First Webs Demos; A resource for WSIFIRSTWEBS.COM; Rockford, IL

Using Voloper eMarketer (VeM) Lesson 01

Topics in This Lesson . . .

What the VeM is Not!
The Importance of Reading the VeM Manual
Feeling Your Way Around the VeM
What You and Your IC Should Do First!
The Admin Area of the VeM
About Permission email Marketing
VeM Definitions

What the VeM is Not

The VeM is not a "fancy MS Outlook". If you want to send html emails to lists, you can do that with Outlook. This program lets you change the look of your communications, lets you separate you communications based on interests Site Visitors have given you, lets you see who has opened their mail, lets you manage and adjust your mailings, and more.

This is a marketing tool. Properly managed, this tool allows you to stay in touch with your clients, solicit new clients, build relationships in your community, and build "community"in your relationships. Everything your customers and prospects do on your web site will be reflected in your Admin area.

The Importance of Reading the VeM Manual

Voloper's manual is available in PDF from your IC. Download the manual from your IC's site and print it. It is 77 pages long.

I encourage you to scan through all pages. Get a feeling for the content. Then go back and read these pages carefully: Page 6 - How the VeM Meets Your Needs, Pages 11 & 12 - VeM Mass Mailing Email Campaigns and Your Mass E-Mailing Message, Page 30 - VeM Predefined Template Options, Pages 36 to 40 - Reporting, Page 44-Locating a Subscriber, Page 56 & 57 - Deleting a Product and Edit Sign-Up Greeting, and page 71 - Export Email List.

The rest of the content may be daunting for first time users. However, if you are understand the content, read as much as you wish.

Feeling Your Way Around the VeM

For this lesson and all lessons, most images are hyperlinked. Click on the image for a larger view.

Step 1: Login to the ADMIN with your Admin URL and Password. If you don't have assigned an assigned User/PW, your IC will need to obtain it for you. Your screen will look slightly different depending on whether you have Voloper's OBS, OS MAX, VGM, or other web site. Your company logo and name will appear in the white panel near the top.




Step 1, L1	Step 2, L1
Log-in to Admin of site	Log-in to eMarketer

Step 2: On the image of Step 1, somewhere midway down the left panel you will see a link called eMarketer. This link takes you to eMarketers Admin panel shown in Step 2. Familiarize yourself with the menu names. Refer back to the Voloper manual to associate menu names with the function of that menu.

What You and Your IC Should Do First!

You have read the VeM manual, and it says the VeM is database driven. That means that whatever you present to your web site visitors to get information, or to take some form of action - that information will be stored in a database for you to do something with. That "something" depends on your business. In this case, the visitors to the FUMC site are church members, and any members in the community who have a need to connect to a church. In a simplified way we could say that the "business marketing" purpose of this site is "Christian evangelism". Your purpose will obviously be different.

What you and your IC do first will be answered by these basic questions:

Who are you trying to reach (i.e. your target audience or audiences)?
How large is your audience, and are there many differences amongst them?
What do you want them to do when they visit your site (you will have multiple purposes)?
How often do you wish to stay in touch with them?
Do you have their permission to email them (i.e. did they "opt-in")?

There may be many more questions specific to your business or organization. Your IC will help you identify these questions and build your eMarketer pages to capture the needed information.

Let us illustrate with an example. Some of the purposes of FUMC's site are to use eMarketer to send out the church newsletters, to attract members to sign for certain areas of ministry, and to bring unchurched people into the membership.

The site has 2 forms. One is a general "Contact Us" form at http://fumcbelvidere.org/contactus.aspx. The eMarketer form a visitor to the site sees is at http://fumcbelvidere.org/eventsignup.aspx. The Contact Us form (shown in Step 3) is a general form and the information is not captured in a database. It is transmitted by email to the church office. The eMarketer form (shown in Step 4) captures important information from visitors and saves it in a database. Step 5 shows the Admin page of eMarketer for the form information in Step 4.

You and Your IC should decide what form elements you want on the Contact Us form. Keep this form short. You don't want visitors to fill out too much information initially. Interested people will have voluntarily moved to the eMarketer form. Here is where you want to capture as much information as necessary so that you can communicate with them in the future.


Contact Us also has an Admin area for set-up. Access it from the Main Admin menu under Form. It looks like below.
Step 3, L1	Step 4, L1	Step 5, L1
Contact Us Form	eMarketer Form	eMarketer Admin

Be sure to enlarge the images in Step 4 and Step 5 and study them carefully. You will see the bottom part of Step 4 in blue is exactly the same as the bottom part of Step 5 in white. With the VeM you have the flexibility to change anything you want in Step 4 by using the menus in the Admin Details panel. It will then be changed and will appear to the visitor just like it looks in Step 4. The information you put into eMarketer in the Admin Details panel, plus the Displayed Sign-Up fields, plus the Extra Sign-Up fields you may add will all appear in Admin as shown in Step 5. Read on. The process will become clear as you work through the Steps.

Your first step is to determine what that information is. I recommend you do this before you upload your subscriber lists with name, address, and email address - so that the fields will be automatically populated. If you do not do it in that order, you must send an email to everyone on your lists and have them check off the appropriate categories. Your IC can upload your subscriber list with related categories for a small service charge. This is well worth doing if you have hundreds or thousands of subscribers.

The Admin Area of the VeM

Step 6, L1

Admin Details Menu

Step 6: In the center of the eMarketer Admin panel is a menu title Admin Details. Study the sub-menu names. We will explore those sub-menus in Lesson 2. For now, just remember this is where you set-up the Categories and Products that show up when visitors go to the eMarketer page. These Categories and Products are as shown in the bottom blue part of Step 4.

When you are finished setting up the form, the Admin page will look pretty much like it does in Step 5. The only difference might be in your selection of which Displayed Sign-Up fields and which Extra Sign-Up fields are used. These fields will be explained in Lesson 02.

About Permission email Marketing

Permission email marketing means that you have obtained permission from the recipients of your emails to send them information. In a church membership, or in a client/business relationship that permission is implied. However, just to be sure, you may wish to use the Double Opt-in process so that you have a record of obtaining permission. For now, the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 does not require Double Opt-in permission. However, legislation may be forthcoming on that sooner than we might expect.

Please read and understand the email definitions below. Read the CAN-SPAM Act by following the email links in the table below.

VeM and General Email Definitions

Category/ Categories	The highest level of product, service, or topical interest that you would place on eMarketer form.
Product's)	A sub-group of the Categories.
Template	A web page that has been set-up to accept your email message in HTML. A template might include images, addresses, and so on. Templates are useful if they are customized to the audience receiving them. Templates have predefined areas to type in or cut-n-paste your message. So they are huge timesavers. VeM comes with several templates, but I encourage all clients to have several customized base around the look-n-feel of their site.
Sign-Up Greeting	This is the automatic message that is sent when a visitor fills out the eMarketer form and submits it. This message is customizable in the ADMIN DETAIL area.
HTML	HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is the set of symbols or codes inserted in a file intended for display on a World Wide Web browser page. The markup tells the Web browser how to display a Web page's words and images for the user. Each individual markup code is referred to as an element (but many people also refer to it as a tag).
Campaign	A Campaign is the process of selecting a template, selecting your recipients, adding you text, scheduling, and then sending the message. Campaigns can be design and sent 1 of 3 ways. They are: simple text only, HTML only, and both text and HTML. HTML is generally preferred by views, but with the increase in Spam, some email filters block html messages.
CAN SPAM Act	The Can Spam Act of 2003 is a commonly used name for the United States Federal law more formally known as S. 877 or the "Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003." The law took effect on January 1, 2004. The Can Spam Act allows courts to set damages of up to $2 million when spammers break the law. Federal district courts are allowed to send spammers to jail and/or triple the damages if the violation is found to be willful. The law requires email to conform to certain practices. For more info go to http://nilsem.com/internetmrkt_email.htmland http://www.spamlaws.com/federal/can-spam.shtml.
Opt-in e-mail	Opt-in e-mail is a Web marketing term for e-mail that recipients have previously requested by signing up at a Web site or special ad banner. Typically, Web users are invited to sign up for promotional information about one or more categories of products or services. Those who sign up have thus "opted in." Anyone sending them e-mail as a result hopes that the message will not be perceived as unwanted Spam.
Double-Opt-in email	Another option for addressing unsolicited marketing emails. Sending a Double-Opt-in message allows your recipients to tell you they want to continue receiving your communications. As Spam problems proliferate, this system may be required by the Federal Government to show that you have indeed obtained permission to send communications. It is there now to use in the VeM.
Opt-out	When someone who receives your email replies by email that they no longer wish to receive them. Opt-outs are reported automatically to you by the VeM.
Reporting	Those activities which include gathering data about the email campaign you sent out. What is reported by the VeM is the # of emails sent, opened, and failed for each campaign. Also reported is Subscriber growth, opt-outs (those leaving the campaign), complete list of subscribers, and monthly activities.
SMS	SMS (Short Message Service) is a service for sending messages of up to 160 characters (224 characters if using a 5-bit mode) to mobile phones that use Global System for Mobile (GSM) communication. SMS is similar to paging. However, SMS messages do not require the mobile phone to be active and within range and will be held for a number of days until the phone is active and within range. SMS messages are transmitted within the same cell or to anyone with roaming service capability. Uses of SMS include notifying a phone owner of a message, notifying a doctor of a patient with an emergency problem, notifying a service person about their next call, address, or pickup.
VCard	A VCard is an electronic business (or personal) card and also the name of an industry specification for the kind of communication exchange that is done on business or personal cards. You may have seen a VCard attached to an e-mail note someone has sent you. Because VCard is a published industry specification, software application developers can create programs that process VCards by letting you view them, or drag-and-drop them to an address book or some other application. VCards can include images and sound as well as text.

Congratulations on finishing this lesson. I encourage you to complete the Lesson Feedback form before moving on.

Respectfully,
Vernon Wanner
Internet Consultant