mass Emailing with EverWeb
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Mass Emailing with EverWeb’s Contact Forms Enhanced Addon!

In our previous post, we looked at EverWeb‘s Contact Form Advanced widget and how it can be used to help your business retain and add customers to grow your business.

In this post, we take a look at the ‘companion’ Contact Forms Enhanced Addon product which can help manage customer form submissions and add advanced customer facing features to your website.

All About Contact Forms Enhanced Addon
As you may already know, EverWeb’s Contact Form Advanced widget is where you build your contact form in EverWeb. The widget has many advanced features such as 17 different form controls which give you all of the field types you’ll ever need in a contact form. There’s also advanced SPAM protection using EverWeb’s own advanced security features and reCAPTCHA from Google to add more security to your form. Additionally you have complete control over
styling and formatting your form to match the look and feel of your website.

The Contact Forms Enhanced Addon (starting at $39.95 USD/Year) helps you manage your contact form form submissions. As well as capturing and storing all of your form submissions in a secure area, you can also store file attachments submitted to you in this area. When using Contact Forms Enhanced, you should also check your local country rules regarding storage of customer data.

In addition to the above features, Contact Forms Enhanced Addon allows you to export the data you havre collected in various formats so that you can analyse it in programs such as Microsoft Excel. When using Contact Forms Enhanced with E verWeb 3.8 or higher you now also have the ability to send mass emails to those who have sent form submissions to you.

Prequisites to Using the Contact Form Enhanced’s Mass Emailing Feature
If you want to take advantage of the new mass emailing feature of Contact Forms Enhanced Addon, you should check the following before proceeding…

  1. You are using EverWeb 3.8 or higher.
  2. You have purchased Contact Forms Enhanced Addon with a plan that supports the Mass E-mailing feature.
  3. You are using the Contact Form Advanced widget to design your contact form and have added the Contact Form Advanced Addon license in the form’s Widget Settings so that Contact Forms Enhanced is active for the contact form
  4. You have at received at least one form submission from a contact that designed using the Contact Form Advanced widget.

There are also some other useful things that are good to know before you start…

  1. You can use all of the Contact Forms Enhanced Addon’s features on all of your forms so long as you have added the Contact Forms Enhanced Addon license to the forms on which you want to use it.
  2. You can’t use EverWeb’s simple Contact Form widget as it doesn’t support the Contact Forms Advanced Addon.
  3. EverWeb stores the data from your contact form submissions in a secure area in your EverWeb Client Area.
  4. Setting Up a Mass Emailing
    There are two main parts to mass emailing out to those who have submitted forms to you: the first is the selection of those form submitters that you want to email to and the second part is the designing and sending of the mass email itself.

    Selecting the Records You want to Use in a Mass Emailing
    Selecting the record that you want to use for your mass emailing is simple. All of the following actions take place in your EverWeb Client Area, rather than in EverWeb itself.

    1. Log in to your EverWeb Client Area if you have not done so already at the following link: https://billing.ragesw.com/clientarea.php
    2. If you’re already in EverWeb, you can log in to your Client Area by either clicking on your Project file name in the Web Page List then clicking on the ‘Manage Account’ button, or by using the EverWeb->. Preferences -> General dialog box and clicking on the ‘Manage Account’ button.
    3. Follow the instructions to log in to your EverWeb Client Area. Once logged in, you’ll be on your EverWeb Client Area Home page.
    4. Down the left side of the page are various options such as the ‘Contact Form Submissions’ section. Choose the ‘View Form Submissions’ option.
    5. You will now see the ‘Contact Form Enhanced’ page. A prominent dropdown menu is displayed which lists all the contact forms you have created. Click on the ‘Please select your form to access its submissions’ banner to access the list of contact forms. Select the form from the list that you want to use.for your mass emailing
    6. To finish, click on ‘Select’ button to the right of the dropdown menu.
    7. After pressing the ‘Select’ button you will see all of the form submissions for the selected contact form. Choose those form submissions that you want to include in the mass emailing by clicking on the checkbox to the left of each form submission you want to include.
    8. To select all form submissions, click on the the box to the left of the ‘Name’ field heading.
    9. Remember that the checkboxes are toggles so you can deselect any form submission, or indeed all of them, by clicking on any already selected checkbox to deselect it.

    Now that you’ve chosen the form submissions to include in your mass emailing, you can now create your e-mail form template.

    EverWeb’s Mass Emailing Form Template
    Above the list of form submissions, on the left hand side, you will see the ‘Send Mass Email’ button. This button is only available after you have selected at least one form submission. It will appear blue in color. After clicking on this button the mass email template will appear.

    Choosing Your Mail Driver
    EverWeb gives you the option to select which mechanism is used to ‘drive’ the mass emailing. You can choose either EverWeb, Amazon (aws) or SMTP as your email driver. Notice that the sent from field will differ depending on the driver that is used e.g. with EverWeb this will be ‘noreply@ragwsw.com’, but with Amazon (aws) you can choose your own email address which Amazon will verify first before you can proceed, and SMTP allows you various configuration options for sending.

    Choose the option that’s best for you. Note that you should not use SMTP if you intend to use a Google or Office365 email address. In this case, you should only use EverWeb or Amazon (aws) as your driver.

    After selecting the driver of your choice, continue to fill in the form.

    Completing the Mass Email Template
    The mass email template form is straightforward to use, just add the subject of the email in the Subject field and the contents of your email in the Contents field. Both fields need to have content, otherwise you won’t be able to send the form.

    When completing the Contents field, you can use the field tags from your selected contact form as well. These tags are listed in the Tags section. Just click on the tag you want to enter it in to the text of your email. A tag has to be populated to be visible so for example, if none of your form submitters has entered anything in to one particular field, that field will not display as a tag to use as it contains no data.

    You can also set a default value for a tag as well in the ‘Default Value for Tag’ section. Choose the tag you want and enter the text that you want as default.

    At the bottom of the form, you will see a list of a ‘Members’ list. This is a list of the form submissions that you have selected to use in the mass emailing. If it is empty, you will need to reselect the form submissions you want. In this case, it’s recommended that you copy the contents of the Contents field to the clipboard first. When you reselect records, the mass email template is not saved, so you will need to rewrite the Subject line and Contents field. Copying the Contents field then pasting it back in later may save you time and effort!

    The final step of the process is to click on the Submit button to send out your mass emailing! When you click on Submit, you will receive a confirmation message that the mail has been sent. Note that if any form submitter email addresses no longer exists, you will receive a bounce back message for these email failures.

    Mass emailing in EverWeb is a great addition to the Contact Forms Enhanced Addon. If you have a question about this new feature, or about anything else EverWeb related, please do let us know in the Comments Section below!

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