Sequential Emails are a useful tool for configuring a series of emails to send to a constituent automatically once a constituent does something to trigger the emails.
Sequential Emails follow a simple process:
- You create a Sequential Email Campaign
- A constituent triggers the email.
- NeonCRM sends the constituent each email in the series, following the schedule you set up.
To access Sequential Emails, navigate to the Settings cog > Global Settings > Communications > Email > Sequential Emails.
From here you can manage existing email schedules and create new ones. Click the New Email button to set up a new sequential email.
This will take you to the sequential email set up page.
Setting up a Sequential Email Campaign
To build a Sequential Email Campaign:
- Define the triggering behavior
- Set the active date range
- Define a specific audience (if desired)
- Schedule the emails
- Test & Activate the Sequential Emails
Configuring a sequential email is simple. Build an email in the Sequential Email tool and give it some rules to follow. These rules include:
Triggers
Which behavior triggers the email? This can be one of five options:
- A constituent is added to the database
- A constituent donates
- A constituent enrolls as a member
- A constituent's membership begins
- Or no trigger at all - these series can only be sent manually from an individual's account page.
Date range
Between which dates is this sequential email active? Leave this blank to make it indefinite.
Stop the sequential email immediately when the campaign end date is reached?
This setting is here because you might design the campaign to create a gap between the trigger date and the date the email is sent. If you enable this setting, people who trigger the email before the end date, but would normally receive the email after the end date will not receive the email. Think of it as an immediate cutoff of the messages.
Extra Search Filters
This lets you narrow the potential audience of your sequential email campaign using NeonCRM’s reporting tool. By defining criteria here, only specific constituents will receive these emails.
Schedule List
This is where you add the actual emails that you want to schedule. By clicking Add New Schedule, you add an email to the schedule. You can schedule as many emails as you like.
Lagging Days
This value is the heart of the Sequential Email system. The value you define here controls how much of a delay exists between the time that the constituent activates the trigger and the time that they receive this particular email.
Create Email
This is where you build the scheduled sequential message.
You can create your email using the NeonCRM email builder or upload your email template.
If you select "Create an email" or "Upload an email", you will be taken to the appropriate page for this action when you click Next.
If you select "Do it later", you will be taken back to the Sequential Email Details page. You can build or upload your email when you're ready by clicking the link from the Email Item Details page.
After creating the email, you can click View to preview the message. If you want to change it, you will need to click Delete to remove the currently set email and then build a new one.
Test & Activate
Once you have built all of the scheduled emails, you will need to activate the Sequential Email campaign in order for it to begin working.
Click Test & Activate to send test messages to yourself and to activate your campaign.
Sequential Emails on an account
Starting on an account page, navigate to the Email Series section.
There, you can see any sequential series already in progress, or choose to manually send a series that has no trigger. To start a series, select Assign Email Series and select a series from the dropdown.
If you select a series to manually send, the system will start counting lagging days from that day. So for example, if you gave the first schedule in a series a "lagging days" value of 3, the first email would send out 3 days after you selected that series for an account.
You can also Stop or Delete a series already in progress. Stop will pause the series with a chance to resume, which will trigger the next email in the series. Delete will remove the series entirely.
