Adding Contacts to your E-Mail 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.

1. To add an email campaign click on the Plus button.
2. To edit a campaign click on the title of the campaign.
3. To delete a campaign click on the trash can.

Once you click the plus button you will see this screen.  

1. Give your campaign a title.
2. Either Choose a previous email list from the dropdown if you've imported one earlier
3. Or import a list by browsing for it. (Note: If you don't have a list yet you can inport it later.)
4. Select off the dropdown who the email will appear to be sent from.  
5. If you need to add an email address for who it will appear to come from, do that on the right by clicking the plus sign.
6. Select from the drop down the name of the person that the email will appear to come from. Or add their name by clicking the plus sign.  It will be important to set this up correctly now.
7. Or add a custom name by clicking the "Plus" button.
8. Click "Save" when you are done.

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.

1. Search for campaigns here.
2. See what is not sent yet. (Default View)
3. See what was sent.
4. Add a new email.
5. Click here to edit the actual email and it's content.
6. Click here to delete an email.
7. This is the title of the campaign. Sometimes that's useful to know which campaign you are making emails for. Click it to edit the title.

On the left you may have noticed that the tools have changed into tools specific for this email campaign.

1. This button will display this list of emails that we see here.
2. This button will add a new email and open up the email editor.
3. Click here to add new email subscribers to this campaign.
4. This button manages all subscribers for this particular campaign. In this case this would show all the people that will get these holiday emails.
5. This screen will show the campaign statistics for this particular 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.

1. In order to get under Spam Radar we ask that you make three random subject lines. As the emails are sent these three subject lines will randomize and change the weight of each email. This will make spam detection less likely.
2. When you click here you will be sent into the email body creation tool. We'll show you that on the next few screens.
3. Some people do not receive HTML based emails that are all fancy. They receive a text version of your email. Here you should add your text version of the email. We highly suggest you fill this out as it increases your chance that the email will not land in the junk mail folder
4. In many cases you need to send an email to a 'review team' you can add a comma delimited list of reviewers here to send to before sending out to your main list.
5. If you are the person creating this email you may want to keep testing over and over until you get the email exactly as you want it.  We've made this one click button so you can do that as many times as you need to quickly and efficiently.
6. We'll talk about date selection on the next screen.

At the bottom of the email creation tool there is a few options here.

1. You can pick a date to send the email.
2. You can pick a time to send the email, this is optional and you can leave blank if you want.
3. You can also send right now.  This is a two step process on purpose. You need to select the "Send Now" button and then click "Send"

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.

1. As long as this button is clicked you can add text/images to each boxed area.
2. When you click in any box a text editor will appear when it is in text mode as stated above.

1. If you click on the background icon you can change the backgrounds of each section.
2. Click into a box with the background tool selected and a color picker will appear. You can see here I made the top section purple.

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.

1. Click on these draggable icons to move the sections up or down.

1. To add text I clicked on the "Text" icon.
2. I wrote out my message
3. I also made the text white by using the text color tool.
4. Notice that the padding of the text is bumping right up against the edge. If I want to add padding to the cell I need to click on the Background icon. There is padding adjustments in there for this reason.

1. Here we can see that I added 8 pixels of padding.
2. I first selected the background tool.
3. Then I adjusted the padding on the cell using the padding tool

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...

1. Click on the image icon
2. The image dialogue box will appear.
3. Click on the Upload tab.
4. Click the "Add an Image" button and browse your computer for the image.
5. Click "OK".

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.

1. Click on the image. You will see the draggable dots around the image
2. Click on the "Link" icon to open the hyperlink box.
3. Type in the hyperlink the image should go to
4. Click "OK"

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...

1. Click on "Use This" and this will load the template into my editor. Note this will remove anything that is currently in the editor. So make sure you are ok with that.
2. I can trash this template by clicking on the tras can.
3. I can also collapse this template and look at other templates by clicking on this arrow.

If I click on "Add Subscribers" on the left I can manually add a subscriber to this campaign by hand. Below are my options...

1. I can add a "New Contact" by typing in their information manually. (There is an import feature, that is coming up in a few screens)
2. Fill out their information
3. Click "Add"

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.

1. Check off their name to add them.
2. Click "Add Selected"

Now they are added to this campaign.

1. If you click on "Manage Subscribers" you will see a list of your subscribers below.  
2. You have multiple tabs one to see subscribers of this campaign and another to see who unsubscribed from the campaign.
3. You can also sort by time they were added and by their name.  
4. There is also a search to find a particular subscriber.
5. You can also check off a person(s) name and unsubscribe them.
6. You can edit the persons personal information here.
7. View their entire profile here
8. Globally unsubscribe them from every single campaign in TouchConvert moving forward.

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.

1. Click on Import under the "Manage Subscribers" feature
2. Click on browse to browse for your CSV file.
3. Click "Add"

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.

1. Click "Done" once you are done importing.
2. Click "Add' after the data map window goes away to complete the import.

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...

1. Select the other campaign list you want to merge into this one.
2. Click Add

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.

1. Select the campaign you wan to deduct from the Non-Reginstant list.
2. Click remove. This will remove anyone in the current campaign from the list selected.