Below is a video and an article on building your own email campaign in TouchConvert.
IMPORTANT: Make sure you added the DNS settings inside of your DNS manager to start to send emails. If you have not done this or get a message that mail cannot be sent from TouchConvert, this is because your DNS settings have not been added. Simply contact us to get the settings if need be.
Email campaigning is used for news and informational events that need to be released on a very specific date and time. For example you could use this feature to create news letters, announcements to certain groups of customers and even invitations and surveys. Click on Email Campaigns to start to build a campaign.
Once you are inside of your campaign you should see a list of campaigns that you've already created. If this is your first time in this area then it will be blank.
Once you click the plus button you will see this screen.
Now that you created a campaign you can add emails to that campaign. If you look below I am inside of the Holiday Campaign. Here I can create as many emails around this Holiday Campaign. My email list of customers for this particular campaign will be the same for each email. That is an important thing to understand. Each email list is applied to the campaign level and not the email. This makes it easier for you to manage a list of customers, in this case a list of customers that will get all of these holiday emails. But it could be a campaign for a list of customers that either get this service from you or this product from you. You can then see the true power of TouchConvert and how you can completely break out your email campaigns to be groups of different kinds of customers. In short send pertinent customers pertinent information. They are not all the same. Send them targeted content based on who they are. Categorize your customers into groups based on what they buy from you.
If you look at the list below you can see that these emails are sent on very specific dates. This is what email campaigning does. Let's go over this screen and how it works.
On the left you may have noticed that the tools have changed into tools specific for this email campaign.
If you click the "Single Campaign" button or the "Plus" button from the previous screen you will see this screen. This is where you will add your first email.
At the bottom of the email creation tool there is a few options here.
Note: One thing to note is that if you want to send this email out on a certain date then select the date and click "Send" it won't send it now, it will send it when that date happens. If you do select "Send Now" and then click "Send" it will send it right now. So be careful when checking off that button.
Finally you can save the email as a draft by clicking the "Save as Draft" button. This is very useful if you are in the middle of assembling the email and need to leave it and come back later.
Now let's roll back up to the top of the screen. If you want to add your own email to the system simply click in the white area below the HTML label and this will instantiate the email editor.
Welcome to the email editor. There are plenty of tools here to help you create the perfect email. Let's start with the basics.
1. Before you can do anything drag and drop the email sections you would like to use to create the structure of the email
I've dragged the four different types of structures out to the screen for you to view. I've drawn arrows so that you can see which icon produces which structure.
Here we can see that you can drag the structures to modify their widths to create your own structure layout.
You can see here that I've moved the top section to be the second section and the second section is now the top section.
Clicking the "Page Layout" button allows me to change the entire background color of the email. You can see that I did that here. We've made the background grey.
To add an image to the email campaign do the following...
Now that image is added to the email.
To add a hyperlink to an image see the instructions below. As you can see I uploaded a daily deal image in the box to the right. Now I want to add a hyperlink so if people click on the link it goes to that daily deal on the web.
NOTE: Adding hyperlinks to your email will enhance the tracking of your visitors on your website because you will be driving traffic to your site from these emails. This is a good thing. Provide as many action items as you can.
OK. So I changed the background color of the text area to match the valentines image above. I did this using the background color trick we just taught you. Now I want to make my message personal. I want the email to say their name and not be so generic. Very easy to do. You will use a special format as demonstrated below. We can see that to have the persons real first name appear I would use the tag {:first_name:}. Now anywhere I add that tag that persons first name will be there. This is good because it now makes the email unique and get's under the spam rader versus emails that are not formatted this way.
The most common tags are...
{:first_name:}
{:last_name:}
{:email:}
{:phone:}
Use those in your emails to make your emails unique and personal to your end user. Try not to use "Dear" That's actually impersonal in today's world. Use "Hi" instead.
Once you are finished you can make a template out of your emails by clicking the template icon.
When you click the template button you can either View a template and load it to the screen or you can make a template out of the email you are creating. In this case we'll create a template by clicking "Make This A Template"
Once you click to make a template you can give the template a name and then click "Save".
You will get a notice from the Notice Bar at the top that your template was saved.
To load an email template click on the "template" button.
Now click on 'View Templates' to view the templates that you can use.
Here we can see few templates we can load. One of them was the Valentines template. We'll click on that one to preview it.
Here we can see the preview of the template we created earlier. I can do the following...
If I click on "Add Subscribers" on the left I can manually add a subscriber to this campaign by hand. Below are my options...
NOTE: Items in red are required.
The second tab if clicked will show all person(s) in your TouchConvert system. Here you can search for existing subscribers.
Now they are added to this campaign.
You can import a CSV file into TouchConvert. A couple things to make sure before you import. Use "Find and Replace" in Excel and remove all commas and quotes from your spreadsheet. These tend to cause import failures to to premature data seperation. Save your spreadsheet as a Windows CSV file.
Once you click import you will be able to data map your CSV columns with the CMPOBuddy system. The only required field is the email address.
Here we can see that this particular CSV spreadsheet had 3 columns. There was a column for the first name, last name and the email address. In this particular dropdown I will match the first name with this dropdown.
Click the "Add" button to complete the import. The screen may hang for a minute and this is ok. It is working on the import. Once it is done the screen will finalize it's loading.
This tool can become very valuable as you start to have many different campaign lists. You may find that you want to actually add a whole different list into the campaign you are currently working on. To add one list to the current campaign do the following...
That's it one list is merged to another. The system is smart enough to ignore email addresses that are already in the current list. So you don't need to worry about duplicate sends.
Very similar to adding a list. But removing a campaign list removes one list from the current campaign you are in. This can be useful for things like managing registrants versus non registrants to an event you are organizing. As you have registrants you add them to the newer campaign but you deduct them from the other campaign where you are emailing non registrants to get them signed up.