Program Settings

This section describes all the options you have to control the behaviour of the You're a Winner! service. These options include how many gifts are awarded, the lifetime of draw entries and whether or not the program should track birthdays and anniversaries, among many other options.

The line below the page header displays the date on which the You're a Winner! service will expire (or has expired). The date changes when you renew your subscription . The renewal/update process can take a few minutes, so if your expiry date doesn't change immediately, wait for a few minutes, then display this configuration window again by clicking the reload button on your browser. If it doesn't update after 20 minutes or so, call us.

When the page is displayed for the first time all of the green tabs are closed. Click on any of them to expand that section.

The section labeled Day-to-day operations contains items that you'll use fairly regularly.

The section labeled Modify the business profile and draw parameters contains items that will need to be set when you're first setting up your client profile and then generally can be left alone.

The section labeled Upload/update template files contains the items that allow you to change the various template and insert files that you will use to create the emails that are sent to your subscribers. Some of these files will rarely (if ever) change, others will change more frequently, depending on your marketing strategy.

When all of the tabs listed above are expanded, the page will look similar to the one displayed below. Click on any item in the image below for a description of that item.

The "Day-to-day" section lists the things that you can command the service to do for you. This includes running test and live draws, generating test emails and several other items.

The item labeled Generate QR Customer scan code allows you to create a QR code that you can send to an external marketing materials supplier (e.g. a printing house) so that they can embed the QR code in placemats, posters or any any other marketing material you wnat to produce. The QR code will be produced as a .png file and will be sent to the management contact email address located in the business profile section below. Note that the QR code will be valid from the date of its generation to the length of time indicated by the QR code expiry field in the business profile section.

The line labeled Generate a Statement of Account first asks for two dates - the balance forward date and the statement date and then tells the You're a Winner! service to generate a statement of account that lists all the transactions that occurred for the client site between the dates indicated. The first transaction line in the statement will be the balance forward amount as at the balance forward date and the outstanding balance reported on the statement is as at the statement date. When the system requests the dates it initially sets the balance forward date to the first day of the current month and the statement date to the current date. You can change the dates to whatever period you prefer. The statement is generated as a .pdf document and emailed as an attachment to the management contact email address.

The item labeled Make a payment on your account opens a dialog which itemizes the current license status for this client, gives the monthly renewal rate and some approximate amounts in different currencies and allows you to continue the renewal process via Paypal. As of this writing, Paypal is the only payment method we currently use. Credit card processing is on our roadmap.

The item labeled Display the translatable fields defined for emails does just what it says. Translatable fields are placeholders for either information stored in the subscriber's profile or as system generated data that's available when a test or live draw is being processed. When you define an email template (winner, consolation, anniversary or birthday notification) you place a translatable field placeholder in the body of the email and the system will substitute the content of the indicated translatable field for the placeholder (e.g. an email template that contains the text "Hi %first_name%! " will contain "Hi Ron! " in the email that is sent by the system - provided that the subscriber's first name is Ron, of course).

When you click on the Run a "test" draw link the You're a Winner! service will create a winner notification and a consolation notification email both of which will be sent to the management contact email indicated in the configuration below. This allows you to verify that the layouts of the emails sent the corresponding groups are correct and that advertising inserts, logos, unsubscribe links, etc. are all included in both layouts.

The item labeled Run a live (real) draw will cause the You're a Winner! service to execute a random draw and generate and send the relevant email messages.

The link labeled Run a "test" birthday reminder will cause the You're a Winner! service to generate a birthday greeting message to the management email address using the birthday on file for the management contact subscriber record. This means that if you want to test a specific date or name, edit the subscriber record for the management contact email and the service will use that information to create the test email.

The link labeled Run a "test" anniversary reminder will cause the You're a Winner! service to generate an anniversary reminder message to the management contact using the anniversary on file for the management contact subscriber record. This means that if you want to test a specific date or name, edit the subscriber record for the management contact email and the service will use that information to create the test email.

The description of the visitor analysis report isn't complete yet. Sorry.

The item labeled Generate a list of active customers in .csv format generates an active customer list and emails it as an attachment to the management contact email indicated in the client profile. The fields listed will vary depending on the collection selections in the profile (i.e. collect birthdays, anniveraries, business and/or address information) but will include as a minimum the subscribers first and last names and the subscriber's email address.

The item labeled View/edit a customer profile opens a new window where you can look up a customer by email address. When you fill in the email address the service does a lookup for that customer and if found supplies the currently available customer information along with the customer's status and an explanation of the meaning of that status.

If there is no matching record for the email you entered then the service will allow you to fill in the information fields to create a new customer record.

The bottom field on this window is a date entry field that allows you to create one or more visit tags for this customer. Only one visit per day is allowed, of course, but this editable field allows you to add tags that were collected manually from previous days. Clicking the button labeled Create visit tag without entering a date will create a visit tag for the current date.

The item labeled Create a user login for tablet signups enables you to create a unique login so that you can collect customer signups where the customer doesn't have a cell phone or can't use it to scan the tent card QR code.

When you click this item you'll be presented with a window that asks for an email address, a password and a confirmation password.

The email address must be one you control in the sense that it must be a globally unique identifier - it can't be used with any other You're a Winner! installation at any other site. However, it needn't be a functioning email address. In other words, if you have a real email address such as "manager@prestobistro.ca" then specifying "tablet.manager@prestobistro.ca" even though it doesn't actually exist, is perfectly acceptable.

The two password fields must match and are validated against a database of roughly 5.5 million previously hacked passwords. The service won't allow passwords that have been exposed elsewhere on the internet to be used here.

To use a tablet you open a browser to point to our company url https://christie-benn.com and then select Tablet Login, enter the email address/user identification you'll create as described below. When you do you'll be presented with a customer signup window similar to the one described in the section immediately above.

This customer signup window behaves in much the same way except that customer information is immediately cleared from the tablet once the customer has clicked the button at the bottom of the page. The content of the button and the action it initiates depends on the customer's status in the draw. For more information on customer status click here.

The item labeled Log out of the client portal securely closes your client session and returns to the christie-benn.com main page. Client sessions automatically expire after 24 hours, but for maximum security use this option to close the session when you are finished doing what you need to do.

The section labeled Modify the business profile and draw parameters defines the fields used to describe the business and to indicate the operating characteristics of your You're a Winner! installation.

The item labeled Organization is where you identify the name of the business. It should be the legal name of the business. In the case of a numbered company, we recommend that you specify the numbered company name here and use the next field to indicate the "doing business as..." name.

The organization name field appears in the footer section of every email that You're a Winner! generates and most anti-spam legislation requires the real business (i.e. your business) to be identified in each email sent out. We also require the real business name and address to be specified in these fields as part of our terms of service.

The item labeled Organization (line 2) is also used to identify the name of the business if you need two lines to describe it. If this field is empty the service won't include it in the footer that's part of the emails that are sent out by the service.

The item labeled Address (Line 1) is the first of two lines you can use for the street address of your business. Like the organization lines above, the street address appears in the footer of all email messages sent out to customers by the service.

The item labeled Address (Line 2) is the second of the two lines you can use for the street address of your business. Like the organization lines above, the street address appears in the footer of all email messages sent out to customers by the service.

The item labeled City is the city/municipality portion of your address. It too appears in the footer section of the email messages sent to customers.

The item labeled State/Province is the state, province or region portion of your physical address. It too appears in the footer section of the email messages sent to customers.

The item labeled Postal Code is the postal/zip code portion of your physical address. Like the other address related items, it is used in the creation of the footer that appears in any email message that is sent to customers from the service.

The item labeled Country is the country portion of your physical address. It does not make up part of the footer, but is used to calculate whether sales taxes are applied to the monthly fee for the You're a Winner! service.

The item labeled Telephone is the telephone number of your business. This isn't currently included as part of the footer of email messages but we need one in case we need to contact you by telephone.

The item labeled Contact: First Name is used to store the first name of the management contact for the business. It doesn't appear anywhere and is not used except for internal communications between you and us.

The item labeled Contact: Last Name is used to store the last name of the management contact for the business. It doesn't appear anywhere and is not used except for internal communications between you and us.

The field labeled Management Email must be filled in with the email address of the person who should receive draw related notifications, analytic results and internal correspondence from us. Typically this would be the general manager of the facility. It absolutely needs to be a valid email address.

The field labeled Draw Result Email Subject Line is used to set the subject line for all emails generated by the You're a Winner! client program so the subject line should serve to identify your business and possibly not much more than that. Something like "A message from <your business name>" might be a good start.

The field labeled Email "From" line is used to set the name of the sender of the emails that your subscribers will receive. If you as an individual are well known as the representative of your business then we would recommend you use your own name. Otherwise, something like "The staff at <your business name>" would work.

The "Reply To" email address field is used to set the reply to email address in the emails you send out. This should be a real email address that you or your staff actually monitor, just in case a subscriber decides to notify you that they want to unsubscribe and do so by sending a reply to the original email rather than just clicking the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email. You could also get emails as replies that are requesting further information, making reservations and similar things, so you definitely want real human eyes on the mailbox this directs to.

Each visit tag that is recorded in the You're a Winner! service has a date associated with it, and visit tags can be made to be valid for a specified period. This field is where you enter the period of time that tags are valid for. We recommend 180 days as a starting point, but you might want to extend that further but we don't recommend making it much shorter though. Once all visit tags have expired for a subscriber they won't be included in further draw results either as a winner or as a consolation email recipient, which means that they won't receive any emails (except possibly birthday and anniversary emails if you've enabled those) from the You're a Winner! service.

You can have the You're a Winner! service select more than one winner for each draw. This field is where you tell the client program how many entrants to flag as winners. The remainder of the list will get the consolation email.

You may well want to have multiple winners per draw if the prize you are offering is relatively low cost/value and if your participants list is relatively large. For the sake of argument, assume that you're budgeting $.10 per email for a prize and you've got a thousand active participants. If your prize is a $25.00 gift certificate you could tell the system to pick four winners each draw and still be within your budget, and you'd generate a fair bit of interest on the participants' part. It's entirely up to you how much you want to budget for prizes for each draw, and therefore how many winners you should have You're a Winner! select.

The check box labeled Track Birthdays controls whether the You're a Winner! service will collect birth dates when the contestant registers and whether the service will generate birthday greeting emails. If this box is unchecked then the birthday reminder file, the send test birthday email button and the time period before sending birthday emails will all be disabled.

The check box labeled Track Anniversaries controls whether the You're a Winner! service will collect anniversary dates when the contestant registers and whether the service will generate anniversary reminder emails. If this box is unchecked then the anniversary reminder file, the send test anniversary email button and the time period before sending anniversary emails will all be disabled.

The check box labeled Collect business name controls whether the You're a Winner! service displays a field where the contestant can enter their business name.

The check box labeled Collect address information controls whether the You're a Winner! service displays a field where the contestant can enter their postal/zip code and/or address.

The check box labeled Bonus entries are earned for birthdays is used to determine whether or not bonus visit tags are given to customers who provide information in the birthday field when the customer registers.

The check box labeled Bonus entries are earned for address information is used to determine whether or not bonus visit tags are given to customers who provide information in the postal code/address information fields. When checked the service counts each visit tag twice for that contestant, thereby doubling their chances of winning. As a business operator, having the contestant's postal code allows you to generate geolocation maps of client density and frequency. Generating these maps is in our road map for future enhancements to the You're a Winner! service.

The item labeled Send birthday email xx days in advance controls how far in advance of the customer's birthday the birthday email is sent to the customer.

The item labeled Send anniversary email XX days in advance of anniversary is used to indicate to the client program how many days in advance of the customer's anniversary the program should send the customer's anniversary reminder email.

The field labeled Run draw every XX days controls how often the You're a Winner! service will execute the random draw generation process. As the label indicates, entering zero in this field disables the automatic generation process completely so the only way to get a draw generated is to click the button labeled Run Live Contest Now. If you wanted the client program to generate a random draw every two weeks, enter 14 in this field.

The field labeled Next draw date indicates the date when the next draw generation process will start. When the draw generation process completes the client program will add the number of days indicated in the item above to the date in this field to arrive at the new next date.

The field labeled Next draw time indicates the approximate time of day (on a 24 hour clock) the You're a Winner! service will start the draw process. Note that this process can take a considerable amount of time to run so don't be surprised if the draw recap doesn't arrive in the management contact's email inbox for a considerable period after this time.

The field labeled QR Codes expire after XX days is used to determine the amount of time the QR code that appears on the table tent cards or the receipt extension document is valid. It is possible for customers who want to "stuff the ballot box" to take a photograph of the card or display then print the photograph and scan the QR code from the photograph without actually visiting your site, which would then distort the analytics of how frequently customers visit. Each QR code encodes the date of its generation along with some security information and the generation date is passed back to the You're a Winner! service when the code is scanned. This field indicates how long to accept the scan to create a visit tag. Leaving the value at zero sets the validity for only the day the card/display was generated. Setting the value to 1 for example will accept scans of a card/display generated yesterday to be valid today. Setting the value to a short period means that tent cards must be generated and placed on tables frequently (i.e. a value of zero means that tent cards must be generated each day). Conversely, setting a longer period may result in forged entries being accepted.

The item labeled Anniversary reminder subject line contains the content of the subject line of any email sent out as an anniversary reminder. It should be something appealing.

The item labeled Birthday reminder subject line contains the content of the subject line of any email sent out as an birthdayy reminder. It should be something appealing.

The button labeled Save Profile Information sends the contents of the fields in this section to the You're a Winner! server, updating your profile.

The section labeled Upload/update template files defines the files used to create the various emails and .pdf documents that You're a Winner! generates.

You will need to create (or personalize for your business) email templates for the various emails you'll be creating with the You're a Winner! service. You need to identify which template is used for which purpose. In the field labeled Winner notification file you upload the template that defines the layout of the email you will be sending to the winner(s) of each periodic draw. We supply a sample template that you can download to your computer by clicking the line Download existing... in the same box.