Introduction
Welcome to Interspire Email Marketer
Congratulations on your purchase of Interspire Email Marketer! Interspire Email Marketer gives you an unprecedented ability to create, manage and automate largeâscale email marketing campaigns, mailing lists, and automatic responses.
Note: If you want to start using Interspire Email Marketer to send out emails right away, see
Getting Started.
Interspire Email Marketer Overview
Hereâs an overview of how Interspire Email Marketer works. The figure below shows how Interspire Email Marketerâs most important components interact. The rest of this chapter describes the components in this figure.

Contact lists
Interspire Email Marketer stores all of your contacts in contact lists.
You can have multiple contacts lists, and you can configure each contact list to work in a different way. For example, you can configure one contact list to send out automatic emails to its members every month, and configure another list to take no automatic action. You can also configure information differently for each contact list (such as the âfromâ address of the emails you send out, and your company name).
Custom Fields
Custom fields are variables that are added to a contact list. You can add any kind of variable you want (âCityâ, âDate of birthâ, âZip codeâ, âHat sizeâ â whatever you need). When you add a custom field to a contact list, you can then add it in to an email campaign.
Interspire Email Marketer already has a lot of builtâin custom fields that you can use to personalize your emails. For example, if you required that a contact fills in a âFirst nameâ field in the website form, you can then send out an email that automatically addresses the contact as âDear Joeâ. This function is similar to the âmail mergeâ feature found in some word processing and database applications.
Note: If you are going to use custom fields in emails, it is strongly recommended that you make them mandatory (a contact must fill them in to sign up). This way, you can be sure that you will have no embarrassing gaps in your emails.
Contacts
Contacts are the people about whom you store information in Interspire Email Marketer. These are the people to whom you send emails.
Event Log
Interspire Email Marketerâs event log is a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) feature that allows you to see all of your interactions with a contact at a glance. Information about Interspire Email Marketerârelated events (for example, each time an email is sent to a contact) is logged automatically, and you can also manually log all sorts of other information (for example, each time you call or meet a contact in person).
Email Campaigns and Split Tests
Email campaigns are the emails that you send out from Interspire Email Marketer to the people on a contact list.
Email campaigns are based on an HTML or plainâtext template, and are sent to members of a contact list. You control when you send email campaigns; you can send them at the click of a button, or schedule them to be sent out at a specific point in the future.
Split tests allow you to discover which version of an email is most effective. You can create different variations on an email (three versions with different subject lines, for example) and send them out to your contact list at random, in equal numbers. The statistics that are returned let you see which version has the highest open or clickâthrough rate.
Interspire Email Marketer also supports automatic split testing, in which the âcandidateâ email versions are sent to only a small proportion of your contact list, and the âwinnerâ version is then sent to the remaining contacts in the list.
Surveys
Surveys are tools used to to collect opinions, needs, preferences, and suggestions of your contacts. Interspire Email Marketer allows you to create and send a survey to gather information depending on your objective, what you want to know or improve on.
Interspire Email Marketer can assist you to personalize your content and build relationsip with your contacts through surveys.
Autoresponders and Triggers
Like email campaigns, autoresponders are emails based on HTML or plainâtext templates. However, autoresponders are sent out automatically at preâdefined intervals after a contact is added to a contact list.
For example, you may want to send out one autoresponder as soon as contacts are added to the list (âThanks for joining our mailing list!â) and another a month or a year after they join (âYouâve been reading our daily newsletter for  30 days now; tell us what you think!â).
Triggers are similar to autoresponders, but allow you even greater flexibility to automate email and administrative tasks to happen automatically when certain other events occur. You can set up dateârelated triggers (so that everyone in your contact list receives a âHappy Birthdayâ email on their birthday, for example) and eventârelated triggers (so that a contact is automatically added to a âwarm leadsâ contact list when he or she opens your email).
Email Tracking
Interspire Email Marketer allows you to track and view a variety of information about the emails you send; how many are opened (and when), how many links are clicked in each one (and which link was clicked), and so on.
Bounce Tracking
Bounced emails are those that never reach their destination.
This can happen for numerous reasons. However, if you keep sending emails to an address that does not accept them, there is a danger that your email server could be blacklisted (making it much more difficult to send subsequent emails to anybody). To avoid this, Interspire Email Marketer can track bounced emails, discover why they were bounced, and automatically act by deactivating contactâs email addresses. The contactâs details remain in the list, but emails are no longer sent.
Interspire Email Marketer can tell the difference between emails that bounced for temporary reasons (a contactâs inbox was full, for example) and those that bounced for permanent reasons (the account does not exist, for example). Interspire Email Marketer can then take different action depending on the type of bounce that occurred.
Templates
Use HTML and plainâtext templates to form the basis of your email campaigns. Templates make your emails attractive and promote your brand identity.
Either use the templates included with Interspire Email Marketer, which are designed specifically to display correctly in all popular email clients, or design your own using Interspire Email Marketerâs fullyâfeatured HTML development editor and plainâtext editor.
Manual Input, CSV Files and Website Forms
There are three ways to add contacts to a contact list: by inputting them manually oneâbyâone, by uploading a CSV (CommaâSeparated Value) file with information on multiple contacts, or by having contacts fill out a form on your website.
Note: You can output a CSV file from many database and spreadsheet applications (Microsoft Excel, for example). When you upload a CSV file to Interspire Email
Marketer, you can specify how Interspire Email Marketer should populate the contact list with the information in the file.
Interspire Email Marketer helps you create forms you can put on your website to let your customers sign up for your newsletter or emails.
Note: You can design forms in Interspire Email Marketer, and then paste the HTML directly into your web pages. You can also put some kinds of forms into the emails you send out.
There are three ways to add contacts to a contact list: by inputting them manually oneâbyâone, by uploading a CSV (CommaâSeparated Value) file with multiple contactsâ information, or by having contacts fill out a form on your website.
Note: You can output a CSV file from many database and spreadsheet applications (Microsoft Excel, for example). When you upload a CSV file to Interspire Email Marketer, you can specify how it should populate the contact list with the information in the file.
Cron
Cron (an abbreviation of âchronographâ) is a program that activates other programs, commands and processes at preâdetermined times and intervals. It is a way of scheduling tasks to happen automatically. The Interspire Email Marketer server uses cron jobs to take care of sending out scheduled emails, handling autoresponders and bounced emails, and a variety of other tasks.