All entries for Sunday 31 May 2009

Form Spam via MS Office Live SB to a Sequence of Sign–ups

Writing about web page http://ppcpromotion.co.uk/adwords-audit

My website ppcpromotion.co.uk is hosted on a MS Office Live Small Business site. I used their built-in form-builder and was going to use their paid-for emailer solution too.

For three months now I have been receiving SPAM messages sent via these forms. Microsoft did not have any safeguards such as a catchpa or email verification.

The SPAM was steady, not a flood, at about 100 alerts per month. The example above has one of the more publishable titles and the large text box was stuffed with weblinks. I could have used an external form designer such as FormLogix some time ago but I was doing some research into Email Autoresponders for a client so elected to thy one of these out.

Microsoft seemed to abandon the CRM space by removing their emailer so I knew I had to move. I have used iContact. These were not brilliant but the costs were realistic and their forms plugged into the site and just worked well where others failed. My leaner forms with meaningful action buttons have already proved to be more effective that Microsoft’s standard one that asked all subscribers to Submit. Even with email confirmation conversions have trebled.

The thing that I am still searching for is an autoresponder that will send the next message when triggered by an action, clicking a link or visiting a page, rather than just by number of days or manually.

I have not yet reviewed the Market Leaders such as InfusionSoft; sorry, Price on Application offers go to the bottom of my list. But I looked back at the use of this by emailer experts such as Perry Marshall and realised that he had got me to sign-up afresh for every list I was on. This is actually good practice but if someone accesses your free download this seems a good time to offer more free stuff. Can this be done? If you want to see how powerfully an autoresponder can be used, just click on Perry’s ad, right and sign up for his 5 day tips & free chart. His Friday emails are always entertaining and sometimes invaluable with the alerts that he sends.

Updated to point to the latest site, still hosted on MS Live SB.
I have been using iContact’s forms for signups since then but recently their policy will not double-signup emails with admin@ sales@etc. They will not send the confirmation emails. This would have blocked 30% of my clients over the past 2 years!

Robert McGonigle : 31 May 2009 16:55 |  Tags: Conversions Email Autoresponders Form Spam Improving Conversions Ms-Olsb |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem