This will be a popular release! How do I know? We’ve finally delivered on two of our most highly requested features. Those two features are mass mail and suspension logic for unpaid invoices. In total, SPBAS v1.6 offers 5 new features with 12 improvements of existing features and 24 bug fixes.
  

Mass Mail Overview

Our goal with SPBAS is to make every module as complete as possible. We understand that the best things in life are often the hardest to come by. So while we could have implemented a half baked mass mail solution just to say we have the feature, we didn’t. Instead, we researched the market and consulted with serious e-mail marketers to create a very solid mass mail application. We hope you will agree.
  

Mass Mail Lists

Lists enable you to create groups of customers that meet specific criteria that you define. For example, say you have a release notice or policy change and you need to contact all customers. You’d create a list for that.

Lists are essentially a set of rules that you assign to a campaign. Each time you send a campaign the mailing list is generated based on the predefined rules. Approaching it this way results in a list that is dynamic and always automatically up to date.
  

  

Mass Mail Campaigns

For each mass mail campaign you can edit the e-mail copy, view it online or send it to yourself for testing. We provide several built in replaceable tags that you can use like {first name}, {last name}, etc.

We also support the inclusion of an Alt Body to accompany your HTML e-mail copy. The Alt Body is designed to be the plain text version of the HTML e-mail. Not everyone can receive HTML e-mails so it’s important to send a plain text copy along too so your message isn’t lost in a tangle of HTML markup.
  

  

After you’ve created your e-mail copy, you need to assign the campaign to one or more lists using the Assign Lists tab. Don’t worry, we’ve got duplicates covered. Even if a customer matches the criteria to be assigned to both lists, they’ll only receive one copy of your campaign.
  

  

Finally, we are ready to send the campaign using the Send Mail tab. This is where it gets really interesting. You have the following options to choose from:

- Max to send per hour
- Who to send to? every customer in the list or only customers who have never received the campaign before.
- When to send? Now, Per Schedule (date & time), Periodic Schedule (interval in days & time)
  

  

Imagine what you can do with that! Here at SPBAS, we’ll use the Periodic Schedule feature to e-mail our free version customers a few days after signup to make sure everything is going ok. Just to see if we can help with anything or if there are questions. It will help us stay in touch with you guys and hopefully make us better at what we do.

How will you use the mass mail features? Let me know in the comments.
  

Suspension Logic

Have a look at SPBAS Admin -> Settings -> Billing & Invoice. I’d like to touch on two new features today.

The first is invoice reminders which you can set to automatically send at your desired interval. For example, if I entered 30,60,90 the customer would get a reminder on the 30th day, the 60th day and finally the 90th day. The 90th day would be the final notice. The e-mail template used for these notices can be found at Admin -> Settings -> Templates -> Invoice, Invoice Reminder.

The second new feature is the ability to suspend the package for unpaid invoices after x days have passed. You could set this to be in sync with the invoice reminders. For example, using the 30,60,90 interval again, you could set the packages to suspend on the 97th day, 7 days after the final invoice reminder. How you configure it is up to you, tailor it to fit your exact business needs.
  

  

In Closing…

With this release SPBAS has become more stable and feature rich. We hope you enjoy the software.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 19th, 2010 at 2:56 am and is filed under News & Info. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.