After you have downloaded the Auto-Remind Add-On from the support center, simply upload the extracted folder to your 12all/admin/modules folder.
Login to 12all as the "admin" user and click Presets. You should now see a link for "Auto Remind." Click this link and follow the on screen instructions to activate.
When activation is complete, click Presets >> Auto Remind. Here you can your first message. Messages work like regular autoresponders, except there are several new fields.
Additional Fields Available
Subscriber Field: This is the subscriber field that holds the date that you are trying to match to today's date. Examples of this might be a birthday, contract expiration date, or next oil change date, etc...
Date Format: This is the date format that you are using in the subscriber field you have just selected.
Type: "Match Year, Month and Day" will match an exact date, whereas "Match Month and Day" will match a particular month and day every year (like a birthday, for example).
Offset Days: This is the number of days before or after the current date that you'd like to match.
Cron Setup
In order for the Auto-Remind module to work, you must set up the cron file:
1. The location of the cron file is: 12all/admin/modules/auto_remind/cron_auto_remind.php
2. Set permissions for the cron file to be usable via cron.
CHMOD 12all/admin/modules/auto_remind/cron_auto_remind.php to 755 3. Ensure that the first line of cron_auto_remind.php is the location of PHP on your server.
Default first line entry on this file is:
#!/usr/local/bin/php -q The /usr/local/bin/php should be the location of php
4. Add a cron job to run the cron file once per day.
Example Usages:
Birthday: The goal here is to send out an email to all patients 2 weeks before their birthday to remind them to schedule an annual appointment.
The first thing to do would be to setup a subscriber field called "Birthday."
Then you would choose Birthday for the subscriber field in your Auto reminder, and "Match Month and Day" for the Type. Date Format should be the format you decide to use for the subscriber field.
Offset days would be -14. The system will now subtract 14 days from today's date and see if that matches any Birthdays. If so, it will send the message to that subscriber.
Yearly contract renewal:
The goal here is to send a message to subscribers 1 week before their contract expires to remind them to renew.
The first thing would be to set up a subscriber field called "Contract Expiration Date", and choose Year Month and Day for the type. Then choose -7 for the offset.
Customer loyalty program case study:
The goal is to send a free offer to a customer every year after they've subscribed.
Choose "Date Subscribed" as the Subscriber field, and "Match Month and Day" as the Type. Format is automatically yyyy-mm-dd when using "Date Subscribed" as the subscriber field. Offset should be 0. Now subscribers will get this message every year on the date they originally signed up.
Note: Subscribers will not get any messages from Auto-Remind module on the date they subscribe.
