July 20, 2007

Table of Contents   

July's Cooler Tips Newsletter
Click here to go to the most recent Cooler Tips.
RSVP Lesson 1
The "Yep, I'll Be There" Method

If all that you need is a list of people who will be attending your event, let's do this the easy way.

Build your edition as an invitation. Then near the end of the invitation place either a text link or a graphic button that basically says, "RSVP - Yes, I'll Be There".
Lesson 1: Yep, I'll Be There Continued...
RSVP Lesson 3
The "I need more information" Method

Sometimes you need LOTS of information back from the people attending your event in order to properly serve them. Here is a place that CoolerEmail can really shine in obtaining and recording this information for you.
Lesson 3: More Information Continued...
This edition of CoolerTips was written by Stephen Shore, founder of STADIS.net - A Permission-Based Email Marketing Service.
Invitation RSVP Lesson 2: The "Meat, Fish, or Vegetarian" Method
Sometimes just knowing that someone is attending is not enough information. There are times you might have several sessions available from which to choose or, at a dinner, you might really have meat, fish, and vegetarian options. Or you might even want the person to be able to change their mind and respond with a different answer at a later date and for you to have all of the current information automatically tabulated for you.

This is where the CoolerEmail Survey feature comes in. It is found by clicking on the Libraries tab in the top row of the menu bar at the top of the web page and then the "Survey Library" in the second row of buttons. This allows you to put together survey questions that can use Radio Buttons, Check Boxes, or free form Text entry fields. For the purposes of people RSVPing to an invitation, the Radio Button question will be the one most often used. It allows the recipient to choose one option from among the ones offered and allows you to give them up to 10 different options.

Just go to the Survey library, create a new survey, name it, choose the type of survey question, and fill in the blanks. After you save the survey question, it will generate the HTML code that you will drop into your edition. All that you have to do is copy the code and paste it into the edition where you want it to go.

Possible questions and responses could be:


The tabulation on the tracking page could end up looking like the following:


Then clicking on the blue numbers will tell you who exactly will be attending.

You have some powerful options, also. When a person responds, you can choose whether or not they can see how the people who have responded so far have responded. Also, you can choose whether or not a person can change his answer once they answered the question the first time. Since people's plans sometimes change, this ability could be important. And although these options are available in the wizard that creates a survey question, you can actually change it later if you like.

The HTML line: ‹input type="hidden" name="viewresults" value="No"›
controls whether or not the results will be seen on the thank you page the responder sees after clicking the button. You can change the "No" to "Yes" to allow them to see the tabulation of the ansers so far...or leave the "No" so that they don't see how people have replied.

Also, your "thank you" response to people for responding can get as involved as you like. The standard response is just have a web page say, "Thank you for participating in our survey." However, that may not be appropriate. You can actually change it to any valid HTML code you like. In fact, using placeholders can really personalize the page displayed, such as instead of the default code:
‹input type="hidden" name="thankyou" value="Thank you for participating in our survey!"›

You could substitute any valid HTML code in here (remembering not to use any additional quotation marks) and come up with something like this:
‹input type="hidden" name="thankyou" value="First_name‹br /›We are looking forward to having you join us‹br /›for the dinner at the Starlight Cafe.‹br /›John "›

This is obviously on the simple side as embeded messages go. We can get much more involved. You can create entire HTML web pages this way. Or, you can do it the easier way and actually create a web page and provide the URL for it. In that case, the thank you input would look like this:
‹input type="hidden" name="thankyou" value="http://www.yoursite.com/surveythanks.html"›

The only downside to this is that the thank you page can't be personalized with a static web page like this.

(Check out next month's CoolerEmail Tips for a way to
personalize this type of thank you page.)
Back To The July Cooler Tips Page

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