Entries Tagged 'Email' ↓

Starting DAP 3.8, DAP has a new feature where you can ask DAP to always generate a pre-chosen, default password of your choice for all new members.

So all new users will be assigned the same default password, which they can of course change as soon as (or any time after) they login.

This is especially helpful for new users, if instead of DAP, you want a third-party service like Aweber to send out the new member’s “Welcome Email” which contains their email and password.

Since DAP is unable to pass the randomly generated password to Aweber, instead, you can setup a default password by going to

Setup > Config > Advanced > “If you want DAP to generate a default password for all new users, enter it here. If not, leave blank”

So if you set this password to say, “changethis“, then DAP will give out the same password to all new users.

Then, in the welcome email you configure at, say, Aweber, you would put the Aweber merge code for email id, and then enter this pre-selected password (because you already know what it is) into your Aweber email, like this:

Hello {!firstname},

Welcome to Example.com. You may log in to your member’s area at:

Email: {!email}
Password: changethis

Thank you,

- Admin from Example.com

And if you ever change the default password in DAP, don’t forget to also change it in your welcome email at Aweber (or 3rd party email service).

Also, don’t use the default password in any subsequent emails, other than the Welcome email (very first email sent to member through Aweber), because the member may have already changed their password by then.

WARNING: You must have also set up DAP/Aweber integration first before you attempt to do this.

Subscriber Flow

The flow of subscriber in this model, is “FROM Aweber TO DAP“. User gets added to Aweber first, then arrives at DAP via Aweber “thank you page”, at which point she gets added to DAP.

Now, if the flow is from DAP-to-Aweber, and are using email parsing to integrate DAP and Aweber, then your Aweber list will always be double-opt-in (as per Aweber policy, nothing to do with DAP).

But if you want your Aweber list to be single-opt-in, then you can use an Aweber signup form on your squeeze page (instead of the DAP sign-up form) and then have Aweber add users to DAP.

Please note that you cannot use this flow for Paid members – because paid members will need to have paid first, which means DAP needs to process their payment first, and if successful, it can add them to Aweber. So for paid members and paid content, always use the other DAP-to-Aweber flow.

But for free signups (say, like when you’re trying to build a list), you can add them to Aweber first using the flow explained below, just so you can take advantage of making your Aweber list single-optin, and then have Aweber add the subscriber to DAP on the other end. So this way, DAP can then create a free account for them, email them their login/password, and give them access to the “Free” content (that is, content available only to “Registered” users, so to speak), etc.

So here are the steps…

Aweber To DAP Integration

1. Go to DAP Dashboard > Products > Manage page.

2. Note down the Product Id of the product to which you want to sign-up the users (after adding them Aweber first, of course)

3. There is a file called dap-aweber.php in the dap folder. Make a copy of that file and call it dap-aweber-PRODUCTID.php.

Replace with the text PRODUCTID with the actual Product Id you noted in the previous step.

So in the example above, Product Id is 2. So the name of the file copy should be dap-aweber-2.php.

4. Open this file (dap-aweber-2.php).

The first line of code in this file looks like this:

$default_product_id = 1; //Change this to any product id from DAP

Change the part shown in bold below:

$default_product_id = 2; //Change this to any product id from DAP

Upload this file back to /dap folder on your site.

5. Now login to your AWeber account.

5A) Select the list that you wish to sign up users to.
5B) Click on Webforms.
5C) Edit existing form by clicking on the name of the list.

6. On the next page – the list form generator page – click on ‘Go to Step 2′ towards the bottom of the page.

7. On the next, page….

7A) Click on the thankyou page dropdown and select ‘Custom’.

7B) Set the thank you Page URL to http://YourSite.com/dap/dap-aweber-PRODUCTID.php
Replace YourSite.com with the name of your site.
Replace PRODUCTID with the ProductId of the product  you noted in step 2.
So, if the productId of the product in DAP is 2, then the thankyou page URL will be – http://yoursite.com/dap/dap-aweber-2.php

7C) Where it says “Pass Form Data”, check the check box so that Aweber can “Forward subscriber information to your thank you page” – which essentially is DAP, so that DAP can add the subscriber to your membership site.

That’s it!

Now you may use the Aweber web form directly on your squeeze page for signing up subscribers (instead of DAP’s “Direct Signup Form”).

Then, every time a subscriber signs up via the Aweber form, they will automatically be added to DAP.

NOTE:

You may configure the Thank-You message in DAP to send out the dap login id and password via DAP.

-OR-

You can leave the Thank-you message in DAP Product page empty. Then configure DAP to generate a default password (DAP Admin -> Setup -> Config -> Advanced) as shown below, and then enter that same pre-chosen password in to your very first Aweber follow up email that goes out to your subscribers, so that they can receive their dap id/password details directly from your Aweber list.

For more details about this default password, please see this post.

NOTE: If you want to send users upon signup to a different page instead of the login page, then do this:

Open dap-aweber-5.php
Look for this line :
$redirect = Dap_Config::get(“LOGIN_URL”);

Update it to point to any URL of your choice.
For ex -
$redirect = “http://yoursite.com/thankyou”;

This way you can redirect users after they signup (in aweber / dap) to the welcome /thankyou page or any page of your choice.

The Basics Of Sending Email Through Your Web Site

DAP is not an email service (like, say, Aweber).

DAP is just a script – a tool, like Microsoft Outlook or Thunderbird – that simply sends out email using your web host’s email server.

It is your web host’s mail server that actually sends out the email to the recipient. So once DAP sends out the email, it has no control over what happens next.

It’s just like when you put your (regular mail) letter in the mailbox (post box). It is then up to the Postal Service to actually pick up your letter, and deliver to the destination address.

So if the emails that DAP sends out don’t get delivered to your recipients, there could be more than one reason for that.

Improving Email Delivery

DAP uses your web host’s email servers to send out emails. So here are some ways to improve email deliverability and avoid your email landing in the recipient’s junk/spam folder.

• Do not use a Gmail or Yahoo or some other web based email as the “From” email id (under DAP Admin > Setup > Config).
• Instead, use a domain-based email id – like You@Yoursite.com or Support@Yoursite.com – as the “From” email id
• Check with your web host to make sure they have “Reverse DNS” setup and configured correctly

Or if you wish to totally by-pass sending emails through your web host, you could also use the DAP “SMTP” feature to send emails out through an external email system – like AuthSMTP.com.

Welcome Emails Not Going Out

See this post: Troubleshooting Welcome-Email Delivery

Autoresponder Emails Not Going Out

If yours is a new site setup, then this is usually because the hourly cron-job has not been setup.

However, if the emails were going out fine previously, and suddenly stopped going out, then it usually is because…

• Something changed on your host that caused the cron to stop working.
• There is an error in the job queue, because of which DAP is unable to proceed with the remaining non-error emails. This could have happened if you tried to send out a broadcast to a CSV list, and there was an error in one of the emails from the CSV list.
• You’re trying to use a third party “SMTP” server to send out the emails, and your server is unable to connect to that server because the authentication settings you’ve configured on “Email > SMTP” are incorrect.

Steps to troubleshoot

1. Make sure that the hourly cron (dap-cron.php) is still running – you need to look at your web hosting control panel for that.
2. Go to “System > Job Queue” and scroll through any items there, and see if there are any scheduled messages there with the status “Error”. If yes, then click on the “Delete Jobs In Error” link. That will delete any jobs that can’t be processed because of an error in the email id or in the import process. Also be sure to click on “Delete Successful Jobs (till yesterday)” just to clear up old, sent emails.
3. Also go to “System > Logs” and empty the logs.
4. Go to “System > Config” and set “DAP Log Level” to “5″. That will start logging all the details you/we may need for troubleshooting.
5. Wait for the top of the next hour and then re-visit the queue and see if emails are going out.
6. If they still aren’t going out, go back to “System > Logs”, copy paste all text there, and open a new ticket with that info, of course, also giving us more details about the problem, what you have tried, etc, along with your login info for: FTP, WP Admin, DAP Admin, and Web Host Control Panel.

Server Blacklisting

If your inexpensive (read as cheap shared web host is hosting a large number of sites on one server, and one of them knowingly sends out spam (or mistakenly gets flagged for spam), that will put the email deliverability of every web site on that server in jeopardy, because your site now shares the same IP address as that of an “alleged” spammer.

So your emails get sent to junk/spam folder by Gmail and Yahoo. Or worse, they just totally disappear into the ether.

Hourly Email-Sending Limits

Almost all shared hosts have hourly email sending limits. For example, DreamHost has an outgoing limit of 300 emails per hour. Which means, a total of only 300 emails can be sent out per hour through any web site hosted on DreamHost. All of the following count towards the 300 limit:

• Emails sent by any scripts on your site – like DAP
• Your WordPress blog notification emails
• Your WordPress admin emails,
• WP forgot password emails,
• WP comment notification emails,
• Forum notification emails,
• Forum emails sent to each other by your users,
• Forum-software Admin notification emails,
• Support software user and admin notification emails
• Tell-a-friend emails
• Viral-inviter type emails
• Emails sent through Outlook or Thunderbird where you have set the outgoing SMTP server to be your web site’s SMTP server
• Emails sent by others using the same SMTP server to send out emails-  like your business partners, employees, etc
• DAP User welcome emails, Payment notification emails, Forgot password emails, Autoresponder emails, Broadcast emails, etc

So do you see how quickly you can go over that hourly limit of 300 emails per hour?

But here comes the worst part…

Once you go over that limit, any emails that are actually sent by you or the scripts running on your site, will not actually result in any kind of error. The mail server will respond by saying that the email(s) has been sent successfully, but in reality, on the backend, it quietly “snuffs out” the email. Which means, it doesn’t go anywhere – just gets sent to a “blackhole”. So you keep thinking that you sent out the email. DAP keeps thinking it has sent out the email. But in reality, the emails never actually get sent.

This is the same as you actually putting your letter into the mailbox at the Post Office. But then, imagine this: The postal worker who comes to pick up your mail, quietly goes to the back of the post office and dumps it all into one giant trash can, and destroys all of the mail. So you’re thinking you actually mailed out that important check to pay your utility bill. But the utility company never gets your check, and they slam you with a late fee.

Possible Solutions

1) DAP + Aweber (most expensive, most reliable)

2) DAP + 3rd party SMTP service provider (AuthSMTP.com or SMTP.com) (less expensive than Aweber, slightly less reliable too)

3) DAP + Good web host (cheapest option, but can have mixed results – all depends on your host).

You could always use DAP and external SMTP service provider like AuthSMTP.com or SMTP.com to send out bulk mail through DAP while totally bypassing your web host’s email system. This is probably the next best thing to using a service like Aweber.

And if you can’t afford even that, then simply use DAP on a good web host. We ourselves use just DAP and Dreamhost‘s email servers to send out emails to all of our users.

And DAP also has built-in job queues to schedule outgoing emails while also making sure that you don’t exceed your web host’s hourly email sending limits (dreamhost’s limit is 300 emails/hour, I think). We use multiple SMTP servers from our own other web sites, all combined to be able to send a few thousand emails per hour.

But even with a lot of planning, it is easy to go over the hourly limit.

So the next time you see in your Job Queue that emails were sent out successfully, but the recipient never received it, here are some things to check:

1) It landed in your recipient’s junk/spam folder. Ask them to whitelist or add your email address to their contacts list.

2) You have overshot the limit, so you would have to actually send out the email again.

3) Try to send out broadcasts during a low-traffic time – say like later in the night – when you’re not actively sending out emails, and using up precious email counts from that hourly quota.

You wish to do what we call a “silent” import. Basically, you don’t want DAP to send out the instant “thanky-you” email to the users being imported.

You may want to do this, say, if you wanted to import a bunch of users into DAP first, without DAP sending them any kind of emails at all, do some preliminary testing, make sure their settings, product access, etc, are all correct, before notifying them of any changes.

Here’s how to do a “Silent Import” with DAP

1. Remove the “ThankYou-Email Subject” and “ThankYou-Email Body” from the Product into which you wish to import users. Save it in a text file for later, and save the Product.

2. Go ahead and do the bulk-add of users from “Users > Add > Bulk-Add Multiple Users To A Product”.

3. Wait for the DAP Hourly Cron to run and finish importing all users. Since the “ThankYou-Email Subject” and “ThankYou-Email Body” of the Product is empty at the time of import, DAP won’t send out those emails.

4. Once all the users have been imported, put back the “ThankYou-Email Subject” and “ThankYou-Email Body” text content, and save the Product.

OPTIONAL

5. At a later point, if you want, you can send out an Autoresponder email – or even better, a Broadcast email – with the merge codes for the email and password, if you want the newly imported users to get their passwords, or if you wish to notify them of anything at all (like the new system you’re using, their new account info, a general “what has changed recently” type of email, etc).

Here are the merge-tags that you can use in outgoing autoresponder and broadcast emails sent through DAP. (Click here for merge tags you can use in your WordPress blog posts/pages)

%%FIRST_NAME%%

This will be replaced by the first-name of the user.

%%LAST_NAME%%

This will be replaced by the first-name of the user.

%%EMAIL_ID%%

This will be replaced by the email id of the user.

%%PASSWORD%%

This will be replaced by the password of the user.

%%SITE_NAME%%

This will be replaced by whatever text you have entered in “Setup > Config > Basic > Site Name” in your DAP Dashboard.

%%ADMIN_NAME%%

This will be replaced by whatever text you have entered in “Setup > Config > Basic > Admin Name” in your DAP Dashboard.

%%ADMIN_EMAIL%%

This will be replaced by whatever text you have entered in “Setup > Config > Basic > Admin Email” in your DAP Dashboard.

%%AFF_LINK%%

This will be replaced by the actual affiliate link of the member (Eg., http://yoursite.com/dap/a/?a=1234)

%%SITE_URL_DAP%%

Replaced by your actual web site url (Eg., http://yoursite.com)

%%UNSUB_LINK%%

This is replaced by a 1-click Unsubscribe link that you can add to the bottom of your outgoing broadcast and autoresponder emails.

(Or… “DAP vs MailChimp”, “DAP vs. GetResponse”, …. “DAP vs 3rd-Party-List-Service”)

We often get asked why use Aweber (or other third-party list service) when DAP itself is an autoresponder. So here’s a brief overview of when and why it makes sense to use DAP or Aweber.

Why Aweber

DAP is not an email service like Aweber.

DAP is just a tool – like Outlook or Thunderbird – that simply sends out email using your web host’s email server.

If your inexpensive shared web host is hosting a large number of sites on one server, and one of them sends out spam (or mistakenly gets flagged for spam), that will put the email deliverability of every web site on that server, in jeopardy, because your site now shares the same IP address as that of an “alleged” spammer.

So your emails could get sent to junk/spam folder by Gmail and Yahoo. Or worse, they just totally disappear into the ether. Some customers won’t get your emails. This won’t happen with Aweber (for the most part).

Aweber (and other premier email service providers) have staff on hand just for this purpose. Their core business is about email deliverability. They spend a lot of time, money and resources dealing with regular ISP’s (like AOL and SBC) to make sure their lists – and their reputation – remain clean. Which is also probably why they shut down large lists without much of a warning to you, and do other similar crazy stuff.

I guess it works for them – and the other Aweber users, because when you send out an email through your Aweber list, it almost always gets there in your recipient’s inbox. Which is very cool. And which is why they also charge so much for their service.

But if you can’t afford their high fees, then you can of course use DAP’s built-in email autoresponder, whose deliverability is only as good as your host’s deliverability.

Of course, you could use DAP and external SMTP service provider like Fusemail.com or AuthSMTP.com (which we use ourselves) to send out bulk mail through DAP while totally bypassing your web host’s email system.

And if you can’t afford even that, then simply use DAP on a decent web host. We ourselves use just DAP and AuthSMTP.com to send out emails to all of our users. DAP also has built-in job queues to schedule outgoing emails while also making sure that you don’t exceed your web host’s hourly email sending limits (most web hosts limit you to 300 outgoing emails/hour). We also use multiple SMTP servers from our own other lesser-used web sites, all combined to be able to send thousands of emails an hour.

When it comes to features, here’s what DAP does *not* have that more expensive services like Aweber and GetResponse provide.

Advantage: DAP

• It’s FREE! You don’t pay anything to send out thousands of emails and have a list with tens of thousands of members. The Autoresponder & Broadcast features are built right into the core DAP software.
• Unlimited Autoresponders
• Unlimited emails for free (no limit on how large your list can grow – so practically free, since you’ve already paid for DAP)
• Add same email to multiple Autoresponders (DAP special)
• Email throttling included, so as to not exceed your web host’s hourly email sending limits
• Ability to merge member data – like password – into emails (DAP only – you can’t do this if you use a 3rd party list service)
• DAP has a stunning-looking “Lightbox” plugin with several built-in templates, to show your DAP signup form as a popup. See List Builder Popup for DAP

Advantage: Aweber and the others

• Costs several hundred dollars a year (see Aweber.com – it could cost you about $794 a year – based on an annual fee of $194/year + another $600/year for maintaining a list size of just 5,000 subscribers)
• Ability to track open rates and click-through rates (coming in a future version in DAP)
• Ability to automatically send out your newly published blog posts as a broadcast (coming in a future version in DAP)

So given a choice, here’s what we recommend, in the order listed below:

1) DAP + 3rd Party List Service like AuthSMTP.com: Best option that we use ourselves

2) DAP + Aweber: If you already have an Aweber account, then this is a great option, especially if you want advanced email analytics that DAP itself doesn’t offer (yet).

3) DAP + Your Web Host: Very usable and workable option as long as you are hosting with a decent web host.

Feel free to comment below if you have any questions.

Subscriber Flow

The flow of subscriber in this model, is “FROM DAP TO Aweber“. User signs up at DAP first, then DAP adds her to Aweber.

If you are looking for the other way, i.e, “FROM Aweber TO DAP”, then click here.

Please Note

When DAP adds a subscriber to your Aweber list, it can currently “send” only the user’s Name and Email address to Aweber. DAP cannot (and does not) send the user’s unique password in DAP, or their affiliate id, etc. If you want Aweber to send out the password, at this time, there’s only one workaround. We have this on our to-do list, and we will be implementing this feature in a future release.

How it works

With the “DigitalAccessPass.com” Aweber Email Parser, integrating DAP with Aweber is a total breeze.

1. Login to your account at Aweber.com and from the drop-down, pick the list for which you want to add DAP users to (see Image 1. below)

Image 1:

2. Click on “My Lists” and within that, select “Email Parser” (see Image 1 above)

3. On the Email Parsers page, check the check-box next to the parser named “DigitalAccessPass.com” (see Image 1 above)

You will then see something like this.

That’s it for the Email Parser activation at Aweber. Just a couple of more things to be done within your DAP Admin Dashboard.

4. Log in to your DAP Admin Dashboard and pick the product (whose members you wish to add automatically to your Aweber list from step 1 above)

5. If your Aweber list, is called “dap_fans”, then your Aweber “list email id” is “dap_fans@aweber.com”. Just add this Aweber list email id to the “3rd Party Notification” field of the above product, and save.

That’s it!

How This Works

So let’s say you picked the list “dap_fans” in your Aweber account, and the DAP Product “Example Subscription Product” (as shown in the screenshots above).

So once you add “dap_fans@aweber.com” to the product’s “3rd Party Notification Email Ids” field and save it, every time someone gets access to the “Example Subscription Product” product (regardless of whether they buy it, or you give them access on the backend), an email is sent out to the email id dap_fans@aweber.com , which looks like this:

From: Joe Subscriber <joe@subscriber.com>

Subject: New User Signup (3rd Party Notification)

Body:
Name: Joe Subscriber
Email: Joe@Subscriber.com
Product: Example Subscription Product

And because you have already activated the DigitalAccessPass.com parser in your “dap_fans” list, Aweber automatically adds “Joe Subscriber” with the email id (Joe@Subscriber.com) to your dap_fans list. And the parser has been written in such a way, that the product name will be used as your “Ad Tracking” field for the subscriber. So you will be able to group them and run reports on them in your Aweber account.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: If I integrate DAP with Aweber and someone signs up to my membership site and then later on cancels or stops paying, can DAP automatically remove people from Aweber?

A: Short answer: No. Aweber doesn’t have a “Remove” parser, only an “Add” parser. So if someone who DAP automatically added to your Aweber list when they purchased a product, cancels or asks for a refund, you will have to manually remove them from the Aweber list. But wait, this may not be such a bad thing after all.

ExtraTip: As soon as someone cancels their subscription (or just doesn’t pay, or their credit card is declined), then their membership account in DAP automatically expires. Which means they can no longer access any content (unless you have specifically set DAP Config to deliberately give ex-members access to content that they paid for previously when they were a member).

So that means, their access in DAP has expired, but they are still on your Aweber list.

This may not be bad, because if you keep sending them emails (through Aweber) about new content and new videos and new stuff you are adding to your membership site even after they’ve cancelled, when they come back to your site through the link in your email, they won’t be able to access the actual content.

So it’s a great way of continuing to keep even ex-members curious and coming back to the site, only to be presented with a “Sorry, you don’t have access to this”, which may be a great incentive for them to come back and join your web site.

Of course, for this to work, you must put all the key content on your web site, and use the emails just to get them curious about the content, and eventually bring them back to the site to deliver the content. However, if you are going to send out all the good stuff in your emails (which doesn’t make sense anyway) then this may be an issue for you.

Q) Will DAP add only paid customers to Aweber? Or both Paid and Free members?

The link is really between the DAP Product and your Aweber List. So regardless of who gets access to that product – for free, by paying, or admin added – they will automatically be added to your Aweber list. So if you don’t want your free members to be added to your Aweber list, then keep your “Free” products and your “Paid’ products separate, and don’t set up this integration for the Free products.

Q) I have a question about how Aweber integrates with DAP.  In this instance i am selling a monthly and yearly membership. The reader clicks on the subscribe button on my sales page and gets taken to Paypal. Assuming i have integrated Aweber properly, does the person get added to my Aweber List as well as the DAP list? Or is the only way they get added to Aweber is through a webform? I would like to be able to email the subscribers from time to time through Aweber but i am not using a Web form on my sales page, only a subscribe paypal button.

For paid products, here’s the flow:
Payment Processor (For ex – Paypal) == > DAP ==> Aweber

1) User pays via Paypal.

2) Paypal notifies DAP (ofcourse you need to integrate Paypal with DAP first either using Paypal hosted buttons (http://www.digitalaccesspass.com/doc/setting-up-your-paypal-button-and-paypal-ipn/) or using DAP generated button for paypal (http://www.digitalaccesspass.com/blog/2010/12/dap-v4-0/).

3) If the Paypal payment was successful, DAP creates the membership account and sends out the thankyou email to user with their membership login info (you can configure thankyou/welcome in the DAP products page).

4) In the DAP products page, you can select the product and set the Aweber list name in the 3rd party notification Ids field. In this field, you can specify a comma-separated list of email Ids.. one of the email ids can be your Aweber list email i.e. mylist@aweber.com

5) After DAP adds the user to purchased product, it sends out notifications to all email Ids listed in the 3rd party notification id field for that product.

Here’s more info on how to integrate DAP -> Aweber for paid products.  Make sure to login to your Aweber account, Click on “My Lists” and within that, select “Email Parser”.  On the Email Parsers page, check the check-box next to the parser named “DigitalAccessPass.com” as described above in this post.

First Name: Veena
Last Name: Prashanth
Email: veena@digitalaccesspass.com
Product: Digital Access Pass with WP LiveLinks