Subscription Services and Mailing Lists
Mailing List Features
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Our own, proprietary, subscription services application provides clients with a very powerful and flexible way to support a wide variety of application needs. These can range from a simple e-mail list, with the e-mail address and perhaps geographic location of subscribers and the ability to send to an entire list or to just a selected subset, to a complex subscriber application where mailings can be e-mail or snail-mail, where users can be classified according to type, where the history of mailings can be maintained, and where an entire organizational campaign (such as fundraising) can be tracked and managed. Our powerful application provides instanteous, hands-free data-collection into a standard relational database, with personalized mail-generation.
You don't have to be technical to send mailings; anyone can do it. You can create simple text only messages, or formatted ones with fonts, colors and images. The easiest way to create a formatted message (text only) is to use your existing document editing software; Microsoft Word, for example, can easily be used to create a message with fonts and colors. Then you simply save it in HTML format (choose Save As "Web Page") and you are ready to send it to your mailing list. If you maintain your own web site, and know how to code HTML, you can create your messages in HTML format yourself, and reference images that are stored on your web site. On the other hand, some clients prefer that we send the mailings for them; we will do that for a very modest fee if that is what you choose.
We can also provide tracking of web site visits, including the ability to monitor it real-time. This counter is viewable only by you, via a password protected login. Because hits are updated real-time, you can see immediately if people are visiting your site (for example, following a mailing). This information is retained permanently and you can view it historically by paging through monthly calendars.
Existing mailing lists can be batch loaded to the client's database. We can accept files from just about any mail client using some sort of export facility, or we can accept plain text files with e-mail addresses (and optionally other information) stored one subscriber per line.
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Get your mailing list today! Sign up at our new "self-service" mailing list application. Your site visitors sign up for your list at your web site, or you can upload existing contacts. Then manage your list yourself - query your database and send your mailings. Track whether your messages have been opened. Now you can sign up online or take it for a "test drive" using a demo userid. For a demo, click here. To signup now, click here. And read about Direct Email Connection, our new interface with Microsoft Exchange Server. If we host your e-mail on Exchange, you can use Outlook to manage your mailing list contacts too! You can use the mailing list to send mass mailings or do complex queries, or write to contacts individually from Outlook. |
Our application is as powerful as it is because it is built around SQL, the flagship relational database. Every client's mailing list comes complete with a large variety of data fields which can be collected or not, and additional fields can be added at the client's option. There are tools to query the database according to selection criteria, to lookup and optionally alter the data for any user (or groups of users), to correct data already stored, to remove subscribers, change their status, or do just about anything else.
E-mail mailings are sent through the application, not from the client's mail program. This is important because it (a) allows dynamic selection of recipients according to selection criteria, (b) is not subject to the client's individual ISP limitations on mass mailings, and (c) tracks the progress of the mailing and can resume delivery after the last message sent if the application does not complete (for example, if the user loses his connection). This can be very important with large mailing lists, and can help avoid dupicate messages and unhappy subscribers.
MageeNET does not condone "opt out" mailing lists, where names are harvested from other services and a user must explicitly request deletion. MageeNET also does not condone the reselling or sharing of mailing lists, unless it is done with the approval of the subscribers. It is understood that any e-mail addresses entered by the client, or by a client's site visitors, belong to someone who wants to be on the mailing list. Our subscription services application allows lists to require activation - that is, a user must first sign-up and then click on a link in an e-mail message in order to activate his subscription. We may require that a client use this, depending on the client's business area. Normally musicians will not be required to use activation.
Furthermore, MageeNET does not condone excessive or harrassing mailings, and reserves the right to suspend an account if complaints warrent such action.
The name, addresses, e-mail information, and any other fields collected are the property of the list owner. MageeNET will not sell, share, or otherwise use any information in any mailing list. If the client so wishes, we will send mailings for them for a fee, but the application is designed to permit clients to do their own mailngs. The entire contents of a client's database can be downloaded for their own use at any time. Should the client wish to cancel the service, they may use this download capability to take a complete copy of their data to store and maintain elsewhere.
Using The E-mail Form
By using an e-mail form, list owners can collect not only e-mail addresses, but also a variety of other information. A typical subscription form, collecting only e-mail address and geographic information, looks like this:
Using the subscription application
The subscription application is designed to accept individual signups from a form at a web site. It can also be used in a form in an e-mail message, but some users disable javascript as a virus protection measure, so this method is not recommended. List owners can enroll individuals themselves via the regular sign-up form on their web site. They can also batch load the database. Subscription acknowledgments are not sent when users are enrolled via batch loading. This mechanism is primarily intended when a list owner first converts to our application. The conversion from an existing e-mail or personal application to our subscription services is thus transparent to people already on the mailing list.
When you sign-up for subscription services, you will receive HTML code to cut and paste into a page on your web site. This code is intended as a model only. You may want to redo the formating to match the style and layout of your web site. Obviously, the fields passed from the web page to our application must be specified as shown in the model code, but formatting and wording are completely up to the user. The sample only shows five fields: e-mail address (required), city, state, zip code and country, but there are many other fields available including full street address and phone numbers. List owners can see all of the pre-defined fields by using the Database Query program.
See screen shots of some of the administrative screens here.
