Autoresponders have many potential uses for your business, and they can make keeping in touch with your subscribers simple. In short, they are a key component of relationship building between company and customer. You can use autoresponders to:        

1. Welcome new subscribers
2. Confirm orders
3. Provide receipts
4. Send shipping and tracking information
5. Solicit opinions from customers
6. Thank survey participants
7. Suggest purchases based on order histories
8. Send coupons for items that complement customers’ recently-purchased products
9. Target specific groups of subscribers with messages tailored to their interests 

This list could go on and on, really: what you can accomplish with autoresponders can range from basic to nuanced, and you may be able to come up with new ways to use them to deliver superior customer service!

Many autoresponse messages are event-triggered emails—messages scheduled to send in response to an action taken. For example, Person X purchases shoes and receives an email coupon for a briefcase that matches them. Or, Person Y abandons a cart and gets an email reminder that the items are still waiting for them.

Other autoreplies are scheduled according to specific intervals of time. For example, you may set up an autoreply to send a welcome message to new subscribers 24 hours after they sign up for your mailing list.

As with any other aspect of e-communications with customers, you should plan your use of autoresponders carefully before you begin creating and using them. Think about how and why you want to use them, how they should be timed, and what kinds of outcomes you hope to see.

In the next section, we will discuss how to create and schedule autoresponders in ez.newsletter. But first, you may wish to familiarize yourself with our papers on targeting and personalizing messages. The targeting paper discusses how to design and create segmented lists, which may be necessary if, for instance, you want to make sure that your newest set of customers gets an introductory newsletter: you can set up a list segment for recent additions, then ensure that all new subscribers added after setup get filtered into this same segment. And you would need to know about personalization if, for example, you wanted to set up order confirmation emails that include individual order numbers and products purchased.

HOW TO SET UP AUTORESPONDERS IN EZ.NEWSLETTER

Step 1: Determine for what purpose or purposes you would like to use autoresponders.

Step 2: Create and save the messages that you wish to use as autoresponders in your ez.newsletter (if they are not already made). If order confimation messages will be among the autoreplies you will use, you will need to personalize them with tokens for order information at minimum, and you will probably also want to personalize the greeting.

Step 3: If you need to filter your lists into different segments, create your filters.

Step 4: Schedule when and/or how often your autoresponders should run.

The filters that you created in step three can either be run once for or saved to automatically run. Automatically running filters run once each minute and will move customers matching the filter criteria into the appropriate segmented list(s) as they are added.

As noted in our paper on targeting:

When filters are used to move customers into lists in this manner, the lists react differently than they do when you upload contacts or add them one at a time by hand. Normally, a list will only contain an email contact once. However, when filters put customers into lists, addresses can be in the list once for each order number, for example. This does not translate to identical duplicate messages sent to the same contact, though. The ez.newsletter system automatically ignores duplicate addresses when sending an unscheduled message. But the multiple entries do serve an important purpose: they allow for any automated responses you set up to be associated with each individual order by a customer.

To schedule autoresponses in ez.newsletter:

1. Click autoresponder.management from the main page
2. Click the Add New Autoresponder link
3. On the page that comes up, give the autoresponder a name
4. Provide a short description of what it will do
5. Select the message that coordinates with the autoresponse you are creating
6. Select the list it should be delivered to
7. Set the timing for your message

Note that, for step 7, the default option is to set the autoresponder a certain number of years, months, days, hours, and/or minutes after a contact is added to the list. To set the schedule this way, use only the pulldown menus that apply to your desired settings. For instance, if you were creating an autoresponder to welcome new customers and you wanted them to receive the message 24 hours after they sign up, select 24 from the hours pulldown menu.

If, however, you would rather set the message to set on a specific day at a specific time, click the Show specific date and time link and set your date and time using the appropriate pulldown menus. 

You may be wondering how these options would apply to order confirmation messages. Well, if you set up a filter for new orders, all orders will be funnelled into the list created by that filter and every new order that follows will be added to that list. So, if you want people to receive their order confirmation just two minutes after being added to the list, just select 2 from the minutes pulldown menu in the timing selections.

When you have set your schedule and everything is ready to go, click Save Autoresponder.  From there, everything is automatic!

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We recently built a Magento connector for our Customer Management Module.  While building this connector we noticed a significant lack of information about how to work with the Magento API on the .NET platform.

Our first choice was to use the SOAP API because Visual Studio has wonderful support for SOAP.  However, after jumping through many hoops, the best we could do was add the Web Reference but after that it was unusable.  Apparently the SOAP API is not totally compliant with all the standards VS was hoping for. To go any further would have required hacking the core files and that was not an option for us to do as we could not possibly require all our clients start hacking their core files.  EDIT : As of v1.3 there is a second WSDL that reportedly has support for vs 2008.  Call it like so http://%3chost%3e/%3Cmagento%3E/api/v2_soap?wsdl

We then turned to the XML-RPC API and were able to start building out our object library.  We found that the documentation for the API was very poor and often wrong at times wrt to the type of values it was returning.  Almost everything goes in and out as strings which still baffles us.  The filter parameters that get passed in are not documentated anywhere that we could find so we pretty much just took educated guesses to find what we could.  Eventually we saw patterns in the inconsistencies, which were, at least, consistently inconsistent. 

Overall Magento really is a stellar eCommerce solution.  The checkout process is one of the finest we've ever seen.  So even though we really only needed to read the orders object, we went a head and built out the full object library with samples to every object and method.  We're making it publicly available here under the MIT X11 license.  We've used Charles Cook's XML-RPC.NET libary which is also published under the MIT X11 license.

We did need to modify Cook's library as the Magento XML-RPC API uses extensions for null values.  These values come back as <nil /> and will throw a nullreference exception.  We found two ways to handle this.  First is to search/replace the xml as it comes back.  The other is to catch the null reference exception when working with the properties.  In our testing the search/replace method was much more efficient but YMMV.

The source for our object library and samples is published here along with the source for Cook's XML-RPC.NET library that includes both hacks for the NULL values.

NOTES :

If you are receiving the error about calling parameters not matching signature then your problem is most likely eAccelerator.  We found that after disabling eAccelerator or adding a filter for the url "Api/*.php" the error goes away.  Apparently eAcclerator is causing a parameter validation exception to be thrown.  If eAccelerator has the API cached then the login call with throw error.  Otherwise you will be able to login but the second call with throw exception.  Subsequent calls with throw exception until eAcclerator releases it's cache.

If you are receving a "Not Found" error and you have multiple stores then you may need to pass the store id like this: http://www.mymagentostore/storedirectory/<storeid>/api/xmlrpc

 This library is now hosted over at google code.

Ez.Newsletter.MagentoApi - Release History

v1.1 : 2009-05-18
Ez.Newsletter.MagentoApi_v1.1.zip

• Bug Fix : Product.Create sample not inserting product correctly.
• Bug Fix : Order.Info not pulling full order information.
• Bug Fix : ProductAttribute class missing members

v1.0 : 2009-03-15
Ez.Newsletter.MagentoApi_v1.0.zip

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