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 large‐scale 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

Here’s an overview of how Interspire Email Marketer works. The figure below shows how Interspire Email Marketer’s 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 “from” 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 (“City”, “Date of birth”, “Zip code”, “Hat size” ‐ 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 built‐in custom fields that you can use to personalize your emails. For example, if you required that a contact fills in a “First name” field in the website form, you can then send out an email that automatically addresses the contact as “Dear Joe”. This function is similar to the “mail merge” 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 Marketer’s 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 Marketer‐related 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 plain‐text 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 click‐through rate.

Interspire Email Marketer also supports automatic split testing, in which the “candidate” email versions are sent to only a small proportion of your contact list, and the “winner” 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 plain‐text templates. However, autoresponders are sent out automatically at pre‐defined 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 (“Thanks for joining our mailing list!”) and another a month or a year after they join (“You’ve been reading our daily newsletter for  30  days now; tell us what you think!”).

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 date‐related triggers (so that everyone in your contact list receives a “Happy Birthday” email on their birthday, for example) and event‐related triggers (so that a contact is automatically added to a “warm leads” 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 contact’s email addresses. The contact’s 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 contact’s 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 plain‐text 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 Marketer’s fully‐featured HTML development editor and plain‐text editor.

Manual Input, CSV Files and Website Forms

There are three ways to add contacts to a contact list: by inputting them manually one‐by‐one, by uploading a CSV (Comma‐Separated 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 one‐by‐one, by uploading a CSV (Comma‐Separated Value) file with multiple contacts’ 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 “chronograph”) is a program that activates other programs, commands and processes at pre‐determined 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.

• Getting Started