Utilizing The Powerful Newsletter Feature Of BizSense

BizSense CRM And ERP has a powerful newsletter feature. Using BizSense you can enhance your relationship with your customers and prospects.

The first step is to create opt-in lists. BizSense emphasizes on the target recipient's convenience. There are certain dos and don'ts to which you have pay attention.

• Build and use your own opt-in list. Avoid purchasing email lists from third party vendors.
• Provide a means for your target recipients to opt in and out of mailing lists.
• Don't add a recipient to the mailing lists without their explicit permission.
• Include unsubscribe link in each bulk message. The recipient shouldn't have to login to unsubscribe.
• Act on bounce messages. If a recipient email server says the user doesn't exist a couple of times, unsubscribe the recipient from all your mailing lists.
• Read and understand the bulk email policies of popular email service providers like Google, Yahoo!, AOL, etc.

Once you install BizSense and save the newsletter settings, create your mailing lists. Note that the mailing lists are one way, meaning you can send email from BizSense to the mailing list subscribers. If the recipient replies to the newsletter those replies are not processed by BizSense.

BizSense offers a WYSIWYG editor to compose HTML emails. While composing the message, be sure to save both HTML and text versions. BizSense sends emails keeping in mind the recipient's preferred email format.

The hardest part is building the opt-in list. Typical ways of offering newsletter subscriptions is to put up a form on your website. When doing so make sure double opt-in is implemented. Another way is to use the BizSense Customer Control Panel. The Customer Control Panel comes with marketing preferences feature. In the marketing preferences section of the Customer Control Panel your customer can view a list of mailing lists and their current subscription to each mailing list. The customer will be able to opt-in and out of mailing lists themselves.

BizSense also provides two other means of adding recipients to the mailing lists. If you already have an opt-in list you can easily import the list using a CSV file. There's also an option to manually add recipients one by one using a web form in BizSense.

The next steps involve setting your email server to handle VERP. VERP stands for Variable Envelope Return Path. VERP helps mailing list software to automatically handle bounce messages. One last step before sending bulk emails is to handle unsubscribe links.

The newsletter message has a built-in token parser. Currently, the following tokens are available:

• @first_name
• @middle_name
• @last_name
• @unsubscribe_url

For example, if you compose the message like:
"Dear @first_name @last_name,

Welcome to our newsletter.

You can unsbuscribe from the mailing by visiting @unsubscribe_url

Thank you"

The message will be transformed into :
"Dear James Bond,

Welcome to our newsletter.

You can unsbuscribe from the mailing by visiting http://example.com/unsubscribe/secrethash

Thank you"

The recipient's first name and last name are picked up from the subscriber entity. The unsubscribe URL is composed based on your newsletter settings. The base URL of the unsubscribe URL can be BizSense Customer Control Panel URL or any arbitrary URL where you handle the unsubcribe process. You can take advantage of BizSense RESTful API to implement your own Customer Control Panel and to build double opt-in mechanism.

BizSense takes care of the nuances of bulk email sending guidelines of popular email service providers. Appropriate headers are sent, bounces are handled automatically, all actions are logged, etc. When an target recipient is being removed by bounce handler BizSense can optionally make an HTTP call to the URI you set. Using this feature you can update your BizSense REST client database.

Binary Vibes Blix Email server provides all the features you need like VERP, DKIM, throttling, etc. Contact Us if you require professional support for BizSense and consulting.

In the upcoming posts, we'll discuss other features of BizSense.