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If you're like me, you'd rather "own" a core program than rent an ASP forever. AutoResponse Plus 3 offers Web marketers the opportunity to "own" an excellent autoresponder program that can reside on their own server.
As I've reviewed various e-mail marketing programs over the past few months, a number of readers have told me of their satisfaction with AutoResponse Plus.
In mid-July, this Perl CGI program was rewritten so that it now uses the popular MySQL database that many Unix web hosting services offer. The result is a truly powerful and flexible program. It is certainly a capable autoresponder system, and for many companies it can also serve as a newsletter listserver program.
Installation
Installing AutoResponse Plus on your web hosting platform can be a mixed blessing. Bringing it "in house" can allow you to integrate e-mail marketing with other programs on your site. But since AutoResponse Plus requires several features that aren't available in low-end hosting platforms, you will probably require a professional installer to make everything work correctly. System requirements include:
Unix, Linux operating system
MySQL database (ver. 3.23.39+) pre-installed with Perl access to several features
Perl 5.005+
Your own CGI directory
FTP access
Sendmail, Qmail, or Exim installed
Cron access to run regular tasks
Ability to direct incoming e-mail to a catch-all e-mail account (optional)
I use a pretty capable web hosting service and had MySQL already in place. I found the basic Perl program pretty easy to install. But it was difficult finding out from my hosting service exactly how to direct e-mail to a catch-all account and tell the cron program how to access certain Perl modules.
I learned two things. (1) the AutoResponse Plus support system is excellent and (2) most people would be better off having the program installed by a professional installer. The AutoResponse Plus team provides regular and thorough responses to questions placed on a user forum (www.arplus-services.com/forums). There is also a help desk for registered users.
Autoresponders
AutoResponse Plus allows you to set up as many different autoresponders as you like. Each acts independently of the others. You select a reply address and "from" name. Status can be set to "active," "suspended," or "dormant," depending on where you are in your set-up or campaign stage.
Subscription can be controlled by means of a web form, e-mail or both, depending upon your settings. There's a place to select double opt-in; new subscribers then confirm their subscription by clicking on a unique link. There's also a place where you can insert your own custom confirmation e-mail message and designate the webpage the subscriber is taken to upon confirmation.
For each autoresponder you also determine exactly the sequence of messages the new subscriber will receive. For example, when the subscriber has received all the messages in one autoresponder sequence, the program can mark them as finished or "loop" them over to the sequence of another autoresponder series.
Finally, you can indicate whether you'd like to be notified when people subscribe and unsubscribe, and whether to give subscribers the ability to edit their subscription information.
Each autoresponder also allows you to set a header and footer that can be used for all messages sent out by this list -- both for text as well as HTML messages. You can also decide whether you wish to include an unsubscribe link with each message.
Messages
Once you've created an autoresponder, then you can set up a series of messages to
send out in sequence to subscribers.
Scheduling
AutoResponse Plus's scheduling feature is more flexible that other autoresponders I've seen. Choices are: immediately, use a preset interval of __ days after the previous message, next run (that is, in the next hour or so when your autoresponder is programmed to send out messages), Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Most autoresponders allow you to set
the interval between messages, but this system allows training messages, for example, to be sent on a particular day of the week. Daily messages could be set to go out Monday through Friday, and then pause for the weekend.
You can designate the format of the particular message, specify a file attachment, or include the autoresponder's header and footer. The subject line can include personalization features, such as the subscriber's first name, if you know it.
Finally, there's a place where you can paste in a plain text version and/or an HTML version of your message. Each such window allows you to measure message length in characters, and display a preview of the message you are preparing. While the preview windows are helpful, you'll probably want to prepare your messages in
word processor and web editor applications first, and the paste them into the spaces provided.
If you are setting up a new autoresponder that is very similar to one you have already created, you can import all the existing messages from the previous autoresponder.
Newsletter Listserver
Though AutoResponse Plus is primarily designed as a follow-up autoresponder, it can also be used as a newsletter or product marketing listserver. How to do this is not immediately obvious from the menu system unless you know to go to Subscribers | Group Tasks | Broadcast.
The broadcast screen is similar to the autoresponder message screen, except that you can schedule a message to be sent on a specific date. The recipients can be drawn from multiple autoresponder lists, if you like, filtered by number of selection criteria, such as autoresponder list, tracking tag, subscriber status, date of subscription, and information contained in custom fields. In case you have duplicate addresses, the program enables you to de-dupe the list easily.
Broadcast messages can be set to go out on a particular date, immediately, on the "next run," or on a specific day of the week. You can use the "instant test" feature to e-mail a message to yourself to check for completeness.
A minor inconvenience of the broadcast feature is your inability to save broadcast messages to work on at a future time. Yes, you could work around this by scheduling the message to be sent far in advance, but a "pending" option with the ability to select for future editing would make more sense.
Formats and Options
AutoResponse Plus has a great deal of flexibility with regard to e-mail format. Though it doesn't "sniff" the recipient's e-mail capability, the subscription forms allow the subscriber to indicate preference -- text or HTML. Alternatively, you can send multi-part MIME messages with both HTML and text; the recipient's e-mail program determines which format is visible.
Personalization
AutoResponse Plus has a rather strong set of personalization tags, allowing you to use the data in your file in a wide variety of ways. Of course, common tags such as {FIRSTNAME}will be used often. If your data file doesn't have anything in the
first name field, you can set the tag up with a default word such as {FIRSTNAME Friend}, so that your message might read "Dear Friend" if "Dear John" isn't available.
In addition to common name and e-mail tags, you can pull information from custom fields, such as phone number or order number.
The system provides you special links so you can place wherever you like in the message an unsubscribe link, address change link, unsubscribe from all autoresponders link, message number, day and dates, and any of a variety of e-mail signatures.
There's even an opt-in confirmation link that would allow you to send messages to those who haven't confirmed their subscription yet, to try to increase your number of double opt-in subscribers.
All in all, the personalization system is superb.
Subscription Features
In this system, all subscribers are part of the same database, which allows you to send messages to subscribers across all your lists, if you like. But each record is tied to a particular autoresponder list. Thus, if an individual is signed up for several autoresponder lists, they will have a record for each list in the subscriber table. Fortunately, it is easy to de-dupe the list (get rid of duplicate e-mail addresses) before
a particular e-mailing is sent out.
Subscription forms
Once you have created an autoresponder, AutoResponse Plus has a utility that will generate an HTML subscription form for you. You can decide which fields you want to ask for: title, first name, middle name, last name, full name. You can also make sure that the first name of each of these fields is capitalized. In addition, you can enable subscribers to select their choice of format (text or HTML). You can also include a tracking tag that tells you exactly which form the subscriber used to sign up, or
to which offer the subscriber responded.
If you're proficient with HTML, you can customize the subscription form to create additional fields. Any fields on your subscription form with names that begin "arpcustom_" (such as "arpcustom_phone") will also be captured and stored by AutoResponse Plus, usable for later personalization.
Unfortunately, you can't require specific fields to be filled in, though a programmer could build some JavaScript into a subscription form to require this.
E-Mail Subscriptions
If your installation of AutoResponse Plus can receive e-mail subscriptions, you can use the "mailto" code generated by the program, which (for most, but not all subscribers) will include the tracking tag as well. If available in the e-mail message, AutoResponse Plus extracts first, middle, last name, and full name from the e-mail header and inserts them into the subscriber's record
When a person subscribes, you can prepare a welcome message that is immediately sent -- or just include them in the regular autoresponder sequence -- depending upon your preferences.
Remote E-Mail Control
If you have other software that, say, sells an e-book, you can program that software to send an e-mail message that can add or delete a subscription from an autoresponder list. In this case, the subject line carries information such as the subscribers name, e-mail address, message format, and tracking tag. You can also set up your system to let you know when such a remote control command has been received.
Unsubscription Link
Every newsletter can carry a link that, when clicked, automatically unsubscribes the e-mail address from a particular autoresponder list -- or from all your lists, for that matter. If you like, you can also send those who unsubscribe to a particular webpage and send them a custom good-bye message.
Address Change Interface
One very nice feature of AutoResponse Plus is the ability to include a URL on each message that allows changes to subscriber information: name, e-mail address, message format (no preference, HTML, or plain text). That's great! However, the interface also allows subscribers to change the number of the "Last Message Sent" and the subscription status "Active," "Paused," "Cancelled." I'm concerned that subscribers won't know what these fields mean, so I question their presence on the form.
Tracking Tags
AutoResponse Plus uses tracking tags to identify subscribers by the sign-up form or offer they came in on. Tracking tags, one per record, allow you to sort subscribers by offer and send out special mailings to subscribers that meet certain criteria. But tracking tags are also used to personalize the subscriber experience, so a subscriber that joined from a particular offer can be taken to a page suggesting purchase of a particular item
relating to the offer. Tracking tags can also specify custom URLs for subscribe failure, unsubscribe success, and unsubscribe failure.
Utilities
AutoResponse Plus enables you to import information from data files rather quickly. Data must be in comma separated variable (CSV) format. After import, you are asked which field in the record corresponds to AutoResponse Plus's standard fields. I was disappointed that you can't import any custom fields into AutoResponse Plus, only its standard fields.
You can also export information from the subscriber file. By means of selection filters you decide on which subscribers' information you need. Then you export these fields: title, first, middle, last name, full name, e-mail address, tracking tag, IP address, and format preference. You can set the field separator you desire (usually a comma), and use quotes around fields if you
like. Unfortunately you are not allowed to export subscription dates, message numbers, custom fields or notes you have made in this record. The file is exported to a temporary directory on your server, and can be downloaded by FTP.
Help System
As noted above, AutoResponse Plus's support system is quite thorough and responsive to user questions. However, AutoResponse Plus's internal help system leaves something to be desired.
Presently, you can find contextual help in the form of a pop-up webpage window (served from arplus-services.com) corresponding to every screen in the AutoResponse Plus menu system. A help index gives the title of each of these help screens. But new users who can't figure out a feature may be hard pressed to get the answer due to two major weaknesses:
Search Features
. The help screens cannot be searched by keyword. Thus, if you don't know where to find a particular feature, or on which screen to set a variable, you have to search screen-by-screen until you find what you are looking for.
Quick Start Pages
. The help system is entirely based upon the menu structure -- Autoresponders, Subscribers, Tracking Tags, Your Profile, System, and Affiliates -- but has little to do with actions you may wish to take. Thus, if you wish to create a message for an autoresponder or send out a broadcast message -- the simple, basic things a novice might want to do -- you don't have any step-by-step guidance. This can be quite frustrating and calls for an extra measure of patience. (The developer tells me that a quick start guide will be available shortly.)
Some features aren't covered in the help screens at all, such as how to subscribe via remote control. There is no comprehensive manual that discusses all the features systematically.
Weaknesses
One problem with installing AutoResponse Plus on your own webserver is e-mail output speed. When the system is responding to incoming e-mail messages, output speed isn't an issue. But the process of churning out 1,000 or 20,000 e-mail messages in a newsletter list can be quite time consuming, depending upon your webserver's e-mail configuration. In my case, I calculated that I could have sent out my e-mail newsletter a bit faster via DSL from a desktop mailserver than I was able to through AutoResponse Plus on my webserver.
In all fairness, this isn't really AutoResponse Plus's fault. It depends upon your own server's e-mail configurations. The developer is seeking a server especially configured to send out e-mail messages quickly to large lists. But the hosting fees for such a single-purpose server may be comparable to monthly listserver fees for an ASP listserver, and you no longer have the advantage of hosting it on the same server that hosts the rest of your website.
As mentioned above, AutoResponse Plus's help system needs help. But the web interface is sometimes confusing and needs redesign, as well. For example, you set up system-wide "subscribe success" URLs under System | Settings. But if you want a customized "subscribe success" URL for a particular autoresponder, you don't find it under the Autoresponder section, but under Tracking Tags.
Once you've spent some time with AutoResponse Plus, you know where to find what you're looking for, but for the novice, a complex program like AutoResponse Plus could profit from having its menu system studied and improved by a usability specialist.
The Bottom Line
Despite its weaknesses, I found AutoResponse Plus to be an extremely capable autoresponder system, more flexible than any others I've reviewed to date. Your ability to create multiple autoresponder sequences on your own server gives you tremendous marketing power. The $99 single domain license fee is a bargain price to pay for the quality programming built into this package. So long as you can get professional installation help and don't need to send out large e-mailings in the tens of thousands, AutoResponse Plus will be all you'll ever need in an autoresponder system. If your company has a modest-sized newsletter list, AutoResponse Plus serves an adequate listserver, as well. Strongly recommended.
In mid-July, this Perl CGI program was rewritten so that it now uses the popular MySQL database that many Unix web hosting services offer. The result is a truly powerful and flexible program. It is certainly a capable autoresponder system, and for many companies it can also serve as a newsletter listserver program.
