Sendrecurring’s Official Launch of Paid Packages! Quotas will now be enforced.

As announced in the last post, we “soft-launched” Sendrecurring’s new paid package system a while back, and as of Monday (January 20, 2014), they are officially launched! There are a couple of announcements that go along with it.

First of all, SORRY ABOUT THE LITTLE CRASH WE HAD ON MONDAY! Somebody had to go and get all code-y and it messed stuff up temporarily. Who farted, right? No worries, we’ve fixed the problem and your emails should be sending like normal.

Second of all, here are the changes that accompany the Paid Package launch.

If you are using the free demo version of Sendrecurring but do not have an account, you will need to create one (totally free and easy). You will automatically be signed up for the free package. If you have an account already (regardless of package), great!
Limits will be enforced for emails, texts, and polls.
For the free package, if you send more than 100 emails per month, any number past 100 will not send. If you send to a recipient group larger than 100 people, it will not send to any of the recipients. For Basic and Pro account holders, the same applies, only your quotas will be higher according to your package.
For the free package, you will need to upgrade your account in order to send recurring texts (or increase email and poll allowance). View text limits here. To upgrade your account, login to your existing account and go to the Pricing page. It will show you the options you have for upgrading.
If you reach or exceed your quota of emails, you will receive a friendly email letting you know.

click image to go to Plans and Pricing in a new tab

Third of all, we’ve added a feature that many of you have been asking for: optional start dates! Previously, the recurring emails were sent based on “now” or whenever you created the email. Now, you can schedule them to go out in advance, which will hopefully make life a lot easier for you. When you’re creating a new email or editing an existing email, it will look like this:

When you click on the text box, a calendar will drop down and you can select your desired send date.

We’re really excited that Sendrecurring is as well-liked as it seems to be this early on! The service is for you, the user, so if there is anything that needs improving or a feature you’d like to see added, drop us a line (conrad@sendrecurring.com) and we’ll do our best to make you happy! And as always, if you’re happy with the service, send us a testimonial (conrad@sendrecurring.com)! We’d love to feature you (either by business name or personal name, or anonymously) on our coming-soon testimonial page.

Sendrecurring’s Soft Launch, Now Happening!

We’ve got two big announcements today! First, we’ve added recurring text messages to our list of awesome features (more on that later), and second, we have now entered the “soft launch” phase of our upgrade!

Over the course of Sendrecurring’s development, we’ve received some awesome feedback and suggestions, one of which was that Sendrecurring should be a paid service that offers levels of features. I know, you’re thinking “Who the heck would suggest making a free service into a paid service and ruin it for everyone?!”

“It looks great and seems to work well. Keep up the great work!! Make a few more tweaks and you can start charging for the service. Fee should be modest for best results.”

“fyi, when this works exactly how I need it to, I’d gladly pay to use it.”

You got it, guys. So we fixed the bugs and added the features they talked about, and decided to come up with a few different packages to fit the users’ needs.

Well, here’s the great thing: It’s not going to ruin anything for anyone! As always, Sendrecurring is free to use for anyone. We’ve created some paid package options, which means we’ve put a limit on how many emails can be sent per month. Keep reading for our pricing information – it’s reasonable, we promise.

click image to view pricing information in a new tab

Since we’re fine-tuning some of Sendrecurring’s features and we want to give our users a decent amount of notice, we’ll be making the switch to the limited Free Package on December 1, 2013. No fees, no limits until then.

Starting December 1, 2013:

Account creation will be required for all users. This doesn’t mean everyone will have to start paying, it just means that everyone will need to create an account (free for everyone). Annoying, you say? We think spam is even more annoying, so by creating annoying accounts, we’re preventing even more annoying spammers from botting around and ruining people’s days.

Once you create your account, you’ll have free access to all of Sendrecurring’s Free Package features. Your account will only be upgraded if you say so.

We know that it can be tough to get used to changes, especially when you’ve been using the service for a while. The official launch of the paid packages will be in December, but we are now offering the paid service as an option before we start enforcing the limits. If you know you’d like to use the service through one of the paid packages, now’s the time to buy. Here’s why.

click image to view pricing information in a new tab

Upgraded accounts will have access to our newest feature, recurring texts! The free accounts do not (and will not) have any texting ability. Also if you sign up now, your transition on December 1 will be seamless (especially if you’re currently using over 100 emails).

We really hope you are as excited as we are about the new features! Go check them out and let us know what you think! Suggestions and feedback are the reasons we made these updates in the first place, so you should know that what you have to say really does matter!

Hop to! Set up your account if you haven’t already, and start exploring the new features!

How to Increase Your Email Open Rate

Hey Sendrecurrers! (recurrrrs? Flerb?)

First things first, we’re excited to announce the birth of Baby Frame, born EIGHT fabulous days AFTER his due date. Maybe if he ever checked his email, he would have seen the recurring one from me saying “Get out, we’re waiting!”

Second things second, Conrad received a feedback email (which we love, seriously. We want to marry feedback emails) from a happy SR user who finished his email like this:

“The cherry would be to have a button to resend the email for those who have not yet responded.”

Then, while browsing Pat Flynn’s site Smart Passive Income during naptime (Have you seen this site? Chock full of business building advice and other online marketing tips!), I came across this article on increasing your email open rate, and thought it had some great advice for all of Sendrecurring’s users!

Some of the key points are to:

1. Have an eye-catching subject line. It should tease the recipients. Give them a taste of what the email contains. You’re more likely to get more opens with the subject “6 easy things you can do to increase sales” than you are with the subject “Your weekly newsletter.”

2. Re-send your email to those who didn’t open it. Sometimes emails get all tangled in the web (see what I did there?) and either never make it to the inbox or get overlooked due to bad timing or whatever. Send it again!

There’s more great stuff in the article and comments, but I don’t want to spoil the fun, so you can check it out by clicking here (SFW).

So we’re adding a resend button to our long list of features to add to SR, and we hope you’ll continue to send us marriage proposals, er, I mean feedback emails.

Send Reminders Quarterly, Bi-Yearly, Yearly or… whatever!

New Feature

This morning I put the final touches on the latest feature for Sendrecurring: a longer than monthly option! Users can now schedule reminders to send any X number of months. However long you want!

You will see the new box when you go to create or edit any reminder:

This is a great feature that a lot of users have suggested. I really wish I could have implemented it sooner but it is a more difficult thing to code than you would initially think, due to every month having a different number of days and leap years, and that Python does not have an “Increment by Month” function in their datetime library.

For those that are curious I will brain dump a little on how I implemented it.

Technical Stuff Beyond This Point

The original system for monthly reminders was pretty simple and foolproof, I would simply add days to the current date until I was at the date that a reminder should be scheduled. This handled both cases of initial creation of a reminder and rescheduling a current reminder really well.

In the new system I could not do that. Reasons include that a new email will need to be sent this month, not X number of months away, and that a reminder past its send date due for rescheduling should be rescheduled X number of months away.

I added some checks.

1. I check if the current time is after the reminder/emails scheduled time (ie already past). If it is then I automatically start looking at future dates for it to be scheduled.

2. I check if the date of the reminder’s LAST scheduled send is before todays date. Brand new reminders will not have this, so that is an indicator that one is brand new. If today’s date is after the last scheduled send then that means it has been scheduled before and any subsequent schedulings will use the X number of months information.

A snippet of source code below (this is rough and untailored for the blog) but could make some sense if you really need to a solve similar problem. Just ask me if you want clarification :D.

  if localdatetime > localsendtime:
      localsendtime += datetime.timedelta(days = 1)
    try: eml = email.localsendtime
    except: eml = None
    if eml and localdatetime > eml:
      #add months depending on monthpattern
      try: monthpattern = email.monthpattern
      except: monthpattern = 1
      #add months if the monthpattern is 2 or higher
      if monthpattern > 1:
        monthdays = (monthpattern)*30
        localsendtime += datetime.timedelta(days = monthdays)
    #add days until it is the correct date
    while getattr(localsendtime, "day") != email.rpattern:
      localsendtime += datetime.timedelta(days = 1)

A few of you may notice that I use monthpattern * 30 for the “month” increment. This is actually slightly lower than the real days per month average of 30.4. The downside to this is that if someone does a really long monthlypattern, the days could eventually be off. It would need to be off by an entire month for the subsequent datetime.timedelta(days = 1) to no longer “catch” the desired date so there is some buffer for error.

I will be keeping a watchful eye on what happens with this. Anything over 75 months may be inaccurate, 6.25 years. I wonder if anyone would really want to be reminded about something that far off.

How to Send a Recurring Poll – New Feature!

Hi everyone! This week, we’re eagerly awaiting the birth of the Sendrecurring Family baby, who is officially overdue. I thought I’d throw together a little tutorial on using Sendrecurring’s newest feature, polls. They’re easy to create, send, and view results for!

It will take you to a screen that looks very similar to the “New Email” page. From here, fill out your email as you normally would, making sure to include To, Subject, and send info. In the box below “Add Option Box,” enter a poll question or option.

To add additional options, click on “Add Option Box.” Empty boxes will appear where you can add your additional options.

Since we’re waiting for our baby, Conrad put together a poll for me to answer each day. Here’s a peek at what your poll will look like to your recipients.

This email contains three poll options and some additional email text (Conrad specified to “Click one of the options to vote.” Ignore his typo). You can add text in the composition box if you need to send your poll with any instructions or descriptions, or just to send a regular message. The text you add in the email box will appear after the poll links, as shown above.

Once you send your poll email to your recipients, the poll options will show up as clickable links. The recipients will be able to click on their answer, and the data will be recorded. It is currently only an option for recipients to vote once.

When they click on their poll answer, a new tab will open in their browser that looks like this:

This new tab will display the current poll results (anonymously), as well as a “Thank you for voting” message or a “You have already voted” message.

As the owner of the poll, you are able to view more results. In your account, below your list of emails, you can view your polls and their data. Click on “View Details” to expand the box, and you can see the amount of recipients, opens, and votes per sent poll.

To view specific data such as which recipient voted on which option, click on the link for the poll under “Subject.” It will take you to a page like this:

Ways Sendrecurring’s poll feature could help you:

Keep track of daily employee tasks
Get feedback from employees
Yes/No surveys (easy!)

If you still have any questions, leave a comment or send an email to conrad@sendrecurring.com.

Guide to Time Zones: UTC numbers

We recently added Time Zone Detection to our email service (!), and it automatically detects which time zone you’re sending your email from based on your browser’s time on your computer. But sometimes, that time isn’t correct, or isn’t the time zone you want your email sent to/from (like if you’re travelling or daylight savings hits). So we made it so that you can change the time zone if you want.

To change the time zone on your email, login to your account and click on “Settings” (located in the

Click on the dropdown menu and select your desired time zone.

…

OK, so maybe we don’t all have our time zones and correlating positive or negative numbers memorized. So here’s a little guide to time zones and their numbers.

We found this awesome image here if you want to read up on time zones. It’s an exciting subject.

Hopefully this makes it easier for you to change time zones for your emails if needed!

Enjoy!

Improvements to Sendrecurring, part 2!

Hey everyone, Tess here, Conrad’s super-awesome, super-pregnant wife. I’m going to be contributing some content to the website and blog so I wanted to introduce myself and say hello! I hope you all think Sendrecurring is as awesome as I do.

Conrad recently posted about some of Sendrecurring’s new and upcoming improvements, and I wanted to just throw a cherry on top of that sundae and tell you a little more about the amazing things we’re working on to improve the user’s experience.

Website

We’re working overtime to create a great new design for the website as well as informative content that will help new and existing users. Here are some of the pages that will be coming soon:

Features and Benefits
Packages and Pricing
How it Works
Customer Stories
About
FAQ

Time

Conrad mentioned in his last post that he updated the time entry box so that you can send an email at any time of the day, rather than just on the hour. He also added a Time Zone Detection feature that lets you alter the time zone you send your email in. To view or edit your Time Zone, go to your account management page, click on Settings, and edit your UTC in the drop-down menu. More info coming on this feature soon.

UPDATE: Here’s a helpful post on how to adjust your time zone and a guide to time zone numbers.

Polls/Surveys

You’ll soon be able to send polls and surveys with your emails, and you can review the results in your email stats.

A little about the paid packages

One of our fears with creating paid account options was that some of our users would stop using Sendrecurring because they didn’t want to pay, so we made sure to keep a free option with slightly more limited features. Don’t worry – we won’t be making the switch right away, so continue using Sendrecurring! We’ll provide LOTS more information about the paid account options before we add them.

Customer Stories

We want to put together a page specifically for testimonials from happy users of Sendrecurring so that investigators can see what an awesome service it is! We can’t put this together without your help, though. If you’d like to submit a story or testimonial of how Sendrecurring has helped you, either personally or professionally, we’d love to share your story!

Just send us:

Your name (you can be as anonymous as you like)
Your business/website (we’ll share and direct some web traffic back to you)
Your story (tell us how Sendrecurring has helped you)

FAQ

I’ve updated the FAQ page so its answers are more current and relevant to the new features. If you have any questions about how Sendrecurring works, don’t hesitate to send your questions to us!

Incoming: Improvements to Sendrecurring

Sendrecurring.com is getting some upgrades!

You may have noticed some minor upgrades over the past weeks such as corrections to wording and description, and better validation on lists of comma separated emails, but BIG changes are on the way.

Around a year ago I posted about how Sendrecurring would do away with logins and instead get by with actions confirmed via email. This led to the currently-in-place system whereby you must click a confirmation link with the creation of each new recurring email. This works, but it has it’s flaws. Chief among them is that it is difficult to manage large numbers of emails as you are constantly bouncing between your inbox and Sendrecurring. Also it can be tedious filling in the same owner email, and timezone information for every email, those things would be better stored long-term… SOOO

Sendrecurring is getting user accounts!

User accounts will begin being rolled out soon. If you read this and would like an account now head on over to the signup page and then proceed to the login page. You will be confronted with a single confirmation email (likely your last one if you make an account) before you can being using it.

What will you find after logging in? A MUCH nicer dashboard for handling all of your emails!

Some improvements to point out:

All of your emails are listed out for easy viewing of everything you have running
Turn Off and Turn On toggles
The Next Send time is clearly visible
It’s just so clean!

And the improvements do not stop there, look at how much simpler the email creation form is for you:

Improvements here include:

No “Owner” email. You are already logged in you don’t need to enter this!
No Start Date and End Date or Duration boxes. What? How? Email starting and stopping will be controlled by the Turn Off and Turn On buttons on the manage page, overall much easier to understand and use than all the date selection boxes! New emails will start out Turned On and you can toggle them to your heart’s content from there.
A much improved time entry box. There’s still a drop down for time selection if you want it, but the new box also allows you to type out times such as: “3:30 am” “15:00” “12 45” and auto-completes a correct time from there.
No limit on specific times. Previously the time dropdown was limited to send only in hourly increments. Well that is gone now. The new type-in time box, coupled with the server improvements allow emails to be sent at any time you want, 5:31 am? Sure. 6:47? Whatever. I expect the majority of emails will still be sent at even or quarterly times, but the option for any time was often requested, so here it is!

These new features will not be replacing the current features… right away. I do plan to phase out the non logged-in email creation with support for updating the emails you do have continuing on for quite some time.

Expect the landing page to have some information about logging in and the new account in the near future.

Also, all this great stuff is still going to be offered for free!

Tell your friends and coworkers!

Thanks,

Conrad Frame

~12 Hour Outage Post-Changes

There was a 12-hour outage to the mail system of the site today.

Luckily, I was notified by a few users that their emails were no longer going through and that even the confirmation emails were not being sent, in fact, no emails were being sent. I was able to get a hold of Google (who is hosting Sendrecurring) and get the issue resolved

The issue was due to Sendrecurring switching to the high replication datastore recently. The Appengine service gave Sendrecurring the “default” limit of 100 emails per/day after the switch, to be upped back to the regular limit after the first billing cycle (one week). Well, Sendrecurring hit that 100 limit very quickly before users started noticed the problem. The limit is back up to the normal one now.

Sorry for the gap in service.

Send on

Changes Behind the Scenes

Sendrecurring is moving forward after many months on the back-burner! I am excited to be working on it again.

To kick things off I did some changes behind the scenes, sorry, not much to see from outside appearances. I won’t keep it a secret that I am using Google App Engine as the backend for Sendrecurring. A year ago they offered a new feature called the High Replication Datastore, which is a fancy term describing how an app is spread across Google’s servers, which I had not taken the opportunity to upgrade to. I did that this evening! Hooray for security, server safety, and data redundancy!

Secondly, I cleaned up all of the html template files for that front-end of Sendrecurring. I don’t know what I was thinking 1.5 years ago when I hacked them all together, but they were a disorganized mess. Things are more orderly now, and some sense has been established.

Why am I doing these changes to the backend? Well I am preparing for some big changes to the overall application and would like clean plumbing before diving in too deep.

Changes forthcoming, possible features are….. logins, saved contacts, open-rates on emails, attachments and definitely more fine-tuned recurrence options and delivery.

Thanks!

SendRecurring Blog