Using emails is a bit odd

[Jan668]

Ok I just tried to send an email to just our buyers list. I know the number of people on this list. I attached the right email. I choose "buyers" and made the campaign.

Then there is a tab saying "interrupt current campaign" and I did not think we had a current campaign going so I ignored that button.

Sent it. by hitting "update".......

now most other email systems give you instant info like "sending email, or your email is in que or email was sent successfully ---- " and I did not get that with your system.

Turns out only 4 emails went out. 2 were open and I have a 50% click through rate... ;) ha!

So I figured I made a mistake and should have said...yes interrupt another campaign...we have something else going to clients, like 48 hr. reminders....

I made a new campaign and called it Round 2.

Nothing was sent.

Says no scheduled emails.

It would be nice if I knew what was going on. Emails are so important not to screw up and I already did that on the first one......there needs to be more absolute direction in this area.....

Why does the button say "update" and not SEND EMAIL or RELEASE EMAIL INTO QUE or something like that? why no notification back to the user telling me I sent 0 emails....or.....your emails will be sent on 2 hours...or...we have 780 emails ready to fly in a moment....

Can you please help me out? I was supposed to get these out on Sat. and now I did Sun. and only 4 are out. Not good.

thanks in advance!!

Jan

p.s. I am poised to do an 5 step auto responder so it is important I fully understand every aspect of this area...not on the surface...like thoroughly. thanks.

[Paige]

Jan, thank you for your feedback, we understand that our email system is a little hard to use, we are actively working on making it better and appreciate any feedback.

Campaigns work a little differently than scheduled emails, campaigns are not technically scheduled because different customers can be on different steps of the campaigns depending on their actions.

I looked at your two campaigns that you made and neither of them have any emails loaded in them to send, so as soon as you put an email in the campaign the email will be sent the following morning.

However, looking at these campaigns, this is not what the campaign manager was meant for. The campaign manager automates the email sending process by looking at customer actions around the site and automatically sending them a series of emails. What you are trying to do would be best done through the "Send to Contacts" when viewing the email, this way you can control when they receive the email down to the exact hour.

[Jan668]

Perhaps my biggest problem is getting to know how your system differentiates the following categories of email people:

Buyers

Leads

Active

Inactive

This is the issue most likely. I only want my buyers to receive the weekly Saturday email.

when I go into "Send to Contacts" it asks me to pick a list.....

Where is buyers there?

then I further choose inactive and active......and I truly need to know what you...allprowebtools....considers active and inactive..

This is where I am having difficulty I believe.

Can you call me?

Jan
970-430-8108

[Jan668]

ok, not getting a response and it is now 4:15 on Monday.

This email should have gone out on Saturday. I am behind.

I am at the point where perhaps I can read your user manual and figure it out myself.

Please send me a link to your user manual on emails. Do you have one? I can read it and figure this out. There is no video about this at all. Have you made a video? Is it somewhere I do not have access to?

Seriously need this to be solved by 5 pm today. Every minute that goes by is dating this email in a big way.

[Paige]

Jan, someone will be calling you shortly

[Jan668]

Thanks Paige...I did speak with Adam.

You guys added two new areas for me to choose "buyers" and "leads" that was not there before - thanks.

I sent out the email at 6 pm tonight.

Did not work well with the mandrill app evidently it does not like gmail. Only 2 out of 7 links worked.

When I check the "view in html" method.... everything worked nicely.

So, it appears you have a bug.

I am kinda really questioning your email system and not willing to use our hard earned email list as a test subject.

Can the team at AllProWebTools Web Tools put some resources on the email section of your platform and work out the bugs before we go further.

If I was the owner of the business that I work with.........I would stop all emails at once until this system is proven 100% bug free.

That is not my call. But I hate wasting time and losing valuable email sign-ups. They are gold. By sending out an email with tons of dead links we damaged our brand.....have to win them back now....with an "Sorry for the problems" email.....that is so lame.

sad.

frustrated.

wish your system worked across all the email platforms.....did you test it?

J.

[Dave]

Thank you so much for reporting this. We have investigated the issue and have already applied a patch. (What other company do you know that will offer free tech support at 8pm and apply a fix within 1 hour?)

The patch allows you to click any of the links in the email and they take you to the correct place (no need to resend your email). The only link that is not retroactive is the "visit our website" button at the bottom - though this will work in future email sends.

We do recommend that you do a test send of your emails before sending to your entire database. This is fairly common knowledge among marketers and is even recommended by constant contact in their best practices document located here:
http://img.constantcontact.com/docs/pdf ... ontact.pdf

You will notice on page 10 toward the bottom under the heading "Testing your Email", there are 3 bullet points and the second one specifically mentions "Click all your links to make sure they work" after sending yourself a test email.

A test button is supplied in the AllProWebTools system, right next to the "send to contacts" button.