December Edition Of The WeDoHosting.com Newsletter

Welcome to the December edition of the WeDoHosting.com newsletter. WeDoHosting.com provides periodic newsletters to our clients in order to help them make the most of their hosting and online experience.

This month we will cover:

	Hosting Posting WeDoHosting.com's Solutions Manager, Joanne Spinney, comments on common hosting issues and how to make the most of your hosting package. This edition: Formmail
	Tech Deck WeDoHosting.com's Support Technician, Tim Vickers, posts one of the most commonly asked questions to support and the answer. This edition: Outgoing Mail
	Sales Tales WeDoHosting.com's Marketing Manager, Dave Davies, helps you make the most of your online presence. This edition: Opt-in Emails

Hosting Posting
by Joanne Spinney

Formmail is one of the many features that WeDoHosting.com includes with all hosting packages. If you have ever filled out a form on a website (a "Contact Us" form for example) and wished you could have a similar system on your own site, the solution is easier than you think.

This easy-to-use script enables any website hosted at WeDoHosting.com to host their own custom forms that will email the entries directly to your Inbox without having to learn a bunch of code. You will simply cut-and-paste some code from our website at http://support.wedohosting.com/script-topics/formmail1.htm, follow the instructions on how to customize it to send to your Inbox and, if desired, redirect the visitor to a "Thank You" or similar page after they hit submit.

If you have any questions about this or any other hosting issue please don't hesitate to contact Joanne at solutions@wedohosting.com.

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Tech Deck
by Tim Vickers

QUESTION OF THE MONTH: I have been using the outgoing mail server provided by WeDoHosting.com for a while now, and suddenly I get an error message when I try and send email. What could be the problem?

BACKGROUND INFO: Since WeDoHosting.com will not change server settings that affect our clients without sending everyone a notification first, this symptom typically originates from your ISP. The most common cause that has affected our clients recently is a change in how major ISPs manage its mail service in order to try and fight the spread of spam and viruses.

In an effort to eliminate the spread of spam and virus attacks, major ISPs have implemented a change that denies computers connected to their network from using outgoing mail services other than their own.

At WeDoHosting, we allow our clients to use our outgoing mail server (called relaymail.wedohosting.com) for sending their email. However, the recent changes implemented by major ISPs had the unfortunate consequence of blocking many clients from sending their email through our servers.

THE ANSWER: Our solution to this dilemma was to work with it. We’ve designed a way for our clients to continue using our outgoing mail services without compromising the fight against spam and virus attacks.

To explain this technically: our way around the recent change was to open a second port for the mail server to 'listen' on, and instruct our clients how to change their email program’s settings to send on a different port than it usually would. “Outgoing” or “SMTP” traffic normally uses port 25. We modified our mail server so that it also 'listens' on port 2525.

Instructions on how you can make this change in your mail program (including screenshots for Outlook Express) can be found at the following page on our support site:

http://support.wedohosting.com/email-topics/relaymail/index.htm

If this does not fix your email problem, either call us at (250) 479-1595 or fill in the online form at http://support.wedohosting.com/ to send an email to Technical Support and we will be happy to help you.

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Sales Tales
by Dave Davies

Opt-in Email Marketing is one of the most powerful tools available to any business and/or website owner. The reason for this is the ease and essentially negligible cost outside of your time in writing and sending the emails.

It's important that you understand that what we are referring to here is email marketing to people who have agreed to receive emails from you and not emails sent to random lists purchased from questionable sources on the net. These lists can be generated from your client-base or from forms on your website. Regardless they can be extremely useful for a few reasons. There are two basic functions behind opt-in email marketing:

1. To supply information, provide support, and additional value to existing clients. While selling additional products and services is great, equally important is protecting your client base. Periodic communication with your clients will remind them who you are, and invite them to contact you if they have any questions, problems, or needs. This will help you protect your existing client-base, which is far less expensive from a marketing perspective than attempting to gain new clients.
2. To sell additional products and services to existing clients and/or subscribers. While protecting your client-base is important, you may very well have new offerings that may be of interest to them. Opt-in emails are an inexpensive option to informing people about these offerings or perhaps upcoming sales that they may not be aware of.

Where To Look:
When you're first setting up your opt-in email lists, you will first want to look at your existing client-base. You may have noticed that recently more and more major retailers are asking for your email information. They know the power of this tool and you can do the same. When you are speaking with your clients either on the phone or at the front desk, ask them if you can send them a monthly mailing with information on your industry. You know they're interested or they wouldn’t be clients. Just be sure to include useful information in your newsletter and not simply make it a sales-pitch that they delete before reading.

Another means of increasing the number of people in your email list is to offer a signup form on your site. You can simply ask for their email address and nothing more making the process incredibly easy for the visitor to say "yes" to. If you're wondering how to do this, formmail (as noted above) makes a simple to implement option.

Where Does The List Live?
There are many options for how to keep and manage your list. For some with smaller lists, it's simply a matter of creating a group in your email client (Outlook for example) and adding members to this list with each subscription.

For those with larger lists and who want it automatically managed, there are many newsletter programs out there. One I personally use is eNewsletter Manager by e-undertown. They offer a free version that's fully functional, isn't time-limited and works very well for automatically adding and deleting records and people subscribe and unsubscribe.

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