Tutorial: Integration with Existing Sign-up Form

Please note that this tutorial describes the Business edition and above because the FollowUpExpert Personal does not support parsing that is necessary to make a mailing list work with a web form.

To create a new mailing list, click the "New" button on the main window toolbar, and click "Mailing List / Follow-up Machine". This opens the "Mailing List" window. Enter the name for the new mailing list in the "Name" text box; example: "My Customers".

Alternatively, you can open an existing mailing list by double-clicking its icon.

You need an email address to which the signup form will send messages with submitted information. It may well be your own personal email address but it is by far easier to use a separate email account you created or bought for this purpose.

To add a new account, click the "Mail Settings" tab, click "Incoming Mail Accounts", and click "Add". Then enter the email address, server name, user name and password (I suggest contacting your provider if you do not know any of these).

You also need to tell the program what it should do with the messages it downloads from the POP3 server; it can either remove them or leave them there for you to download them later using an email program.

Click "OK", "OK" until you get back to the "Mailing List" window you started from, and choose the new account using the "Account" drop-down list. Example:

You can find out more about setting up the program to work with an incoming mail account here: Incoming Mail.

Click the "Opt-In" tab, and turn on the option labeled "Enable opt-in by email". Click "Form/Parsing", and then click "Add" to create a new parsing rule.

Now it may be a good idea to preview a sample message sent by the sign-up form you want to integrate with. Click the right-arrow above the "Sample message" box.

It opens a menu containing the available import options. Choose "Download sample message".

The program opens the "Download Sample Message" window; simply follow the prompts. After you choose the sample message and click "OK", the message appears in the "Sample message" text box.

Note: The first part until the blank line is the header of the message; normally it comes with a few more fields I did not include above (such as the date the message was sent, the name of the email program that was used to create the message and so on). Text below the blank line is the main text of the message. (If it is an HTML message, it's automatically converted to the text version to simplify parsing.)

To extract the email address, type "Email-Address" (without quotes) in the text box labeled "Starts with", and choose "Email" using the "Save as" drop-down list. You should notice that the program highlights the sample email address. Click "OK" to save the changes, and click "Add" to create a new parsing rule. This time you are going to tell the program how to extract the name of the new subscriber. Type "Name" in the "Starts with" text box, choose "Name" using the "Save as" drop-down list, and click "OK".

Great! We got the basics covered; let's now take care of the phone number. Click "Add" to create a new parsing rule. Enter "Phone" in the "Starts with" box; the phone number should be highlighted in the "Sample message" text box. We now need to add a new custom field to save the phone to. It's pretty simple; type "Phone" in the "Save as" text box. Click "OK" to save the changes. When asked if you want to create a new custom field, click "OK".

Click "OK" to get back to the "Mailing List" window. Then click "OK" to save the changes you made. Now it is time to test the integration.

To test everything you first need to submit the sign-up form. Then switch to [[APPLICATION_NAME]], wait a minute or two to make sure the message gets there, and click "Send/Receive". If all goes right, you will see something similar to the screenshot below on the "Status" > "Incoming Mail" panel.

Double-click the mailing list icon, and click the "Subscribers" tab. The address of the new subscriber should be there. Review the new entry to make sure all the details are there (name, phone number).

Things you did so far are going to work perfectly, if "subscribe" messages are the only ones that are ever sent to this email address. Right now the program is set up to treat every message sent to the list's address as an opt-in request and to process it.

If you are using the email address for other purposes as well, it may be a good idea to tell FollowUpExpert that only messages with "subscribe" in the subject are valid opt-in requests.

Double-click the mailing list icon, click "Conditions", then click "Incoming messages that match the following conditions", turn on the "The Subject line contains specific words" option, and click the "words" link. This opens the window entitled "Subject Words".

Enter "subscribe" in the text box, and click "Add". You also need to turn on the option labeled "Message subject does not contain any other text except the above words and phrases"; this is to ensure that messages that contain anything else apart from "subscribe" in the subject (e.g. "Should I subscribe?") do not constitute a match.

Below you can see how the window should look like after it is correctly filled out.

Click "OK" to confirm the changes, and then "OK" again to close the "Conditions" window.

Hint: Obviously the program is not limited to handling "subscribe" in the subject. You can use any text you want; just make sure it matches the subject of the messages sent by the sign-up form (see Messages Matching User-Defined Conditions).