Knowledgebase

TRANSCRIPT

 Go to Communications > Email Manager > Send an Email > Send Now. Choose your mailing type. I'll select a meeting mailing. Once you select your type, you'll see the related templates.

We create all the basic templates for you during the implementation process. These templates will pull data from the system and format it into an email. Since StarChapter is an all-in-one tool, the process is a little different from a system that just does mailings. Instead of creating a meeting or a newsletter inside of an email, you'll create it elsewhere in the left menu first, so that it can be posted to your site. Then you'll pull that information into an email.

On the next screen, you'll see all of the details about this mailing. You might get a big red warning message, which I'll get to in a minute. We have our email subject line, which we can change; the reply-to email address, which we can also change; and the content of the message itself. We can change this message here, but keep in mind that the only thing we're changing is the message. If we've just noticed a typo in the meeting ticket price, for example, we don't want to change it only in our email--we ought to change it under the Meetings section, too.

The red warning message is showing up because the web address that we're sending this message from doesn't match what we've got set up as the reply-to address. It's possible for any email sender to put any reply-to address they want on their mailings. It's not uncommon for people running phishing scams to make their reply-to address something like [email protected] . Because of this, any mismatch between your domain name and the reply-to address domain name will look phishy. This red warning is a reminder to make them match.

If our mailing looks okay, we'll go onto the next screen. We can add attachments if we want to. Next, we'll choose our recipients. On the left are all our options. On the right is everything we've selected. Let's go through our options. We can send to . . .

• All Members
• and/or all Non-Members
• Or members who are part of specific groups. For example, we can email everyone within the Board of Directors, or maybe everyone within a certain member type.
• Or we can target non-members based on their groups, like former members.
• We can target members who are expiring within the next thirty, sixty, or ninety days, or who are expired but still in the member list.
• We can search for individual members or non-members.
• We can also send based on someone's meeting registration or attendance status. If this is a meeting reminder, we may want to target only people who have not yet registered. Alternatively, you may want to email everyone who registered. If this is a meeting survey, it's probably best to target people who actually attended.
• The Attendance Count option targets people who haven't been attending very many meetings. This way, you can reach out to members who aren't using their membership benefits and who may not be at risk of renewing.
• We can target new members for mailings, but that's not the best way to send their initial welcome messages. That's because under the Membership settings, we can automate these to go out right after they're added.
• If we've assembled a complicated recipient list, we can save it for later and re-use it. For example, if you send emails about your mentoring program to all the mentors, students, committee members, and Jim, you can save that list instead of picking everyone each time.
• And finally, you can just type in an email address.
  
  

If you've made your selections, you'll see the numbers update on the right. First, we filter out any duplicates. You'll see the total number of unique recipient emails here. Then we remove anyone who has unsubscribed from your mailings.

StarChapter also uses email verification to validate contacts coming into your mailing list. New contacts have to click on a link in an initial verification message to confirm that they want to receive your mail. This also confirms that their email address is accurate and able to receive mail. The initial verification process cuts down on spam complaints and message rejections that damage your reputation.

Next are the message rejections. There are two kinds, hard failures and soft bounces. These are similar to the sorts of messages you may get when dialing an unknown phone number. You may hear a message saying the number has been disconnected. That's the equivalent of a hard failure: when you emailed this address previously, their mail server sent us back a permanent failure message. Usually that means the address is bad. Soft bounces are more like a busy signal. Just one may not mean anything; maybe someone's mail server is down or their mailbox is full. But after ten soft bounces, we know that email address likely isn't any good.

Message rejections damage your reputation because you start to look like you aren't managing your mailing list, much like a spammer. These safeguards help ensure that all your contacts receive your messages in their inbox and not their junk folder.

On the next screen, we get a final preview of what we've set up. At the top, we can send a test message to ourselves, or click on the final send button at the bottom. Since my example system doesn't have real contacts in it, I'll stop just short of actually sending the message, and cancel instead. My earlier progress will be saved and I can pick it back up later.

In Email Manager, after you send a message, you'll see basic statistics on that mailing with links pointing towards more detailed reports.