Email and Social Marketing Tips | Pinpointe Blog

To create a subscription form that you can place on your web site, you first choose which contact lists you want your subscribers to be added to when they sign up, as select which custom fields you want to include on your subscription form.

Begin by creating a form.  Select the list(s) you want your subscribers to be added to when they fill out your subscription form.  Under each list you will see the custom fields which have been assigned to that list. To include each custom field in your subscription form, simply tick the box next to it. It will then be added to the Sort Custom Fields list below. You can change the order in which custom fields appear on your subscription form simply by dragging and dropping them.

Here’s the scenario.  You’ve created a campaign and sent it out a month ago.  Since then you’ve had new prospects sign up for the same list and now you would like to resend the same campaign to only the new contacts. How do you do this?

This is easy.  We’re going to send to a list of prospects and we’ll filter based on dates.

This will only send the emails to people who have subscribed after you have sent the email the first time.

Another alternative to this is to create an auto-pilot campaign program instead of an email campaign. You can then set the auto-pilot program to be sent immediately after subscription and make sure you select to send to existing contacts.

Yes.  Pinpointe is designed to help you personalize your communications to improve response results.  Any field that exists in your contact lists can be easily inserted into the email subject or anywhere within the email body.  When you create and configure your contact lists, you will probably create some additional custom fields too.  These custom fields can also be used to personalize your communications.

To insert any field, including custom fields into your email campaign, just click on the “Insert Field” link underneath the WYSIWYG editor (HTML emails) or Text editor (Text Emails.) A popup window will appear asking you to select the Custom Field you would like to insert.  You’ll see the field inserted as a tag.  For example if your list has fields called ‘First_Name’ and ‘Last_Name’, and you wanted to insert them into the subject and body as follows, you’ll see the following in the editor:

Subject: %%First_Name%% – Here is this Month’s Newsletter

Body:

Dear %%First_Name%% %%Last_Name%%,

…

Absolutely. Each customer has their own dedicated ‘instance’ of Pinpointe running, so your data, contacts, campaign information, templates etc are all separate from other customer’s accounts.

Of course.

Pinpointe  supports sending of automatic sequential emails that are triggered when a user subscribes, sent in specific time intervals, eg. After 1 hour, or after 2 days etc.

These sequential emails are referred to as Auto-Pilot campaigns, or ‘autoresponders’ and can be accessed using the Autoresponders section from the main menu.

Pinpointe also supports custom Auto-pilot campaigns that are triggered by specific custom fields. Lets say for example, that you have a custom field called “Title Level” and an Autoresponder setup to send out a specific email to all ‘Director-level’ contacts.

When the contact fills in their details in the subscription form, and selects ‘Director-level’ from the options, they will receive this auto-pilot response.  You can create different auto-pilot campaigns with different information based on whether the contact is a VP level, manager or engineering level contact.

For a tutorial on creating an auto-pilot campaing, see this entry. setting-up-an-auto-pilot-marketing-campaign

Yes.  When you set up a campaign and then again when the campaign is sent out, you are asked to provide the sender information and the ‘reply-to’ information.  Pinpointe will then send the email out with the From and Reply-To headers set to your preference.

Here’s an excellent use for this feature.  Assume you have a regional sales team in say, New York City and your sales team will be attending (or running) a local event or trade show.  Use the ’send on behalf of’ feature to send personalized email invitations from your regional representative to the prospects in his/her territory or region.  You can set up the entire process for the regional team and prospects can even reply directly to the salesperson.

An Auto-pilot campaign (or ‘autoresponder’) is an email that you can set up to be a stand alone, or one of a series, that will be sent out at a set time after a person subscribes to your contact list.

For example you can set up an autoresponder  to be sent immediately (0 hours) after the person signs up to let them know about a promotion you are having for new users.

You could then set up one to be sent 72 hours, or 3 days later see how they felt about your offer.

Our system is set to check for and fire off any scheduled campaigns and Auto-Pilot campaigns every 5 minutes.  Once you set up a campaing or Auto-Pilor campaign, it can take up to 5 minutes for it to start sending.

A Pinpointe auto-pilot campaign lets you send an email to your subscribers a specific number of hours or days after they have subscribed to a mailing list. For example, if John signs up to your mailing list today, you can create an Auto-Pilot task to automatically send a welcome email to him 24 hours after he subscribes.

Auto-pilot campaigns (also called ‘autoresponders’) are a marketer’s “dream tool”, and in this article we’ll show you how to setup a basic autoresponder to send an email to your subscribers 24 hours after they join your mailing list.

To create an autoresponder, start by selecting ‘Create Autoresponder’ from the ‘Autoresponders’ menu item.

The “Create Autoresponder” page will appear. Choose the mailing list you want to create the autoresponder for and click the “Next >>” button. Complete the autoresponder details form. The only required field is a name for your autoresponder, which is used to identify the autoresponder in the control panel. This name is not shown to your users.

You can optionally filter the email addresses in your subscriber list using the other options on the form, but for our example we will send to everyone on the list. Click the “Next >>” button when you are done.

When the page loads, complete the form. Pay particular attention to the “Bounce Email” and “Hours Delayed” fields. The “bounce email” field is the email address where emails rejected by your subscribers mail servers will be sent. The “hours delayed” field tells the scheduling system how many hours after someone subscribes to your mailing list to send them the autoresponder email. “0″ means it will be sent straight away.

Optionally, complete the rest of the form. If you’re unsure about any of the options just move your mouse over the help tip to learn more. Click the “Next >>” button to continue.

On this page you can create the content for your autoresponder email. Enter a subject in the subject field. This is the email subject line your subscribers will see in their inbox. Enter the content of your newsletter in the editor too. Use the “Send Preview” option at the bottom of the page to send yourself a preview of the email before clicking the “Save And Exit” button.

Congratulations, you’ve just created your first Pinpointe Auto-pilot campaign! Remember, you can create as many of these for each mailing list as you like.