FAQ: Email Campaigns and Messages

Go to Email > Email Campaign > Campaigns > Manage > Messages.

All messages in your campaigns are available in the Content Editor (WYSIWYG). Click the Links icon > Browse Links > Email Message. This is useful when creating links to your messages from a web page.

You can create and run reports that compare information across messages within the campaign, or you can compare information across all of your Email Campaigns. See Email Reports for more information.

Yes. When you associate an email interest with your campaign, message recipients can elect to continue to receive email from the campaign and automatically include each person who opts into the interest in the target audience. You can select an existing interest or create one during campaign configuration.

First, you'll need to associate an email interest with the message to enable message recipients to individually elect if they want to receive email from the campaign. You can then choose to include each person who opts into this interest in the target audience. Keep in mind that you can also associate an email campaign with an existing interest.

By default, Enable autologin links is selected in a campaign when setting up optional features for the campaign. This means you can include links in an email message, using the WYSIWYG, that automatically log the recipient into Luminate Online.

Yes. If you already have an email campaign with attributes and Target, Do Not Email, and Reviewer groups defined, you can copy the existing campaign and assign a new name to it. Any messages associated with the original campaign are also copied to the new campaign. You can then edit the copied campaign.

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

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 more information, see Choose the Email Audience

If you have Advocacy enabled 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, Do Not Email group selections, and filters are not making the number of recipients too low, you can use the Calculate Audience Recipients feature. This runs a report and displays information about the number of usable email addresses, number of intended recipients, and the number of recipients filtered out.

The Calculate Audience Recipients report is available under Related Actions for any message scheduled for delivery

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 that the subject and content will not be rejected by 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 with 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, or you can 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.

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.

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 rebuild-able 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.