In a previous article, we went through the steps to create an opt-in email subscription form to place on your website or blog which will allow you site visitors to sign up for your email newsletters, mailing lists and promotions.
How to create a newsletter opt-in form for your website.
The next step is adding the opt-in email subscription data that you collect from the form on your website to the mailing lists you have created in your GroupMail Newsletter Software.
In order for GroupMail’s Subscriber Add-on to process requests of this type, it needs to connect to your incoming mail server to look for messages with the subject line Subscription Details.
To do this, open the Subscriber Add-on by clicking on the button on the GroupMail Add-ons toolbar.
When the Subscriber Add-on opens, right-click the Pop3 Email Accounts in the navigation menu on the left-hand pane of the work space and choose New Account.
Click New Account.
This gives you two Options
– Auto Account Setup
– Manual Account Setup
You can follow these Steps to use the Auto Account Setup.
For the Manual Account Setup – select it and press Next.
This will bring up the Account Properties. Enter the Account Name, POP3 server address, Username and password appropriate to the email account and click on OK to complete the account configuration.
There are additional settings available under the Security Settings and Message Options tabs, however the default values work for the majority of configurations.
Next we need to create a Message Action and Message Rule.
Click New Action.
We now need to configure a rule for this account that will recognize all messages that are subscription requests (i.e. have a subject line equal to Subscription Details).
Set the Name of the rule and description as appropriate, and choose OK to complete the rule configuration.
Press Ok
Select the Group that the recipient is to be added to, choose where the email address is contained in the email message, in this case it is in the Body of the Email Message, and choose Next to proceed to the next step.
(We have the option to enable Double Opt-In support, however this is not a requirement in this scenario, so choose Next to proceed.)
In this case there are two recipient details that we need to extract from the message body, the Name, and the Email address. To parse (extract) these, enable the checkbox Parse Recipient Details from Message Body as shown below.
First off we will extract the Name of the recipient, so choose New to display the Parsing Wizard screen below.
In the Start From dropdown, select from Top of Message Body and type Name: in the After the Token Text option.
This tells subscriber to start from the top of the message body and read the name of the prospect after locating the Name: text.
Choose Next to continue.
The recipient name is contained in the message after the Name: text to the end of the line, so select this option and Next to continue.
Choose the Text and/or Numbers option and select Next to continue.
Finally, enter a descriptive name for the data being extracted, and select the group field to store the data, choose Save to complete the configuration of parsing the recipient name.
In order to extract the remaining data from the email, choose New and configure the parsing details for each of the remaining pieces of recipient data (i.e. Email Address)
Once completed there are 2 parse fields as follows:
Choose Next to proceed.
To send the recipient a confirmation message once they have been added to the group, click the … button in the Send Subscription Confirmation Message section.
Choose New to create the message.
Select the appropriate group in the Send To dropdown list, this ensures that the appropriate merge fields are present on the Insert -> Merge Fields menu.
Enter an appropriate subject line and compose the confirmation message, when complete Save the message and close the message editor.
The Subscription Confirmation message has now been added to the list, choose OK to continue.
This completes the configuration of these subscription requests. Choose OK to return to the main Subscriber screen.
We now have a POP3 email account My Newsletter which connects to messages sent to the email xyz@infacta.com address. There is one rule My Newsletter Rule which recognizes emails received with our predefined subject line Subscription Details.
For each email received with this subject line, Subscriber will parse the recipient details from the email message, and add these to the Website Newsletter Group and also send a confirmation message to the recipient.
Process Emails in the Account
To process the email messages in this account, click on the Process Now button on the Subscriber Add-On toolbar.
Click the Process Now button.
While the process is running, an icon is displayed in the system tray. Clicking the History button on the toolbar displays the statistics for the account processing.
If you have any questions, or need any help along the way, you can contact the GroupMail Support Team.