In this chapter, we will cover:
- Creating an E-marketing account
- Moving a Template to the Local Library
- Editing a Local template
- Importing a HTML template
- Sending E-marketing messages
- Updating ACT! with E-marketing History
- Analyzing an E-marketing Campaign
- Creating Lookups of your Campaign Results
- Creating Surveys
- Creating Web-Forms
You are probably already familiar with the concept of a mail merge, and you know what an email is. The ACT! E-marketing module, also known as Swiftpage E-mail, gives you a safe and easy way to merge your ACT! contact information into a graphic-rich template.
ACT! E-marketing is actually an e-mail service provider, or ESP, which is an outside service that helps manage some of the more problematic parts of an e-blast. They make sure that your emails are spam compliant and that your email won’t get blocked by the larger service providers such as AOL, Yahoo, or Gmail. They automatically suppress sending to duplicate email addresses, and to individuals who have previously opted out of your list.
An ESP also offers many additional benefits. They send your email from their own email servers, which means that you don’t have to worry about sending limitations imposed on you by your Internet Service Provider. You can upload your graphics to the ESP so that creating an HTML email becomes a relatively simple task. You can send your e-blast to a Lookup or Group of your ACT! contacts. And, when combined with the Smart Task functionality, you can time when or how often you’d like your emails to be sent based on the value in a specific field.
Sending out your e-blast is only the beginning of the E-marketing process. Once sent, you can track the response to your email campaign directly from within ACT!. You’ll be able to run searches for who opened—and who ignored—your email. You’ll also be able to see what parts of your email they found the most interesting. And you’ll be able to focus in on the individuals who showed the most interest in buying your product.
As if all of this wasn’t enough, ACT!’s ESP will allow you to create web forms that your contacts can fill in from your website; that information will automatically appear in ACT!. You can even create a web-based survey and have the ESP track and compile the results.
ACT! E-marketing is bundled into ACT! and provides you with a free, limited ESP account which you can try out for 60 days or upgrade at any time.
In this chapter, you’ll learn about three of the most popular functions of ACT! E-marketing:
- E-mail—Create email templates and send them out to select portions of your database.
- Results—Track the results of your email campaign, create histories of the email on the individual contact records, and use the information to take care of opt-outs, duplicated and bad email addresses.
- Surveys and Web Forms—Easily compile a survey, send it out to your contacts, and track the results. Or, create a web form so that new contacts are automatically added to your ACT! database and existing contacts can be updated easily.
When you create ACT! E-marketing templates you actually do it from a series of Swiftpage email websites. That means that your templates will be stored online in the Swiftpage Template Manager and not on your computer. Although you originate the process in ACT!, all the heavy lifting is actually done on the Swiftpage website. And, because Swiftpage is "cloud based," the format of the various windows may change periodically. Your templates, however, will remain unscathed.