Knowledgebase

TRANSCRIPT

Communication is key to running an organization. This training covers sending single and recurring emails as well as maintaining your contact lists and setting up email forwarders. Let’s start with those. 

Under Communications > Settings, select the Forwarders tab. Here you’ll find alias addresses that will forward mail to any account that we specify. These are a great option for board emails because they have a more professional look than a board member’s business or personal email address, plus they’ll stay the same even after a board transition. That helps everything run smoothly. To add a forwarder, select Add Forwarder here. The From address will be the alias that you’re creating, such as “president” and the To address will be the president’s business or personal email address. 

Note that since these are just aliases, there’s not a password or a place to log in. Instead, they just forward messages along to the destination that you’ve entered. If you need an address to go to more than one person, just add another forwarder with the same From address. 

Next, we’ll go to the Contact Addresses tab. This tells the system where to send certain notifications. Payment notices go to the treasurer email; the default email will be the standard reply-to address on outgoing messages (although you can change that on a per-message basis); and the membership email gets notices when members expire and are automatically moved to the non-member list. This does depend on your settings, and keep in mind that if the moves happened because of an import, notices aren’t sent. That’s because the membership contact is most likely the person who imported the latest member roster, and already knows about those moves. 

The national contact isn’t used by many organizations, but if you are a chapter of a national organization and you’d like to send information upstream about member profile changes done at the local level, you can enter that email address here. Then within the General tab you can enable that report. There’s an option at the very bottom. However, that doesn’t apply to most organizations. Usually instead, members will update their profiles at the national level, or the level of your parent organization if it’s not a national, and that information will then filter down. 

While we’re on the General tab of Communications > Settings, I also want to point out the “Send outgoing emails from” setting. To maximize delivery of your mail, the From address will always end with @mg.yourdomain. By default, this will be postmaster@, but you can update this to info@, admin@, or any other address you would like in this field. Please note that this address is not connected to an inbox and is only used as the From address to improve your bulk mail delivery. The Reply To address on each outgoing message will automatically be listed and used when your recipients respond.

Next, we’ll discuss the templates and email builds available in StarChapter. All core emails that you’ll need, like receipts, invoices, newsletters, and meeting notices, are already built into your system, so most organizations don’t need to create new ones. 

Email builds are what you will use to draft an email. These can be used for one-time or recurring emails and most will pull information from various areas of your system so you don’t have to recreate what you’ve already added to the system. Go to Communications > Email Builder and click the Preview button on any email build you would like to evaluate. Sample content from your system, when available, will be used in the preview. We’ll take a closer look at the Newsletter Email Builds, as that will be our example when we draft an email later in this training. Use the Category filter or the Search box to locate your Email Builds of interest.

To ensure that you always have working email builds, you won’t be able to directly edit these; however, you can, click the Copy button beside the original version. The copy will appear on the table and be available for edits by clicking the Content & Layout button.

Click the Edit link to edit existing content or click the blue + to add new content sections. Many of the content sections available in the Email Builder tool include the text “Dynamic Content.” This text should not be removed as it will break your email build. Instead, you can delete and replace that content section with your preferred content or you can edit the source template. Select a Blank content section if you want to draft a unique message or any of the other content sections to pull information from other areas of the system, such as a list of upcoming meetings or a display of sponsor logos. For this example, we’re going to add sponsor logos to the bottom of the newsletter. When all updates are complete, click the Publish button to make this new Email Build available for use.

With multiple versions of some emails available, you may want to set one of those as the default version. Click the Make Default button next to your preferred version when multiple email builds are available.

To change the dynamic content being used in your Email Builds, go to Design > Email Templates. If you edit one of these templates, you’ll see a list of variables on the right side. These placeholders will pull information from elsewhere in the StarChapter system. If you’re sending a meeting email, for example, it’ll pull details from the meeting that you choose when sending out the message. Or if you’re sending a membership email, it’ll pull information from the receiving member’s profile. If you make alterations here, make sure that you stick to the variables that are listed on the right side of the template you’re working on. Other variables not listed on this screen are not supported and may not work. 

Let’s discuss how to use those Email Builds in Communications > Send an Email. This is where you’ll send out one-time or recurring mailings. You’ll also see your pending email drafts below with the date and time that they were last updated and action buttons on the right to Delete or continue working with the draft. 

If we have a one-time email, we’ll choose New Email > One-Time Email. Pick the type first, then we’ll be prompted to choose an Email Build. If you selected a Default Email Build, it will be at the top of that drop-down list as the pre-selected choice, but you can override that at this step. Since I’m going to be sending out a newsletter email, it wants to know what newsletter I’ll be sending out. Unlike other systems that you may be used to, we aren’t creating the newsletter here. Instead, the newsletter is created first under Content > Community > Newsletter, and then its content gets pulled over here. This is so that the newsletter itself lives not just in email but also in our website archives after this message has been sent. 

On the next screen, we’ll see the message content. Before we look at that, I’d like to bring your attention to the Reply To Email. By default, this will include the Default Email we saw in the Communications > Settings at the start of this training, but you can update that to be another email address at this point. Please note that the From Address used when emails are sent through StarChapter will not be your Reply To address. Due to various security protocols used by email servers to limit spam, bulk mail, such as what you’re sending from StarChapter, must adhere to certain rules to maximize delivery. The From Address used within your system aligns with those rules, but the Reply To Email will ensure that your recipients can easily respond.The message content comes from the Content > Community > Newsletter, based on the variables in the template and the newsletter that we selected. Although the message is already created, it’s good practice to review the content of the email. If changes are needed, we recommend updating the newsletter itself first, then creating a new email. Make sure to review for spelling and for any kind of spammy language. We’ll want to avoid using all caps, excessive punctuation or exclamation points, or terms like “FREE” or “Last Chance”. 

The caps that you see here are actually a graphic style applied to that wording. If we were to take this and change it back to a regular paragraph, we don’t technically have all-caps there, it’s just a visual. So this would not be an issue when it comes to spam filtering. 

On the next screen, we can add attachments. We recommend avoiding this if possible, as attachments make a message more likely to be blocked or considered spam. Instead, upload documents to the Content area of the system and include the document-specific links in your email.

Next, we’ll select our email recipients. For a newsletter, we should send the email to all members and non-members. However, we can use groups to send a targeted email to certain kinds of members or non-members, like the board of directors or former members who are in the non-member list. We can use the “Expiring and Expired Members” option to remind members that it’s time to renew. The individual email address options let you target a specific member or non-member.

You’ll also want to be aware of the Meeting Registrants and Non-Registrants options, but we’ll discuss that more in our next example. The attendance count option lets us reach out to those members who haven’t attended many meetings in a date range, and who are at risk of not renewing.

The new member option isn’t too useful because in the membership settings, there’s an option to automatically send a welcome email to new members right after they’ve been added. This is more for later follow-up. 

Saved lists allow us to add multiple recipients and save that combination for later use. If you’ve chosen any groups, like new members who joined within the last sixty days, and then reuse that saved list later on? That group will be reevaluated when you later use it, so you’ll be contacting new members relative to when you’re sending the message, not new members relative to when you saved the list. 

Lastly, the Single Email Address option allows us to type in an email address.

From our selections we have a number of unique recipients. Unsubscribed identifies how many contacts included in the recipients list have opted out from our mailings. Contacts who are unverified have yet not confirmed their subscriptions. We’ll talk about this more in just a moment. 

We also filter out email addresses that we’ve sent mail to in the past, but who have rejected our messages. A hard failure is a permanent error message. This typically indicates an invalid email address. A soft bounce is a temporary failure. However, it’s similar to dialing a phone number and getting a busy signal. One or two may not mean anything, but if it happens consistently, it indicates a bigger problem. Soft bounces can be caused by a spam filter or firewall rejecting your messages. If there are more than ten rejections of this type, that email address will be excluded from future mailings. 

There are two reasons for this. First, these problem email addresses already aren’t receiving your email, and that’s a problem that needs to be addressed. We’ll talk about that shortly. But the second reason is that continuing to send messages to these addresses will damage your reputation as an email sender. Basically, you start to look like you’re not maintaining your contact lists, which is very indicative of spammers.We filter these addresses out to protect your organization’s sender reputation. 

Finally, the last line gives us the total number of messages that will be sent. 

On the next screen, we’re able to review all sections before we send out the email. We recommend sending a test email before clicking on the final send button at the bottom. If I cancel this unsent mailing, it’ll save my progress up until the screen I’m currently on. It’ll be listed in the Communications > Send an Email until it’s been sent or deleted.  Instead, we’ll proceed with finalizing the message now. The draft can be sent immediately by clicking the Send Email button or scheduled to go out on a specific date and time by clicking the Schedule Email button, which I will select. I can choose any date in the future and any time of day before clicking Schedule. Emails pending distribution will be listed in Communications > Scheduled Emails.

If you’re on the Starter or our previous Lite plan, you won’t have the option that we’re about to look at. However, if you’re on any other plan, you can use the Recurring Email option to set up an email to be sent at a specific date in the future or at a frequency of your choosing. When we click the Send Email button, we’ll see the Recurring Email option appear. 

For our example, we’re going to walk through how to schedule a meeting reminder. 

On this screen we’ll give the email a name and select the mailing type. We’ll select Meetings, and then the email that we’d like to use, which is where the content for our email will originate from. We’re going to select the Single Meeting 2 Column Summary option in order to provide a single meeting reminder with plenty of information and a registration prompt. Because this will be setup to go out on a recurring basis for any upcoming meeting, I will leave the Specific Meeting field set to “Any Meeting.” 

Selecting Next, we can set the frequency for a set number of days before or after the meeting. Since this is a reminder to register, we’ll want this to be Day before an upcoming meeting, and I’m going to set a 7-day reminder. We can also set the time of day for this email to go out to optimize the chances that we’ll catch recipients at a good time. We’ll set that for 10am and click Next. 

On the Content screen we can update the subject line for the email, and add a Reply To Name if we’d like. The content will not be displayed here because we’re setting up a recurring message that will pull a different meeting for each mailing. To edit the meeting information, you’ll do that at that source in Meetings > Meeting Manager, which ensures that both your website and email content is consistent.

We don’t have any attachments to add, so we’ll skip this piece to land on Recipients. This is when we’ll use the Meeting Registrants and Non-Registrants filters. Since we’re sending a meeting reminder, we want to send it out only to those contacts who haven’t yet registered. If we’re scheduling a meeting survey, we’ll target those contacts who actually attended the event. 

Next, we have the review screen. 

Just like before, we have the option to send a test email to ourselves, and to edit any sections. And if everything looks good, select Finish to save and activate this email.  

The last item we’ll cover in today’s training is the Bounce Checker Report. To access this report, go to Communications > Charts & Reports > Bounce Checker. This report lists all delivery failures, whether they were hard failures or soft bounces.  This list can be filtered by the number of bounces, whether someone is subscribed or unsubscribed, and the member type. We can export the report by clicking the Spreadsheet button.

Because this is a training system and we don’t send real messages, there aren’t any bounces to display here. You’ll likely have more data, especially if you have a large contact list.

For hard failures, you'll want to reach out to your contact to confirm the email address. If the email on file is incorrect, ask your contact to update it either through the StarChapter member information editor or through your national organization. 

For soft bounces, there may be something within the body of the message that is setting off a spam filter. Some contacts may have strict firewalls, especially if your contacts are hospital employees or government contractors. In most cases, being more careful with email content and asking the member to add your organization to their Allow List will resolve the issue. Allow List details are available in our Knowledgebase. If that doesn’t resolve it, send in a support ticket and we’d be happy to take a look. 

And that’s it for today! For more videos and tips, please check out our Knowledgebase. Or if you’d like to learn more about email marketing for your organization, take a look at the StarChapter blog for tips and best practices. Thanks for watching.