How the Auto-Mail software works…
Abacus Auto-Mail is simple software that sends your predefined sequence of messages automatically, at intervals you specify, to e‑mail addresses as they are added to your mailing list. Moreover, even the e‑mail addresses are added to your mailing list automatically, as visitors to your web site fill in a form to subscribe to your newsletter, free offer or any other useful information they want to get from you.
This is the most powerful sales tool you can possibly have, simply because your visitors have come to you, asking for something, rather than you looked for them, offering them something they may not want.
Every single one of these subscribers is a prospective customer, and a certain percentage of them eventually will buy from you. That percentage may be large or small, depending on how you conduct your mail campaigns. There’s a right way to do it, which will maximize your success, and there’s a wrong way, which will maximize your failure. There are also many ways between these two extremes.
This page is only about how the Abacus Auto-Mail software works. Step-by-step tuition on how to conduct mail campaigns successfully is available at the “Related Products” link at the top of this page.
If you click on the “Sales Funnel” link on the “Related Products” page, you’ll find a DEMO form that was created with the Auto-Mail software. Fill it in to experience exactly what would happen to the prospective customers who join your e‑mail list.
Uses for Abacus Auto-Mail software:Create e-mail lists of prospective customers for any products or services.
Maintain contact with prospects and customers by means of series of sequential pre-written e-mail messages, sent at predefined intervals.
Broadcast a message to any or all prospects and customers at any time.
Conduct the time-proven "sales funnel" process automatically on self-generating customer lists. |
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Abacus Data Systems software quality and reliability
There are a few products in existence that attempt to do what the Auto-Mail software does. In every example that we found, there was some problem or other which caused it not to work well, or not to work properly, or not to work at all. Apart from bugs, the problem is often caused by incorrect manual installation and/or configuration by the user, which can be quite technical and error-prone.
Rather than ask you, our customer, to take the trouble to do it yourself, or to request Abacus to install and configure the Auto-Mail software on all your web sites, which would be impractical and expensive, we’ve designed the Auto-Mail software to install AND configure itself on your web sites automatically. As far as we know, no other mass mail software does this.
Therefore you should have no problems of any kind. All Abacus software products are created by a highly qualified software engineer. They are renowned for their attention to detail, ease of use and intuitive interfaces, which are designed by a Human-Computer Interface (HCI) expert. Abacus software also conforms to legally required standards of accessibility for visually-impaired users.
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The Five Steps to Create a Mail Campaign
1. Create an AutoEmailer for your chosen subject, newsletter, product(s), etc.
For example, let’s say that you deal in pet care products for all domesticated animals. The biggest tip we can give you is to target your market as narrowly as feasibly possible. So, if you sell a product or service specifically for poodles, you’d create an AutoEmailer and reference it as “poodle”, probably.
In our example, however, we’ll assume that you sell a line of general dog care products, own a web site called “PetsVets.com”, and suggest that you call your first AutoEmailer campaign “DogCare”.
View Image 1, to see the kind of result you’ll achieve in this step-by-step guide.
1.A. Set the local working folderClick the ‘Local folder’ button in the software main interface. Create a folder with the ‘Make New Folder’ button in which to keep all your “PetsVets” AutoEmailer campaigns. We suggest a folder called “autoemailer” inside a folder called “PetsVets”.
This folder needs to be created only the first time. Thereafter you just click the ‘Local folder’ button, navigate to it in the ‘Browse For Folder’ dialogue box, and select it.
Click the ‘OK’ button.
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1.B. Add a new AutoEmailerType the name of the new AutoEmailer, “DogCare”, in the ‘New’ textbox, and click the ‘Add new AutoEmailer’ button.
This adds the “DogCare” AutoEmailer to the drop-down list above it, and also creates a new folder called “DogCare” automatically in the “autoemailer” folder that you selected in Step 1A. This “DogCare” folder is where all your messages to your prospective dog care products customers will be kept. It’ll always be there in the drop-down list from now on.
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When you create your next mail campaign for “CatCare”, you’ll do the same actions. |
1.C. Define the AutoEmailer settingsType the ‘Sender’s name’, the ‘Sender’s e‑mail’ and web page that you want your new subscribers to go to when they’ve filled in your “sign-up” form.
(The ‘Sender’s e‑mail’ is for display in the ‘From’ field of your messages only. It is not the e‑mail address from which your messages are actually sent; so, you can leave it blank if you don’t want your subscribers to see it.)
Click the ‘Save settings’ button.
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2. Write your series of messages for this AutoEmailer.
Although you can send up to 999 messages in each AutoEmailer campaign, you’ll probably use up to only 30 or so.
2.A. Create a new messageType the ‘Subject’ and the ‘Body’ of the first message, and click the ‘Add message’ button. The number of the message appears in the drop-down list above it, and the message is saved in the “DogCare” folder on your computer. Repeat this for all messages that you wish to write in advance.
(Once you’ve added a message, you can edit it at any time by selecting it from the drop-down list. You save any changes by clicking the ‘Save message’ button.)
By clicking the ‘First name’, ‘Full name’, ‘E‑mail address’ and ‘Current date’ buttons, you can insert place-holders into the ‘Subject’ and ‘Body’ textboxes which will be replaced with each subscriber’s first name, full name, e‑mail address and the current date respectively when the message is sent.
The first message, usually a “Welcome”, is always sent as soon as a new subscriber has filled in the form on your web page. The second and subsequent messages are sent according to the number of days you set in the ‘Send this message … day(s) after the previous message’ textbox.
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3. Upload your mail campaign messages to your web space.
Your e‑mail messages to the prospective customers in your e‑mail list are sent by the e‑mail server on your own web space provided by your web hosting company. They are not sent from your computer. Therefore the files must be uploaded from your computer to your web space, where they can be sent automatically to your e‑mail list subscribers at any time of the day or night, without the need for your computer to be switched on.
Technical requirement: Your hosting company’s web server must use Linux and run Perl cgi scripts.
3.A. Load the Project Remote SettingsClick the ‘Remote settings’ button in the software main interface.
The remote settings apply to all the Auto-Mail mail campaigns existing in the “autoemailer” folder you created in Step 1.A. Therefore, you need to set the Project Remote Settings only once for the entire “PetsVets” project. Imagine a hierarchical structure: A Project (“PetsVets”) contains many AutoEmailer mail campaigns (“DogCare”, “CatCare”, etc.) which each contain many e‑mail messages (Message #001, Message #002, etc.)
So, if it’s a brand-new project and you haven’t yet set its remote settings, fill in the ‘Project Remote Settings’ form with the details of your web space as provided by your web hosting company. Then click the ‘Save to file’ button. This saves all the details to a file on your computer, so that you don’t need to do this again. Now you must upload some system files — You don’t need to know anything about these! — to your web space. To do this, click the ‘Upload’ button. You do not need to do this again for the project, unless you change any of the details.
If, however, it’s not a new project and you’ve already uploaded the system files, just click the ‘Load from file’ button, and the project details will appear instantly in the form.
In either case, you must store the form’s details in your computer’s memory for use later. To do this and close the ‘Project Remote Settings’ form, just click the ‘OK’ button.
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3.B. Upload the mail campaign to your web spaceClick the ‘Upload’ button in the software main interface.
This uploads the entire mail campaign to your web space for the AutoEmailer currently selected. (In this example it’s the “DogCare” Auto-Mail mail campaign.)
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4. Design your subscription “sign-up” form.
The subscription form captures the name and e‑mail address of every visitor who fills it in and clicks its “sign up” button, and adds them to your e‑mail list automatically. Tests prove that the simpler the form is, the more visitors are likely to subscribe to whatever you’re offering them.
4.A. Design the subscription formClick the ‘Design form’ button in the software main interface.
Use the controls to design your “sign up” form. If you happen to be an HTML expert, you can edit the form’s code directly.
If you already have a form design that you like, click the ‘Custom’ button and paste its code into the textbox that appears. It’ll be configured by the software to work with the Auto-Mail system.
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4.B. Add the subscription form to your web pageWhen you’re happy with your subscription form design, click the ‘Copy’ button, to copy the form’s HTML code to the Windows Clipboard, and paste it into the HTML code of a web page where you want it to appear. Click the ‘Close’ button.
If you wish to test your form before publishing it, or if you don’t have a web page, click the ‘Test form’ button in the software main interface, and the Auto-Mail software will create a new web page, complete with the subscription form and text which you can edit as you wish. This page will be uploaded to the root folder of your web site and be opened in a browser window automatically, so that you can see it. View Image 4, to see the web page that is created automatically for you.
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5. Send the e‑mails and daily reports.
Something must tell the system software (behind the scenes) to send your e‑mails to your subscribers and the daily reports to you. This mechanism is called the “trigger”.
5.A. Show the trigger codeClick the ‘Show trigger’ button in the software main interface.
This displays the single line of HTML code that triggers the automatic process of sending your e‑mails to your prospective customers and daily reports to you about who has signed up and who has been sent which messages.
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5.B. Add the trigger code to web pagesClick the ‘Copy’ button, to copy the trigger’s HTML code to the Windows Clipboard, and paste it into the HTML code of one or more web pages anywhere between the <body> and </body> tags.
Click the ‘Close’ button.
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That’s all there is to creating a mail campaign! Watch the video presentation above to see how quick and easy it is.
Take a look now at the other ‘Special Features’ of the Abacus Auto-Mail software in the column at the right, and try the Auto-Mail LIVE DEMO, to see for yourself what happens when one of your visitors fills in a form on your web page…
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Try this live Auto-Mail DEMO and stay up to date with Abacus software…
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This form is only to show you how the Auto-Mail software automates the "sales funnel" process for your prospects. You will not really get a report about dogs. You’ll get a (short) series of e‑mails, as if you were a potential customer.
(The form with the anti-spam-robot check that you see here was created in a few seconds, using the Form Designer of the Abacus Auto-Mail software.)
We respect your privacy. Your contact details will not be divulged to anyone. |
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