: How to do a send an e-mail in 189 easy steps
I've been learning how to do eMarketing, and let's just say... I never knew sending an e-mail was so complicated.
(oh, and this is the Abridged Version! btw.)
1. Set up templates.
2. import test list.
3. Send test e-mail.
4. What, you mean that didn't work?!
5. Go into test list.
6. ... you mispelled my name, peoples...
7. erase my entry.
8. Put it in manually. Because I can.
9. Send new test e-mail.
10. Yay! I got it.
11. Send template to approval.
12. changes required.
13. make changes.
14. Send template to approval.
15. changes required.
16. make changes.
17. Repeat steps 11 - 16 about five more times.
18. Watch tutorial on personalization and dynamic content.
19. Suddenly realize we can do EVERYTHING off of one template. This is so super special awesome!!
20. Make it so, number 1. Even if it takes four hours to build this one super special awesome master dynamic template of awesomeness.
21. Send test e-mail.
22. Learn why defaults are important.
23. Add defaults.
24. Send test e-mail.
25. Show it for approvals.
26. "We've never done this kind of dynamic content before. let's not use it. What if it messes up?"
27. "That's why there's defaults. In theory, though, it would never happen."
28. Go back to using multiple templates.
29. Yay! Personalization can stay! We only need 3 templates now!
30. Whoops, make that four.
31. copy/paste simulated 'from' e-mails to the test list to test the reply feature.
32. These e-mails don't really exist, you know. Will that be a problem?
33. Send test e-mail.
34. Hit reply.
35. Hey, where'd it go?
36. To an address that doesn't exist. how do you make e-mail boxes?
37. Bring up this fact constantly, and ask this question again, only to leave you about as confused as a child asking their mommy, 'where do babies come from?' and getting no answer.
38. In case you're wondering, no. The stork does not create e-mail inboxes.
39. Call customer support.
40. Apparently as long as we have the correct domain, it should catch anything from any address, real or not, and then forward it somewhere.
41. Ask customer support ten billion other questions about everything else we need to know too.
42. Hey, it isn't always easy getting through. Might as well make the most of it!
43. Does this domain even exist?
44. Go downstairs to find out.
45. Woah, shit, someone registered this domain last year.
46. Woah, shit, it was us! Sweet.
47. It's been properly set up.
48. But it has no e-mail boxes.
49. Have one big catch-all box created, so at least messages have somewhere to go.
50. Set up reply forwarding settings.
51. Send test e-mail.
52. now where'd it go?
53. Track e-mails.
54. Send e-mail straight to new catch-all box.
55. Catch-all box plays catch.
56. Send test e-mail.
57. Well, we know it went OUT.
58. Call customer support.
59. They work on the problem.
60. Because I'm just a little impatient sometimes, work on a workaround.
61. Argue for that workaround on grounds that subdomains aren't domains, and thus they don't have to match.
62. Call customer support to ask if that's really the case.
63. "Oh... so taking that off makes bad things happen..."
64. And the subdomain comes first... not second... so I was stripping off the domain... oh... Yeah, that could be bad.
65. Okay, let's fix the real problem now. What's up with the domain?
66. Run tests.
67. They ask me to run more tests.
68. Give them the results of the tests I already ran, plus screenshots of all our e-mail histories, they narrow down the problem.
69. Send test e-mail and reply to it.
70. That was pointless, yes. But I was just curious if they fixed it and hadn't told me yet...
71. Time passes. And somehow, somewhere - it's fixed.
72. Send test e-mail.
73. I don't see it fixed.
74. Send another test e-mail.
75. It goes through.
76. Send another test e-mail, this time with personalization!
77. It goes through. Happy dance!!!
78. Pull up the theme song to Portal on my iTunes, because damn, I think I'm actually going to cry with happiness here.
79. Send final test e-mail from another template.
80. Nothing.
81. Wait.
82. Refresh.
83. Shit...
84. Send again.
85. Nope. nada.
86. Okay, so some are going through and some aren't?
87. That fixed part of the problem...
88. Call customer support and tell them of this new development.
89. Track e-mails out and in.
90. Repeat steps 50 - 59 again.
91. Oh, and then do that again. Because repetition builds habits!
92. Send a mass test e-mail out of all the templates and tell everyone who gets one to reply back.
93. I get two.
94. wtf?!
95. Wait a sec... these two are from the same 'from' address. So only one address comes through.
96. I thought this was supposed to be domain specific, not address specific.
97. Call customer support.
98. Does that inbox suddenly exist?
99. No. The stork does not make e-mail inboxes. The stork does not make e-mail inboxes, right?
100. Go downstairs to see if the stork made an e-mail inbox last night.
101. No storks downstairs. Not even a stray duck.
102. Okay, what is different about that address than all the others?
103. Sherlock Holmes goes to investigate the list we uploaded in step 2.
104. Stares at it.
105. *blink blink* Oh. My. GOD.
106. "oh... person next to me... come take a look at this..."
107. "Uh oh... that's a scary tone."
108. Okay, so it was a scary tone. It was the kind of tone a mental patient in an insane asylum would use.
109. "What do you see that's different?"
110. "Is it something obvious?"
111. "It will be once you see it."
112. ...
113. The domain was misspelled... in all but one address. And it was the one address that went to me.
114. Fix them all manually.
115. Send test e-mail and reply.
116. It comes back.
117. Send mass test e-mail and tell everyone to reply.
118. They ALL come back.
119. Start laughing.
120. The kind of laughter that a mental patient would have.
121. No, this kind of laughter is about 1/2 mental patient and 1/2 evil overlord.
122. And boy does it get strange looks.
123. Especially when the tears start rolling down my cheeks.
124. Insist that I probably need to be taken away to a little white room somewhere.
125. Pull my headphones out of the soundboard and plug my speakers in, and hit play on that Portal song.
126. Send mass test e-mail with personalization and tell everyone to reply.
127. Oh god, it works! it works!!
128. Inform customer support that we are, in fact, merely idiots. And that the second problem was ours, not theirs.
129. Hope they got as good a laugh as I did.
130. Look at the real list.
131. Fix ALL the spelling.
132. Import list.
133. Prep templates.
134. Track down discrepancies in the list.
135. There are two with local e-mail addresses that are on some kind of suppression list that we don't have access to change.
136. Call customer support.
137. Get access to change it.
138. Change it.
139. Check the lists again.
140. Double check the list, especially for misspellings.
141. Eyes glaze over after the first 100.
142. Take eye breaks to start staring at actionscript for a while instead. Which is actually doing what I want it to do for a change. So I'm kind of sorry that I had to stop it and go back to the task at hand.
143. Finish lists.
144. send final templates to approval.
145. Great... now there's not enough space between the banner and the 'click to view in browser' link
146. And apparently, we can't add a space.
147. And even if we did, the space is still a hyperlink.
148. Why the space is a hyperlink is anybody's guess... And nobody wants to guess anymore.
149. Try to fix it by hitting the enter key.
150. Try to fix it with a break tag.
151. Try to fix it by shouting at it.
152. Decide just to remove hyperlink from banner, and put that link somewhere else.
153. On all four templates.
154. But not on the text versions.
155. Which go back to approvals.
155. Oh, and the 'click to view in browser' link doesn't work either.
156. The server goes down NOW?! Why right now?!
157. Wait.
158. Wait a little bit more.
159. Call customer support.
160. Ask when the server will be back up, only to learn that it's not down, and that the 'click to view in browser' link doesn't work in a test e-mail for some insufficiently explained reason.
161. Point that fact out to everyone else.
162. Templates are officially 100% approved! Time to send!
163. Take two steps toward my computer.
164. "... oops."
165. Did I just hear an oops? Oh god, no...
166. Someone clicked the 'opt out' button...
167. But this time, it was on a test e-mail, with a real person's name on it. And they just opted a real person out.
168. Laugh like someone who belongs in a mental institution.
169. While crying.
170. Get shushed because the sound of head against metal door frame is a little too loud.
171. Try to find the missing person in the list.
172. At least the list is only 300 people long and not 279,920 people long...
173. But everyone's accounted for.
174. Everyone on the test lists are accounted for too...
175. Realize that the only way to figure out who got opted out is to send the real e-mail and then trace what couldn't send.
176. And by this point, everyone agrees with me.
177. Set up the first template to send.
178. Double check everything.
179. Click the send button.
180. Click to confirm that I really did hit the send button.
179. Repeat steps 177-180 for template number 2.
180. Repeat steps 177-180 for template number 3.
181. Ditto for template number 4, but look at the list one more time just to spice it up a little.
182. Pull a report.
183. Hey, our missing person has a name and e-mail address!! And was in the first batch. How about that.
184. And go figure, I can't figure out how to bring them back...
185. Call customer support.
186. I'm kind of glad they have a lot of people down there, because the same people are probably getting pretty sick and tired of hearing from me right now.
187. And while I'm doing that, we got our first reply!!
188. Proof that the system works! Way to go, system!
189. E-mail sent!
Current Lips: purple, turquoise and gold gradient blend
I've been learning how to do eMarketing, and let's just say... I never knew sending an e-mail was so complicated.
(oh, and this is the Abridged Version! btw.)
1. Set up templates.
2. import test list.
3. Send test e-mail.
4. What, you mean that didn't work?!
5. Go into test list.
6. ... you mispelled my name, peoples...
7. erase my entry.
8. Put it in manually. Because I can.
9. Send new test e-mail.
10. Yay! I got it.
11. Send template to approval.
12. changes required.
13. make changes.
14. Send template to approval.
15. changes required.
16. make changes.
17. Repeat steps 11 - 16 about five more times.
18. Watch tutorial on personalization and dynamic content.
19. Suddenly realize we can do EVERYTHING off of one template. This is so super special awesome!!
20. Make it so, number 1. Even if it takes four hours to build this one super special awesome master dynamic template of awesomeness.
21. Send test e-mail.
22. Learn why defaults are important.
23. Add defaults.
24. Send test e-mail.
25. Show it for approvals.
26. "We've never done this kind of dynamic content before. let's not use it. What if it messes up?"
27. "That's why there's defaults. In theory, though, it would never happen."
28. Go back to using multiple templates.
29. Yay! Personalization can stay! We only need 3 templates now!
30. Whoops, make that four.
31. copy/paste simulated 'from' e-mails to the test list to test the reply feature.
32. These e-mails don't really exist, you know. Will that be a problem?
33. Send test e-mail.
34. Hit reply.
35. Hey, where'd it go?
36. To an address that doesn't exist. how do you make e-mail boxes?
37. Bring up this fact constantly, and ask this question again, only to leave you about as confused as a child asking their mommy, 'where do babies come from?' and getting no answer.
38. In case you're wondering, no. The stork does not create e-mail inboxes.
39. Call customer support.
40. Apparently as long as we have the correct domain, it should catch anything from any address, real or not, and then forward it somewhere.
41. Ask customer support ten billion other questions about everything else we need to know too.
42. Hey, it isn't always easy getting through. Might as well make the most of it!
43. Does this domain even exist?
44. Go downstairs to find out.
45. Woah, shit, someone registered this domain last year.
46. Woah, shit, it was us! Sweet.
47. It's been properly set up.
48. But it has no e-mail boxes.
49. Have one big catch-all box created, so at least messages have somewhere to go.
50. Set up reply forwarding settings.
51. Send test e-mail.
52. now where'd it go?
53. Track e-mails.
54. Send e-mail straight to new catch-all box.
55. Catch-all box plays catch.
56. Send test e-mail.
57. Well, we know it went OUT.
58. Call customer support.
59. They work on the problem.
60. Because I'm just a little impatient sometimes, work on a workaround.
61. Argue for that workaround on grounds that subdomains aren't domains, and thus they don't have to match.
62. Call customer support to ask if that's really the case.
63. "Oh... so taking that off makes bad things happen..."
64. And the subdomain comes first... not second... so I was stripping off the domain... oh... Yeah, that could be bad.
65. Okay, let's fix the real problem now. What's up with the domain?
66. Run tests.
67. They ask me to run more tests.
68. Give them the results of the tests I already ran, plus screenshots of all our e-mail histories, they narrow down the problem.
69. Send test e-mail and reply to it.
70. That was pointless, yes. But I was just curious if they fixed it and hadn't told me yet...
71. Time passes. And somehow, somewhere - it's fixed.
72. Send test e-mail.
73. I don't see it fixed.
74. Send another test e-mail.
75. It goes through.
76. Send another test e-mail, this time with personalization!
77. It goes through. Happy dance!!!
78. Pull up the theme song to Portal on my iTunes, because damn, I think I'm actually going to cry with happiness here.
79. Send final test e-mail from another template.
80. Nothing.
81. Wait.
82. Refresh.
83. Shit...
84. Send again.
85. Nope. nada.
86. Okay, so some are going through and some aren't?
87. That fixed part of the problem...
88. Call customer support and tell them of this new development.
89. Track e-mails out and in.
90. Repeat steps 50 - 59 again.
91. Oh, and then do that again. Because repetition builds habits!
92. Send a mass test e-mail out of all the templates and tell everyone who gets one to reply back.
93. I get two.
94. wtf?!
95. Wait a sec... these two are from the same 'from' address. So only one address comes through.
96. I thought this was supposed to be domain specific, not address specific.
97. Call customer support.
98. Does that inbox suddenly exist?
99. No. The stork does not make e-mail inboxes. The stork does not make e-mail inboxes, right?
100. Go downstairs to see if the stork made an e-mail inbox last night.
101. No storks downstairs. Not even a stray duck.
102. Okay, what is different about that address than all the others?
103. Sherlock Holmes goes to investigate the list we uploaded in step 2.
104. Stares at it.
105. *blink blink* Oh. My. GOD.
106. "oh... person next to me... come take a look at this..."
107. "Uh oh... that's a scary tone."
108. Okay, so it was a scary tone. It was the kind of tone a mental patient in an insane asylum would use.
109. "What do you see that's different?"
110. "Is it something obvious?"
111. "It will be once you see it."
112. ...
113. The domain was misspelled... in all but one address. And it was the one address that went to me.
114. Fix them all manually.
115. Send test e-mail and reply.
116. It comes back.
117. Send mass test e-mail and tell everyone to reply.
118. They ALL come back.
119. Start laughing.
120. The kind of laughter that a mental patient would have.
121. No, this kind of laughter is about 1/2 mental patient and 1/2 evil overlord.
122. And boy does it get strange looks.
123. Especially when the tears start rolling down my cheeks.
124. Insist that I probably need to be taken away to a little white room somewhere.
125. Pull my headphones out of the soundboard and plug my speakers in, and hit play on that Portal song.
126. Send mass test e-mail with personalization and tell everyone to reply.
127. Oh god, it works! it works!!
128. Inform customer support that we are, in fact, merely idiots. And that the second problem was ours, not theirs.
129. Hope they got as good a laugh as I did.
130. Look at the real list.
131. Fix ALL the spelling.
132. Import list.
133. Prep templates.
134. Track down discrepancies in the list.
135. There are two with local e-mail addresses that are on some kind of suppression list that we don't have access to change.
136. Call customer support.
137. Get access to change it.
138. Change it.
139. Check the lists again.
140. Double check the list, especially for misspellings.
141. Eyes glaze over after the first 100.
142. Take eye breaks to start staring at actionscript for a while instead. Which is actually doing what I want it to do for a change. So I'm kind of sorry that I had to stop it and go back to the task at hand.
143. Finish lists.
144. send final templates to approval.
145. Great... now there's not enough space between the banner and the 'click to view in browser' link
146. And apparently, we can't add a space.
147. And even if we did, the space is still a hyperlink.
148. Why the space is a hyperlink is anybody's guess... And nobody wants to guess anymore.
149. Try to fix it by hitting the enter key.
150. Try to fix it with a break tag.
151. Try to fix it by shouting at it.
152. Decide just to remove hyperlink from banner, and put that link somewhere else.
153. On all four templates.
154. But not on the text versions.
155. Which go back to approvals.
155. Oh, and the 'click to view in browser' link doesn't work either.
156. The server goes down NOW?! Why right now?!
157. Wait.
158. Wait a little bit more.
159. Call customer support.
160. Ask when the server will be back up, only to learn that it's not down, and that the 'click to view in browser' link doesn't work in a test e-mail for some insufficiently explained reason.
161. Point that fact out to everyone else.
162. Templates are officially 100% approved! Time to send!
163. Take two steps toward my computer.
164. "... oops."
165. Did I just hear an oops? Oh god, no...
166. Someone clicked the 'opt out' button...
167. But this time, it was on a test e-mail, with a real person's name on it. And they just opted a real person out.
168. Laugh like someone who belongs in a mental institution.
169. While crying.
170. Get shushed because the sound of head against metal door frame is a little too loud.
171. Try to find the missing person in the list.
172. At least the list is only 300 people long and not 279,920 people long...
173. But everyone's accounted for.
174. Everyone on the test lists are accounted for too...
175. Realize that the only way to figure out who got opted out is to send the real e-mail and then trace what couldn't send.
176. And by this point, everyone agrees with me.
177. Set up the first template to send.
178. Double check everything.
179. Click the send button.
180. Click to confirm that I really did hit the send button.
179. Repeat steps 177-180 for template number 2.
180. Repeat steps 177-180 for template number 3.
181. Ditto for template number 4, but look at the list one more time just to spice it up a little.
182. Pull a report.
183. Hey, our missing person has a name and e-mail address!! And was in the first batch. How about that.
184. And go figure, I can't figure out how to bring them back...
185. Call customer support.
186. I'm kind of glad they have a lot of people down there, because the same people are probably getting pretty sick and tired of hearing from me right now.
187. And while I'm doing that, we got our first reply!!
188. Proof that the system works! Way to go, system!
189. E-mail sent!
Current Lips: purple, turquoise and gold gradient blend
Current Mood: 
grateful
grateful