If you’re using an older version of AspDotNetStorefront you’re probably overwhelmed with the junk mail coming through your built-in contact form on a daily basis.

You should upgrade. AspDotNetStorefront 8.0 is packed with great new features, enhanced security, and a completely redesigned Admin interface that will make your life a lot easier. Learn how to upgrade to AspDotNetStorefront 8.0.

If you’re not ready to make the change, here’s how to activate an incredibly helpful piece of code that will prevent a whole lot of junk mail from getting to your inbox.

In the latest AspDotNetStorefront upgrade, I found this lovely bit of JavaScript that when added to your contact page will supply form validation. This means:

• The email address field will require a valid email address format and all fields will require information.
• If a required field is missing information, the form will not be submitted and an error message will pop up instructing the user to “Please complete entries.”
• If all fields contain information but the email address is invalid, it will pop up a message saying “Invalid Email.”

This level of validation should be enough to stop those annoying spam-bots, but friendly enough that your customers will be able to complete the form accurately, in order to get their legitimate email on its way.

Enabling JavaScript

First of all, you should make sure that your topic pages in AspDotNetStorefront allow scripts. Out of the box, you cannot add JavaScript to a contact page. If you try, and hit update at the bottom, your script will be erased.

To enable scripts:

• Go to the root of your site (your Web folder)
• Open the RadControls > Editor folder
• Open the ConfigFile.xml file in your favorite text editor
• search for “AllowScripts”

You should find this line of code:

<property name="AllowScripts">false</property>

Change the “false” to “true”, and upload this file to your site to the appropriate folder.

Now we should have access to add JavaScript code to topic pages through the HTML editor in admin.

Installing Form Validation

Log in to your admin site, and go to Misc > Topics. Search for the contact form in the left navigation, and open it up. Now, let’s take a look at the source. You should see an icon in the toolbar that looks something like this: <>. Clicking that will allow you to view the HTML that’s creating the code.

Take a look at the code and see if you can find any <script> tags.

• If you can, then chances are you’re running a more recent version of AspDotNetStorefront that already has this fix applied.
• If you don’t see this, that means you’re either on an older version, or you recently upgraded to 8.0 and this fix wasn’t applied because it would have overwritten the changes you’ve made. Luckily, you can apply this fix without getting rid of the changes you’ve made to the form out of the box.

In the HTML code, look for the opening <form> tag. It should look something like this:

<form id="MailArea" action="sendform.aspx" method="post"></form>

Directly after this you should see an opening and closing <div> tag. Within this tag, copy the following block of code in:

<script type="text/javascript">function CheckFields(){var ergx = new RegExp(''\w+([-+.'']w+)*@\w+([-.]\w+)*\.\w+([-.]\w+)*''); if(document.getElementById("MailName").value == "" || document.getElementById("MailPhone").value == "" || document.getElementById("MailEmail").value == "" || document.getElementById("MailSubject").value == "" || document.getElementById("MailMessage").value == ""){alert("Please complete entries.");return false;} if(!ergx.test(document.getElementById("MailEmail").value)){alert("Invalid Email.");return false;}}</script>

Now, scroll to the bottom of the form, still in the HTML window. The final piece of code that writes out the submit button will need to change. it should look something like this:

<input name="B1" type="submit" value="Submit" />

Change that line of code to this:

<input onclick="return CheckFields();" name="B1" type="submit" value="Submit" />

And that’s it! Your submit button is now set to use the form validation javascript.

Click “update” to update the topic, and go take a look at your contact page on the front of your site.

Try to enter an invalid email format, or try to leave a field empty when you hit submit. It should pop up an error window instructing you to complete the fields, or to enter a valid email.

If it’s not working, go back to your topic in admin and make sure your script is still there. If it’s disappeared on you, you may need to restart your site, or reset the cache in admin to make sure the ‘AllowScripts’ setting is enabled. Double check the ConfigFile.xml on your server to make sure the AllowScripts setting is set to true.

Now that you’ve gotten your junk mail under control, you may want to change the formatting of the emails you receive from the form. Take a look at this post for instructions on changing the appearance of contact form emails.

                          

Now that you are collecting email addresses from your customers, it is time to develop a plan to use them.

There are many types of email campaigns that can be implemented. Some, such as limited time offers and notices of special events, are designed to quickly drive traffic to your site. The goal with these campaigns is to increase sales over the short term.

Other email campaigns, such as newsletters and surveys, focus more on building customer loyalty and improving customer service. By establishing yourself as an expert in your field or as someone who provides top-notch customer service, you will be able to increase your customer base. This type of relationship-building marketing focuses on increasing sales over the long term.

Ideally, your email marketing strategy will include both approaches.

Take some time to think about how (and what) you’d like to communicate to your subscribers. Even more importantly, consider what kinds of content your recipients will find most useful. Put yourself in their shoes.

By providing value to your subscribers, whether it is in the form of special offers or useful content, you will ultimately find yourself with more satisfied customers and higher conversion rates. Focus on keeping your emails personal, relevant and valuable.

Some of the various ways you can utilize email communication include:

• Newsletters
• Announcements
• Notices
• Industry news
• Product tips
• Special offers & promotions
• Featured items
• New product introductions
• Holiday products & events
• Invitations
• Surveys
• Coupons
• Retention letters
• Customer service
• Welcome emails
• Requests
• Auto-generated responses to specific consumer actions

These are just some ideas to get you started. There are almost limitless ways in which you can employ email marketing. Spend some time thinking about the occasions when it makes sense for you to communicate with your customers and what you want to say to them at those moments. Next, plan an email campaign to carry out your objectives.

Your collection of customer email addresses and the permission to use them is an incredibly valuable resource. Combined with a solid email marketing plan, you can successfully grow your business while increasing customer satisfaction. In today’s economy, who among us can afford to overlook such a golden opportunity?!

Look for our continuing series on email marketing to help you create and implement a successful email marketing plan. If you ever need help, we have an experienced email marketing team and an array of email marketing services to assist you.

Our next installment will focus on design considerations. Until then, please share your ideas for email marketing strategies. What kinds of campaigns have worked well for you? Do you have ideas you’d like feedback on?

                          

This is set up as a topic, and you can find it by going to www.yourdomain.com/t-contact.aspx.

This page can be modified through the HTML editor just like any other topic by going to Content > Manage Topics in version 8.0 or Misc > Topics in earlier versions.

Here, you can make any changes you like to the layout of the page, but what about modifying the actual email you get in your inbox when the contact form is submitted?

Unfortunately, there’s no HTML editor for that. Luckily, we found a great feature built right into AspDotNetStorefront that allows you to customize the contact form! Without this feature, you’ll still get your contact form results in your inbox, but using this feature will allow you to change the way it’s displayed.

This is especially useful for quoting the original message in an email response to the visitor, but if you don’t want those extra strange form tags to show up. What’s a ‘B1′? Who knows…let’s get rid of it!

This tutorial will show you how to turn this:

Name=Nicole Swan
Phone=541-201-9965
EMail=nicole@vortx.com
Subject=Contact Form Submit Test
S1=This is a test message submitted from the Contact Us page.
B1=Submit

into this:

Name: Nicole Swan
Phone Number: 541-201-9965
Email: nicole@vortx.com
Subject: Contact Form Submit Test
Message: This is a test message submitted from the Contact Us page.

This tutorial requires a basic knowledge of HTML and XML Packages. If you know a little HTML but you’re not familiar with XML Packages, read on! This tutorial will help you get to know them.

So, what’s an XML Package? Your AspDotNetStorefront site uses XML Packages for a variety of functions that you would not be able to live without. Your category and product pages need them to display content, your search function uses it to display results, your news, minicart, & customer receipts all depend on them as well.

With this tutorial, you will use an XML Package to control the form results sent from your contact page.

1. Log in to your admin site, and head over to the AppConfig Parameters. This is located in the Configuration > Advanced menu in AspDotNetStorefront 8.0 or in the Misc menu in earlier versions.
2. In the top left, under the “Add New” heading, you’ll see two fields for “Config Name” and “Config Value”, followed by a drop-down box.
3. In the Config Namefield, type in ‘SendForm.XmlPackage’.
4. In the Config value field, type in ‘notification.contactform.xml.config’
5. In the drop-down menu, select XMLPACKAGE

Now, you should have a brand new AppConfig Parameter called SendForm.XmlPackage with a value set to notification.contactform.xml.config. This means your AspDotNetStorefront site will now look for the XML Package ‘notification.contactform.xml.config’ and use that to control the layout of the form results. So let’s go create that XML Package!

1. Open the XML Packages folder in the root of your site.
2. Open the notification.newmemberwelcome.xml.config file in your favorite text editor*.
3. Save this file as ‘notification.contactform.xml.config’ in the XML Packages directory.

Now all we have to do is edit the file to display the results from the contact form, and not the new member welcome message. Let’s start at the top.

If your text editor shows line numbers, you’ll find displayname=”Welcome Email” on line number 2. Change “Welcome Email” to something a bit more accurate, like “Contact Inquiry Form.” The rest of the information on line 2 can stay the same.

Now go down to line 19. This is the template. This is the actual content that will be displayed in the email. Since we don’t want the new member welcome email to be sent out, let’s delete everything in between the <xsl:template match=”/”> and </xsl:template> tags.

Your XML Package should now look something like this:

Now, we just need to put the form contents in between the <xsl:template match=”/”> and </xsl:template> tags. First let’s lay the groundwork. On the contact page, you have 5 fields to display:

• Name
• Phone Number
• Email
• Subject
• Message

So in the template in the XML Package, list those fields, and leave some space for the results to follow. This should look something like this:

For every form field in the contact page, we want to display the results in the email. Each form field has several attributes, one of which is “name”. If you view the source of your t-contact.aspx page, you can find the ‘name’ attribute for each form tag. This is what we’ll need to display the results of the form.

Below, I’ve listed the form fields and their corresponding ‘name’ attributes as they are in the out of the box contact form.

Name – ‘name’
Phone Number – ‘phone’
Email – ‘email’
Subject – ’subject’
Message – ’s1′

As you can see, the AspDotNetStorefront programmers made it pretty easy for us to figure out what is what. Now in the XML Package, let’s add these values. We’ll do this with the value-of element in XSLT.

<b>Name:</b> <xsl:value-of select="/root/Form/name" />
<br />
<b>Phone Number:</b> <xsl:value-of select="/root/Form/phone" />
<br />
<b>Email Address:</b> <xsl:value-of select="/root/Form/email" />
<br />
<b>Subject:</b> <xsl:value-of select="/root/Form/subject" />
<br />
<b>Message:</b> <xsl:value-of select="/root/Form/s1" />

Now save your document and test it out! You can easily apply further modifications, just treat the <xsl:template> area of the XML Package like an HTML page. You can add HTML tags, & CSS styles to every element displayed. If you’d like to add your company logo at the bottom of the message, or a special coupon code for visitors sending inquiries, just add the text or image content wherever you’d like it to appear.

You can also add and remove form elements on the contact page, and display them on the page, just make sure your form fields each contain a unique ‘name’ attribute, and apply that with the value-of element in your Xml Package.

*All custom development of AspDotNetstorefront by Vortx is done with Microsoft Visual Studio. You can download the express edition here. You can also use any text editor such as notepad or wordpad, which both come with the Windows operating system. You can also use Notepad++ or Textpad, which are lightweight versions of Visual Studio, but heavyweight versions of notepad.