Hi all!
I've been asked to get a sense of how much time we'll need to spend maintaining Wordfly after installation and setup. For orgs using Wordfly currently, is it hands off, mostly hassle-free, moderately hassle-ish, chunk-o-time, or I wish I had my life back?
Thanks,
Kirk MortensenDBA, TheatreWorkskirk@theatreworks.org
Hey Kirk -
I guess the question is - what do you mean by maintaining? :)
Heather
Good question! I don’t know. We’re currently on Constant Contact, and there’s a fair amount of list cleanup, and cross- updating the databases with each other (ugh!). On Wordfly, I know it automatically handles unsubscribes, etc., so nothing to manually update in Tess, right? How about ongoing DBA/IT tasks to keep the integration functioning, etc.?
Kirk Mortensen
Database Administrator
TheatreWorks
From: Tessitura Web Forum [mailto:forums-tessitura-web@tessituranetwork.com] On Behalf Of Heather KraftSent: Wednesday, January 05, 2011 9:37 AMTo: Kirk MortensenSubject: Re: [Tessitura Web Forum] Wordfly Maintenance
From: Kirk Mortensen <bounce-kirkmortensen3287@tessituranetwork.com>Sent: 1/5/2011 10:23:40 AM
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Oh, I remember those joyful days (we were on another program, but still an outside database). So the good news is that yes, once you are on Wordfly and set up, you should have minimal touches to it. It obviously depends on how you use it and what you expect from it, but from a DB standpoint, the upkeep is pretty minimal once we got set up. My caveat here (and I think others will agree) is that because we are so segmented in what we send out, and I don't want people to unsubscribe from say, Ticket Reminders when they really don't want to get our Enews anymore, I've had to do a bunch of hoop jumping and (unfortunately) manual naming standards to support said hoop jumping. So set up wasn't quite the snap for us as we did not stick with the standard scripts for unsubscribe/hard bounces. Since we only use emails/accounts from Tessitura in Wordfly, once we were set up, the maintenance is completely automatic now.
The one part of our system that is still not completely set up is the email sign up. We had been using a form that fed right into our external email system (and then TMS). So we are in the process of setting up web forms that will feed the subscription process directly into Tessitura. If you have those already then you don't have to worry. If you don't, you'll want to add that to your 'to do' list.
From a non-db standpoint there's two kinds of users in our organization - the builder of the templates and the creator of the campaigns/sender of emails. The template user still has quite a bit to do - some of it is pounding the CSS in WordFly into submission, some is because Outlook wants to break everything, and some is because he's a fabulously type A guy who has to have everything perfect.
From the campaign creator/email sender standpoint, it is pretty straight forward. We've been dealing with a few bugs in the beta, but have seen great improvements and the WordFly team is pretty responsive. It's still missing some functionality that we'd like, but we hear it is in the pipeline.
HTH, feel free to buzz me offline as well!
HeatherSeattle Rep
We’re on TMS, not Wordfly—starting about six months ago. While TMS marks hard and soft bounces and unsubscribes, there is some handling on our end to make other e-mails primary in accounts that have them, for accounts marked as hard bounces; I’ve written a couple of procedures to take the marketing flag off unsubscribes and hard bounces. I go in and mark the eaddress as a hard bounce, then take the TMS-generated hard bounce e-mail restriction setting off, so that if there are deliverable eaddresses in the account, I can use them.
Additionally, we are starting to look at the salutations that attach to e-mails. Also, to get two e-mails from the same account, you have to figure out how to pull them, which means setting up different e-mail types and figuring out how to apply them.
I would say every large e-blast requires up to a couple of hours of my time—cleaning up marketing flags before running the extractions; running the extractions; dealing with the responses, both automated and manual. I track all manual responses via CSI and deal with the automated by deleting—the “out of the office” ones; and updating—the “change of address” ones.
Lucie
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