- If the day field of the customer matches the day field for the letter, send them that letter.
- WRITE DAILY SENDS to a log and have it email you a report.
This is an oversimplified example as there's tons of other important things to do - error checking, mail validation, security, etc. - but under any circumstances make very very sure of two things:
Anyone in this email list has to have joined willingly or is aware you are going to be sending them an email through a TOS or statement that they willingly checked or otherwise approved. Because they bought something from you does not automatically allow you to send them an email. Any unsolicited email is spam. Even just one.
Before sending your first mailing, have an unsubscribe feature in place and make sure it works. A simple way to do this is have the unsubscribe link in the signature of the email to automate the process.
The actual unsubscribe feature in the above scenario would be a separate program that validates the email (so someone can't visit your unsub. page and just start entering email addresses) and when called, will not DELETE the email from your database, it will simply inactivate it. This is so someone else can't come in and re-add it, making it look like you're ignoring policy.
There are probably free solutions out there, but a custom solution will probably be relatively expensive. Can't post prices to avoid violating US price fixing laws, but can discuss via sticky mail.
Thank you so much. Is there anyone who can offer other alternatives?
What rocknbil is describing seems like the best solution to me.
The only thing that I would do differently would be to send the first installment immediately on registration, rather than waiting until the cron job runs. That way the customer gets instant feedback on their registration.
rocknbil is also right that you should be thinking prettty hard about how you'll run the opt-in mechanism, to make sure you do have consent to send their emails.
Best, a.
PS also suggest taking a look at the AOL whitelist.
And I totally agree that I should send them an immediate letter instead of waiting for the cron job. Do you have any idea how to do that please?
I have no idea what he is talking about. Especially about cron jobs and all! ... Unix (or whatever that is)
Hiya,
Well, there's some big questions there! :)
Unix is a computer operating system, like Windows - only a lot better. ;) Your server probably runs a type of Unix called Linux.
Cron is the name for what Windows calls 'Scheduled Tasks'. It's a way for you to say to the operating system, "please run this program once a day", or at whatever time interval you like.
I totally agree that I should send them an immediate letter instead of waiting for the cron job. Do you have any idea how to do that please?
Well, the bottom line here is that you need to have a computer program which will do it for you. You've got two options: either learn some programming yourself, or pay someone else to do it for you.
There's lots of freelancers and firms out there who will do this type of thing for you - whether you think it's worth learning to do it yourself should depend (I think) on whether you find it interesting or not! If you do, and particularly if you think you're going to want to do a lot of this kind of thing in the future, it's probably worth you learning more about the technical side.
A good place to start, if you are on a unix-based server, would be the PHP or Perl forums on this site. If you're interested in Perl then Perlmonks is also a great resource (can't link to it here but I'm sure you'll find it!). Get some recommendations for beginners books and dive in.
HTH (hope that helps), a.
Anyway, I have found a free program to do it. I have not really had the time to check it out to see if it does all I need to do. It needs some technical knowledge to do it, so I guess I will be paying someone to set it up for me.
Thanks so much for your time and help!
