Building Your Business

There are spambots roaming the internet that target helpless forms and submit repeatedly to these forms with garbage information. One defense against spambots is to use CAPTCHA which are randomly generated fuzzy characters. The person completing the form must type in the matching characters to prove that they are human and not a computer. Each time the form is displayed the fuzzy characters are different.



It is easy to setup CAPTCHA with Relevant Tools web forms. In the forms setup area all you need to do is click the CAPTCHA option and the form code will automatically be generated for your form.



By default the CAPTCHA will be placed as the last item in the form just before the submit button. You can move the code to a different location in your form if so desired. Let us know if you need help doing this.

You can also control the number of characters used and the size of the box used for the characters. To do this you need to add some parameters to the generated code. By default there are 6 CAPTCHA characters with each character being 35 pixels wide and 40 pixels high. If for example you want to use 8 characters that are 20 pixels wide and 30 pixels high you would add c=8&w=20&h=30 so that the code looked like this:

<img src="http://form.relevanttools.com/eis-cgi-bin/tch?c=8&w=20&h=30">

Using the default setup will enable you to use CAPTCH to protect your forms without worrying about any of the technical details. If you need to change how it looks and need help, just let us know.

Labels: tutorial, web forms

With Relevant Tools web forms you can easily setup fields that can be used as counters so that each time the form is filled out the field will automatically be increased from the last signup. For example if you are registering players for a youth sports league you can have a unique registration number that is automatically assigned to each player.



To set this up for you need to first define a field in your database to be used for the auto increment counter. The field type should be integer. You can name the field anything that you would like. If you are registering customers for a conference you could name the field Customer Number. Then in the forms area select the form you want to add the auto increment field to and click on forms setup. Next click on the link "auto increment field".



If you do not see the auto increment field link for your account on the forms setup page all you need to do is go to our contact page and request that the auto increment feature be turned on for your account. There is no additional cost for turning on or using the auto increment fields.

Select the field that you want to use for the auto increment field. You can enter the starting number. If you do not enter a starting number it will start at one.



You also have the option to enter a limit number. If you do not need to limit your form signups simply leave the limit number blank. A limit number is useful if you are registering customers for a conference or event and need to limit the number of registrations. Once the limit is reached anyone signing up will receive an error message that the event is full. On your error page you can have yet another Relevant Tools form to signup for the waiting list!

Labels: tutorial, web forms

It is easy to create messages to use in your Relevant Tools account for an email campaign to your database. There are many different ways and each method has advantages. One of the easiest methods is to simply email the message into Relevant Tools. On the Relevant Tools Messages page click on 'create a new message' and follow the instructions for option 1.

Compose your email message in your own email program. You can format it as you normally would and can even attach a small file or picture as part of your message. Send it to the email address specified on the create a new message page as it varies depending on the location on your account. The subject will be your userid that you use to login, followed by a semi colon and the actual subject of the message.



After you send the message into Relevant Tools you will get an email message back to let you know that your message has been installed. You can then edit your message. You can change who the email is from so that it is not from your personal email address but rather from a company address. You can edit the subject if need be.

The actual message is typically a MIME message that is composed of multiple parts - text, html, and any associated images or files. The nice thing is that you did not have to worry about these different parts.



But if you want to change the actual content of the message you may want to go back to your email program and make the changes there and send it again as editing the generated html can be tricky.



The last part of your message are any associated images or files. They have been encoded so that they can be transmitted on the internet. Don't change this part at all in the edit screen. If you need to make changes go back to your email program.



Test your message and when you are happy with how it looks you are ready to start your email campaign and send it out to your database.

Labels: email messages, tutorial

Launching your first email campaign with Relevant Tools is easy. First you must create your newsletter or email message by using one of the methods available in the message area. You can upload your message, mail it in, create a text only or image email, upload a file or use a specially designed template. Once your message has been created you are ready to send it out to your database. Click on Mailings in the top navigation bar and select your message.



Your mailing will automatically be assigned a mailing name that will be used for viewing the mailing progress and results. You can change the mailing name if you would like. Next you will select who the mailing will be sent to. Many times you will be sending it to everyone in a particular database but you can also select people who signed up in a particular time period, from a particular signup form, or do one or more searches on your database to select people by any parameters you would like.



You should ALWAYS TEST before sending or scheduling the real mailing. Enter your email address to receive a test message.



After sending the test message you should look at the statistics displayed for the mailing. It will show how many records are selected, the number of deselected records due to duplicate, bad or missing email addresses and the number of records that have been previously unsubscribed. Verify that the database is the right database and this is the number of records that you are expecting.



You should have also received the test mailing in your inbox. Verify that it is indeed the message that you want to send. Do not be alarmed when you see that the unsubscribe link in the footer of the email is not your own email address. The system randomly selects a record to use for the test mailing.

You can choose to either send the mailing now or schedule it for later. When you schedule a mailing for later everything associated with the mailing - the message and the records selected for the mailing - are copied over to the mail server queue and held until the specified date and time. If you change the message in Relevant Tools or records are added or changed in your database that will not be reflected in the mailing unless your delete the scheduled mailing and submit it again.



When you send the mailing out now it is immediately submitted to the mailing queue. Depending on how many other mailings are already in the mailing queue it may start going out immediately.



You can track the results in the results area and see real time how many messages have been sent. If you have open and click through tracking turned on you will also be able to see how many people are reading your message and taking action.

Labels: email campaign, email messages, send email, tutorial