Batch send registration confirmation email

[Battler45]

Vihar,

We are (finally) getting ready to launch the HomeToIndy.com site tonight. In preparation for this, the client (who is migrating over an existing site and existing leads to our platform) has manually entered a number of leads into our back-end system using the Add New Lead button.

In adding these new leads, because the site was not yet live, she did not send out the "confirmation" emails that are available when manually entering leads.

Now that the new site is going live, she would like to send out a confirmation email in bulk -- so, everyone will get the same message, but it will be personalized to each individual user with their first name and last name and then their login credentials.

I have attached the template to be used for this notification email. The formatting can be exactly the same as in the email notifications that are currently sent out via the admin -- same font sizes & styles, site banner image at the top, etc.

I apologize for the urgency of this ticket, but the site is going live in a few hours (my time) and so if you could set this up and send it out toward the end of your work day today (any time after 6AM my time / 3:30PM your time), that would be great. If something comes up and you are not able to send it out, that's okay -- I'm sure I can build a page on my end to make it work.

To clarify, the process will be:

1 - Retrieve a recordset of ALL current leads for the HomeToIndy.com site (279) (all records in the MLSUser table)

2 - For each lead record, populate their first name, last name, email address and password into the attached email template where indicated

3 - With the site banner image at the top, send an individual email to each lead record -- essentially, batching the process that occurs individually when new leads are added manually.

4 - There are currently about 180 leads in the system (they may add or remove a few between now and when you read this), and so all 180 should get a personalized copy of the email (there are several in there that will go to me -- that's fine).

Sorry if I'm being overly explicit -- since we are working on such a short timeframe, I'm trying to anticipate and answer any questions you might have as well as I can.

Hopefully this should be fairly straightforward -- if not, I will be up for until about 10am your time if you have questions (sending me an email directly might be the most timely way to get a response).

Thanks. With the http://www.buildingstapleton.com site that launched on Saturday and this site launching tonight, we are clearing some big milestones and making very good progress, which should (hopefully) bring us a lot of good exposure.

Posted by Peskoe Ben(unfuddle username: bpeskoe)

[Battler45]

Ben,

Unfortunately there isn't any straightforward way to verify this. That being said, I checked the log-files for a possible exception in this but there were none so the emails were correctly sent out to the SMTP server for delivery. I also logged into email-account on SmarterMail (mail.sierrainteractivemls.com) to check for "Sent messages" but the web-app doesn't seem to keep track of messages sent out via SMTP. I was able to check one of the reports though which listed that total of 250+ emails were sent today. I think most of them would be the confirmation messages for HomeToIndy leads.

Pls let me know if there is any other way to access emails sent via mail.sierrainteractivemls.com server.

Thanks.

Posted by Shah Vihar(unfuddle username: vshah)

[Battler45]

Vihar,

Very nice job, thanks. This looks great. I'll test it out right now.

Ben Posted by Peskoe Ben(unfuddle username: bpeskoe)

[Battler45]

Vihar,

The tests worked great. I did sent out the full email -- it said that emails were sent successfully, but it seemed to respond very, very quickly. Can you check to make sure they all went out properly?

Thanks. Posted by Peskoe Ben(unfuddle username: bpeskoe)

[Battler45]

Ben,

My apologies but I haven't yet set the confirmation emails (its almost 4:30 PM my time) as I wasn't sure about a couple of points. It was too late by the time I had those queries. Anyway, I've created a page in the new admin area that can be used for sending bulk emails to manually registered leads.

I wasn't actually sure about the subject and "from" user to use in sending these confirmation emails. Normally we use the agent associated with the lead as the "from" email, and a default subject for sending emails to newly registered lead. However I felt this was a slightly different case in that the leads were being transferred to new platform and hence I thought a different subject might be more appropriate. So I've created a new page that would allow to set subject, and from user details. Pls check the same at http://client.sierrainteractivedev.com/hometoindy-bulk-emails.aspx

Pls note that you'd need to be logged-in as Admin to access this page.

The page UI is divided into two section:

1 -- "Required Parameters"

• Email Subject - Pls specify the email subject here. If you want to use the default message, pls leave this blank.

• FromName & FromEmail - pls specify the email-address & name that should appear in the "from" field in the email header. This email-address would by default receive replies from the users. If either of these fields is left blank, the email-address & name of the AdminUser, who is assigned the lead, would be used.

• "Send Bulk Emails" - pressing this button will send emails to all manually registered leads. Pls note that the page is programmed to send emails only to manually registered leads (as distinguished by the UserSourceID field being 2 in the MLSUser table). There are approx. 10 other leads that weren't manually registered so those would be ignored. Pls note that majority of these leads seem to be created for testing so there shouldn't be much problem on that front.

2 -- "Test Email" - This will enable you to test the email generation/UI before sending actual emails to leads.

Pls note that the style of the email-contents would be same as that of the "Add New Lead" functionality. This can be tweaked by changing the html stored in the template, which is present here: [WebSiteRoot]/res/templates/HomeToIndyEmail.txt

Pls let me once the emails are sent ("Emails sent successfully" status message should be displayed underneath the "Send Bulk Emails" button) and I will take down the page from the live site. In case emails are not sent to one or more leads, those details/errors would be stored in the log-file. We can use it to resend emails to only those leads, if required.

Pls let me know in case of any issues.

Thanks.

Posted by Shah Vihar(unfuddle username: vshah)