Building Your Business

You missed it for Valentine's Day but it isn't too late to plan a romantic getaway in Napa Valley at the Relevant Tool's customer Napa Cottages. While you are dreaming about relaxing in the Wine Country you can learn about how Napa Cottages uses custom response pages for their contact form and how you can personalize the response pages for your own Relevant Tools web forms.



Use Relevant Tools to set up your web forms, selecting the fields that you want. VIP customers have the option to enter a web page on your website to be used for the response page and the missing fields and error page (usually the same page). If you don't enter your own web pages here the standard Relevant Tools pages will be used with a link back to your site.



Relevant Tools will generate the form code for you to install on your website. You can customize the look and feel of the form to match your website.



Your website visitor fills out the form. If any required fields are missing the missing fields page is displayed with the list of missing fields.



The user can go back and make any corrections required.



Now when your website visitor completes the form they receive a customized response page.



It is easy to set up and if you have any questions or need technical help, Relevant Tools is here to help you with the details.

Labels: web forms

Keep your email subscribers happy with offering an automatic unsubscribe option for those that no longer want to receive your email. With Relevant Tools an unsubscribe link is posted in the footer of every email that is sent out. One click and the recipient is unsubscribed. The record is still in your database in case you need other information but Relevant Tools will automatically bypass all the unsubscribed email addresses when you send mailings.



In the case above the words remove are the link to the unsubscribe link but this can be customized as desired. Once the user clicks on the unsubscribe link their email address is immediately placed on the unsubscribe or do-not-send list. If you have specified a custom unsubscribe confirmation page then your own page will be displayed.



This process works well for anyone who wants to get off your list directly from the mailing but sometimes people want to unsubscribe directly from your own website. You can use Relevant Tools to generate the unsubscribe code to put on your own webpage.



When the unsubscribe form code is installed on your page you offer your readers another option to remove themselves from your list if they do longer want to receive your email.



Keeping your readers happy, perhaps especially when they no longer want to receive your email, is vital to maintaining a well performing list.

Labels: email campaign, unsubscribe, web forms

Relevant Tools web forms continuously fill your database with new contacts and you can import contact lists from Excel or other databases. Relevant Tools can also process data notifications from other sources. There can be a lot of data arriving from multiple sources.

Using the 'other operations' function available in Relevant Tools you can examine the field usage in your database and spot any potential issues. First display your database. Then click on the 'other operations' link.



The other operations page gives you three choices. You can display the contents of all records in one report, look at the values of a particular field, or look at field usage in your entire database. Click on 'show field usage' to see how fields are being used in your database.



The report shows the number of records that have a value for each of the user defined fields in your database. But sometimes there may be fields in use in your database that you haven't defined. There is an option to see field usage for all fields existing in your database, even if you haven't defined the field.



This report is particularly useful for finding problems where you may have changed a field name or made a typo and the data is being saved with a field name that you didn't expect. One of the features of Relevant Tools is that all data is saved, even if you haven't defined the field name. So when you see a field that isn't defined and should be, you can simply define it and all the data will automatically be displayed in your regular searches.



There are some fields that are system fields that are used internally, such as Record ID. Some of these system fields may be of interest, such as Created On. You can include system fields in custom views of your database if you want to view or export the system data with your user data.

Labels: databases, fields

Follow these simple steps to email your message to your database of contacts with Relevant Tools. Before you get started sending your email you should first create your message. Then click on Database in the top orange bar and press the green display data button.



Confirm that you displaying the expected database. Then click on the link "email to this list":



Next select the message that you previously created:



You should always test by sending a copy of the message to yourself:



Double check that it is the right message and it looks the way you want it to. Any bad email addresses, previous unsubscribes or duplicate addresses will automatically be removed from the mailing.



Press the "Send Mailing Now" button and your mailing will be on its way immediately or you can schedule it to be sent at a later time.

Labels: email campaign

It is easy to set up online registration using Relevant Tools. We have implemented online registration for many sports, such as swimming, water polo, soccer, lacrosse, and Little League baseball. Rugby is the latest sport that is using Relevant Tools for online registration. As with many sports teams that only collect payments once a year, Highlanders Rugby is using PayPal to collect online payments.

To get started a registration page lists all the steps for a parent to do:



The registration information form is a standard Relevant Tools web form where all the information collected is stored in a Relevant Tools database.



Each player completing the registration form is automatically assigned a unique confirmation number using Relevant's auto increment fields. This confirmation number is used to track the payment. Payments can be made online using PayPal or by check.



The confirmation number and player name are passed into PayPal. Online payment is completed using PayPal's standard interface with a return to the rugby website when payment is complete.



The PayPal payment notification is automatically processed by Relevant Tools and a record is created in a Relevant Tools PayPal database. The player registration information is updated with the payment details. The volunteers running registration for Highlanders Rugby can easily generate reports.



Full details of the PayPal transactions are available in the Relevant Tools PayPal database. The credit card information itself is not stored online for added security and it is not needed in Relevant Tools as PayPal is handling the actual credit card transaction. You can create custom views of your PayPal and registration databases to show the information you need to see.



Let us know if you need help with your sports league registrations. We can customize the registration forms and payment processing for your particular sport and have you up and running right away.

Labels: online payment, registration, web forms

You can easily create custom views for your online database. With a custom view you can control which columns are data are displayed and the order of display. This is particularly useful if you have a database with a lot of fields that are used for different functions. For example you can define a contact view, a status view, a performance view, and so on.

To get started click on databases. Make sure your database that you want to define the view for is selected as the current database. Click on 'create/edit/delete' a view to start the process of defining or customizing a view.



To create a new view give it a name or you can select an existing view to edit.



Select the field that you want to use for each column. You can also specify the maximum column width if you want to have some columns be wider or narrower.



In addition to using any of the fields that you have defined for your database you can also include system fields in your view. System fields are fields such as "created on" or "IP address" that are automatically added to each record.



When you display your database you can toggle the view from 'all user defined fields' to the views that you have defined. The fields will be displayed in the order you have specified.



In addition to controlling the view that you see on the screen, views are also used to control what data is exported. When you export your database only the fields that are used in the current view are exported. If you want all fields exported make sure you are using the view 'all user fields'. If you want to export system fields such as the date created and IP address you will need to define a view that includes those fields.



Have fun creating views for your data. You can change your views at any time.

Labels: databases, views