The Messaging Times

One of the most useful features of GroupMail is its ability to help automate your opt-in, opt-out and bounce management efforts. The Subscriber Add-on checks your POP3 server for new email subscriptions, unsubscribe requests and bounces and takes the action that you tell it to – either adding recipients to a group(s), deleting recipients from a group(s) or placing addresses in GroupMail’s exclusion list.

If you are having problems with Subscriber, send our technical support team a copy of the settings shown in Subscriber’s configuration assistant.

To do this:

1. Open GroupMail and click on the Subscriber Add-on button

2. Click on the “Help” menu and select “Configuration Assistant”.

3. Copy the details of the Subscriber’s Configuration Assistant (CTRL + C) and paste them (CTRL + V) into an email to support (at) infacta (dot) com.

GroupMail’s Subscriber Add-on makes it easy to keep your mailing lists up-to-date and accurate.

Nobody wants the people on their email list to unsubscribe. Some even take it personally. Of course, we all want our subscribers to be completely fulfilled and eager to receive our emails week after week, month after month. The reality though, is that there will always be some people on your list who want to unsubscribe, for whatever reason. Making it difficult for them to do doesn’t help. In fact, it can turn a passive unsubscriber into an active spam reporter.

Previously, I wrote about making opt-out links easy to find and even easier to process.

Earlier this year, Mark Brownlow shared some valuable insights about how to make your unsubscribe process painless for your recipients.

“…Unfortunately, some marketers take the Ikea approach to subscriber management. Once you’re in Ikea, it’s hard to get out again. Not without following the long route that takes you through almost the entire store.

Ikea can “trap” me because I have no viable alternative once I’m in. Plus there’s a restaurant at the end selling cheap meatballs and cake, which makes up for the long walk.

Subscribers, however, do have alternatives if they feel trapped by your inadequate unsubscribe process. They can hit the “report spam” button instead. (And you don’t give them cake for not doing so.)…”

The same is true for the opt-in or subscription process. If you make make your subscribers jump through hoops to sign up for your newsletter, they might stop jumping before they get to the end. Complicated unsubscribe processes pose an even greater risk as your sender reputation is on the line.

Make subscribing and unsubscribing easy.

Managing recipient lists is one of the most important responsibilities of an email marketer. Your success depends on well-maintained and highly relevant lists. Without the right tools, keeping your email contacts in order can be a heavy burden on both your time and budget. GroupMail allows users to manage recipient details easily.

You can import recipients from address books (Outlook Express, Eudora, etc.), CSV or .txt files, Excel documents and databases. You can also have GroupMail check for duplicates during import to ensure that nobody is added to a group twice.

You can also export all or only selected fields associated with a group.

GroupMail also allows users to merge and purge groups, exclude recipients from mailings, do partial sending, filter messages to particular subsets of your group based on database fields, add and delete recipients automatically in response to opt-in, opt-out or bounced messages and even link to contact lists stored in external databases.

Email lists are the cornerstone of an effective email marketing strategy. Make sure that you have the right tools to manage yours wisely.

Several months ago, I received an email from MediaPost about their newsletter, Social Media Insider. The email discussed the offering and a provided some background about the Editor in a few paragraphs presented in a box at the top of the message.

At the end of this introduction, they requested that I should subscribe if I wanted to continue receiving it.

“…You’re receiving this newsletter because by registering for other MediaPost publications you’ve expressed an interest in this subject matter. If you want to continue receiving Social Media Insider, please click here to subscribe…”

That’s cool. I appreciated the request for permission and followed the link.

This is where the frustration kicked in. Firstly, the link brought me to a Registration Page (see below)

I obviously already have an account because I have subscribed to email newsletters from MediaPost in the past (remember that they reminded me of this in the email box.). Ok, so I’ll login to my account.

Ok, now I’m getting fatigued and frustrated. After logging in, I’m brought to the profile page that I created some time ago when I first started subscribing to MediaPost email newsletters.

Although I’m quite frustrated and fatigued at this stage, for the sake of research, I go back to the email that I received to click on the link again, now that I’m logged in to see what happens. I’m brought to a multi-subscription form, with all of the newsletters I already subscribed to pre-checked. It turns out that I had already subscribed to Social Media Insider.

My frustration has now formed droplets of sweat on my brow. Thinking that they perhaps wanted me to confirm my subscription, I left all checked and updated my subscriptions on their site.

Well guess what? Today, I received another email from MediaPost – another edition of their Social Media Insider newsletter, with another damn box at the top of the message giving another description of the newsletter and Editor and, you guessed it, another request to subscribe to the Social Media Insider.

Aaaagghhhh!

Below are links that will point you to tutorials that will help you to manage your opt-in, opt-out and bounce management requirements.

Managing Bounces with GroupMail (Blog)

How to Process Opt-out Requests in GroupMail (Tutorials)

How to Set-up Your Website Opt-in Form (Tutorials)

I thought that it might be useful to have them all in one place.