Knowledgebase

TRANSCRIPT

We're all busy, so today we're going to look at automated emails to save your board members time and energy. Automated emails can get your newsletters out, or remind members who haven't registered of upcoming events, or they can remind expiring members to renew. Let's look at a renewal email today. Bear in mind that automated emails are not available to customers on the Lite plan, only Standard level and above.

Before starting, we may need to make some modifications to the renewal template. Because our standard renewal notice references a built-in StarChapter dues page, chapters whose members pay dues at the national level should not use an unedited version. Or even if you accept dues locally, you may want to change the language. Here's how.

• Under Communications > Settings > Templates, we'll copy the renewal reminder and then edit our copy. We'll change the language a bit, and put in a link to our national organization's renewal page.
• Go to Communications > Email Manager > Send an Email > Schedule for Later.
• Enter a name for this mailing job like "Renewal Reminder."
• For the Mailing Type, choose Expiring Members.
• For the template, choose Member Renewal Notice. Click Next.
• For the schedule, I recommend either monthly or weekly. I also recommend choosing No End Date. Click Next.
• Edit the subject line if needed. The message contents are likely going to be different every time this email is sent, especially for something like a meeting reminder, so the individual message isn't editable. This is why we went to the templates screen first. Click Next from here.
• Attachments shouldn't be needed and are more likely to make your message flagged as spam, so try to avoid them. Click Next.
• On the recipients step, choose Expiring and Expired Members. I recommend choosing members expiring within 90 days. Bear in mind that this will pull all members with an expiration date that is 90 OR FEWER days away. So a single automated email, set to go out monthly to members expiring in 90 days, will catch them three times. You don't have to copy this mailing for 60- and 30-day expirations. Once the recipients are set, click Next.
• On the preview step, send yourself a test copy of this message if you would like. Note that the text has to fill in a member name and expiration date and chooses the data at random. So the test will not necessarily have the information of an expiring member inside it! This is normal.
• If everything looks OK, click Activate. It's not a "Send" button because it's not being sent now; it'll be sent when it is scheduled to go out.

And that's it. Once your scheduled mailing has been set up, you can always modify it under Email Manager. Be sure to keep an eye out for the Scheduled Mailings tab here. And for more on member retention strategies, check out starchapter dot com slash blog.