Knowledgebase

TRANSCRIPT

We're all busy, but recurring emails can save your board members time and energy. Recurring emails can get your newsletters out, remind members to register for upcoming events, or remind expiring members to renew. Let's look at a renewal email today. Bear in mind that recurring emails are not available to customers on the Starter Plan, but are available for the Essential Plan and above.

Before starting, we may need to make some modifications to the renewal email 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. Even if you accept dues locally, you may want to change the language. Here's how.

Under Design > Email Templates, we'll search for the Member Renewal Notice, and then select the template to edit. We'll change the language a bit, and we can redirect the renewal link if needed. We’ll select Save to confirm our changes.

Next, we can then set up the recurring email.

• Go to Communications > Scheduled Emails > New Email > Recurring Email.
• Enter a name for this mailing like "Renewal Reminder."
• For the Mailing Type, choose Renewal Notice.
• For the template, choose Member Renewal Notice. Click Next.
• For the frequency, we can select either monthly or weekly, we can set the start date and end date, or opt for no end date. Set the time of day you’d like the email to go out. Click Next.
• Edit the subject line if needed. Review the content and edit as needed. Click Next from here.
• Attachments shouldn't be needed and are more likely to cause your message to be 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. A recurring email, set to go out monthly to members expiring in 90 days, will include 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 Finish. 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 recurring mailing has been set up, you can always modify it under Scheduled Emails. Each time the email is sent, it will be logged in the Email History list.

And for more on member retention strategies, check out starchapter dot com slash blog.