Understanding Email Campaigns and Messages

Email Campaigns enable you to group together a set of related email messages to share a common audience, security settings, and delivery instructions. You can create and run reports to compare this information across the messages within the campaign as well as compare information across all of your Email Campaigns.

When you access Email Campaigns (from the Email drop-down list on any Administrator page), the Email Home page displays with the option to create a new campaign. You can also click the Campaigns tab to access the list of campaigns already created.

When you access a specific Email Campaign (by clicking Manage on the Email Campaigns list), the Summary page for the campaign displays with the option to create a new message for the campaign, as well as work with messages that are in the Draft or Approved state directly from the page.

You can associate each email campaign with the type of messages it contains (for example, newsletters or fundraising appeals) to group similar campaigns together.

You can associate an email interest with your campaign to enable message recipients to individually elect if they want to continue to receive email from this campaign and then automatically include each person who opts into this interest in the target audience. You can select an existing interest or create one as you configure the campaign. For more information about interests, refer to Managing Interests.

Note that all messages within each campaign will automatically be available in the WYSIWYG HTML editor (in the Links menu > Browse Convio Links > Email Message). This feature can be useful for providing links to the full HTML in plain text messages or creating an archive of messages.

By default, messages from this campaign will contain an autologin link. You can turn off this feature for the campaign if you prefer.

You can create a new original campaign where you start with the system defaults and edit them as needed. Or, if you already have an email campaign with attributes and target audience, Do Not Email, and reviewer groups already set up similar to how you want your new campaign, you can copy the existing campaign and assign a new name to it as well as edit the attributes. Note that any messages associated with the original campaign are also copied to the new campaign.

About Audiences

Within each email campaign, you will create the default, or target, audience by selecting constituent groups. This creates the target list of intended message recipients.

You can specifically exclude certain members of the groups included in this target audience by creating the Do Not Email List. This can be useful for messages that have an interaction and have a group that identifies the constituents who have already performed the interaction; you can exclude this group so they do not receive emails about taking actions they have already performed.

During the delivery configuration for a specific message, you can individually add new groups or exclude your default groups as necessary depending on the purpose of the message.

You can also apply specific audience filters during delivery configuration to target constituents within your target audience who have (or have not) interacted in a certain way with a previous message sent within the campaign. For example, you can select the Audience Filter option to send a message to only the recipients who have opened a previous message sent from within the campaign, or to only the recipients who have clicked a link in a message in a previous campaign message.

If you have Advocacy installed and the message involves an action alert, you can apply filters based on Vote position, party affiliation, and Congressional committee affiliation to further define the constituents who will receive the message.

To verify that your Target and Do Not Email group selections plus the filters you have applied do not make the number of recipients too low, you can use the Calculate Audience Recipients feature. This will run a report and display information about the number of usable email addresses, number of intended recipients, and the number of recipients filtered out.

About Testing and Validating the Message

You can define a Reviewer List to specify the staff from your organization who should review a draft of the message before each message is approved and configured for delivery.

As part of the creation or editing process of a message, you can run it against a SPAM checker to check the subject and content for potential concerns that could cause it to be rejected by the popular email service providers. A report displays a summary of any potential problems (and suggestions to fix them) so that they are not flagged.

You can also send the message to test accounts you have defined and maintain at the popular email service providers to be sure that they can be opened and look as you intend.

To maximize the effectiveness of an email message, you can create another version of the message where you vary the words in one of the message elements, and then send the original message to a sample audience (referred to as A) and the variant to a different sample audience (referred to as B). Then, you can run a report to determine which version is more effective -- as judged by how many people opened each message, how many people clicked through the action link in the message, how many people took the action in the message, and so on.

You can change wording in the message envelope or content. You can also use a different stationery. However, for the most accurate results, change only one element at a time in a message variant.

Note: You can test an approved message variant even if the original message has not been approved yet.

About Message Delivery

After creating a message, you can specify several options specific to the delivery, including:

• Scheduling the date and time to send the message to the delivery queue (if other than immediately). You can also schedule recurring deliveries of the message at a regular interval (for example, for a monthly newsletter).
• Selecting groups to rebuild before the delivery occurs. Groups are considered rebuildable if they can contain new members as the result of a query or task that has run since the message was queued.
• Specifying to send a carbon copy of the message to a secondary email address listed in the contact record of a recipient.
• Specifying to send only the version that contains the plain text to all recipients instead of both the HTML and plain text-formatted versions of the message.

Sending the message means that it is placed in the email delivery queue. The actual send process is determined by the site rules and tasks that control resource contention on your site. For example, to minimize the effects on performance during the hours when people are most likely to visit your site and make donations, the 'Send' time may actually begin later.