Email Campaigns

Sending emails to multiple people

Let’s give “Bcc” a break and learn how Solve’s three distinct email features can make sending emails to multiple people easier to do, more personal, and more effective.

Scheduled emails (Contact activity)
Group recipients (Webmail feature)
Email campaigns (Integrated Service Add-on)

Each is a powerful tool in your toolbox offering different features and benefits. Lets review each one …

1) Scheduled emails

Imagine having an assistant who is diligently sending personalized follow-up emails to your contacts at exactly the ideal moment. Wouldn’t that be nice? If you’re like most you currently a) don’t follow-up because it takes too much time, or b) rush out a “Dear Valued Customer” to everyone at once when you have time. How would timely and personalized attention change how your contacts perceive you and your company?

Solve offers a unique activity called “Add a scheduled email”. In addition to the normal email parameters, this activity lets you specify when the message will be sent. Let’s look at a few practical examples to see how this unique feature is put to work …

A simple and automatic follow-up

Let’s say you just made a sale or completed a project. While the ink is still wet, create a scheduled email activity that will be delivered to your client exactly one month from now to thank your client for his or her business, confirm everything worked out and get that referral. It really is that simple, it scales, it makes a difference and that’s money in the bank for you.

Multi-step lead nurturing campaigns

Let’s expand on the first example by using the Scheduled email activity to manage a company-wide personal lead nurturing campaign. Let’s say you’ve established an ideal ten-step process for handling each new lead:

Day 1: Send an email welcome message with your personal contact information
Day 3: Send an email with some tips on how to get started
Day 4: Schedule a phone call
Day 7: Send an email providing a list of tips on how to be successful with your service (benefits)
Day 11: Send an email on how you compare to the competition (they’re doing it anyway, so jump in with your answers)
Day 14: Send an email that answers the questions frequently asked by new clients and some quotes
Day 18: Send an email with a free report on how leveraging your service can help them blow away from their competitors
Day 19: Schedule a follow-up meeting
Day 22: Send an email with a case study
Day 28: Schedule a follow-up meeting asking for their business
Held: Send an email thanking them for their business!
A Month Later: Thank your client for their business, confirm everything worked out and request a referral!

That continuous “personal” follow-up would do an amazing job of converting leads to clients, but just before your keyboard-bound fingers fall off from fatigue, your head would explode from the stress. Solve will systematically type and send those eight personal emails at exactly the right time and set up the three events in your calendar. It’s simple to do:

On a new contact record, create a set of Scheduled email messages and events according to the sequence of your nurturing campaign. Insert fields such as “First Name”, “Last Name” and “Job Title” to personalize your Scheduled email messages. This simple step prevents you from using the over-used, generic “Dear Valued Customer” opening. Have you ever met Valued Customer? Imaginary friends are only OK when you’re a child.
Go ahead and save each new carefully crafted scheduled email you’ve just created as an email template, meaning you’ll never have to compose the email again. Carpal Tunnel - dodged!
Save this set of activities as a template with its own name so you can attach a copy of the same set of activities to each new lead with one, simple click.

Solve templates are blueprints of your work that you can reuse later. A template stores a set of scheduled email messages that can be applied to new prospects. When you follow the same steps repeatedly, templates save you a lot of time by simply plugging and chugging new information.

Combining the scheduled email’s field names with a template adds value to your sales and marketing efforts. Your emails will have personal appeal, provoking those fuzzy feelings with your prospects and clients, yet all you did was insert a template of pre-defined activities.

Scheduled emails are delivered by Solve’s email servers and do not require the optional Webmail feature to be enabled.

2) Group recipients

Group recipients supports sending personalized messages to a list of tagged contacts and is a feature available from within the Webmail Add-on. This feature fills a gap between sending a traditional email message and coordinating a mass-email campaign (which is still best handled by a specialized service such as Constant Contact or MailChimp).

It’s also quite simple to use. Say you want to send a personalized email to all your current prospects. Click on “Group recipients”, choose the tag you use to track your prospects, compose your message and click send.

Unlike a Bcc’d message which shows up as “To: undisclosed recipients”, Solve will create a personalized email message for each contact. The contact’s name and email address will be put in the To field and any fields you’ve used such as “Hello [First Name]”will be populated with the correct value. Clicking the “Preview merged emails” option before you hit send will allow you to conveniently view the email as each specific contact would.

When all the contacts have been processed Solve will email you a report as to how it made out. You can put this report in your Solve workgroup email folder so that a record of the message is automatically linked to each contact’s linked-email activity.

To protect the innocent the “Group recipients” feature does not support traditional To, Cc, or Bcc addressing. Attachments and images are best managed by uploading them to a server and linking to them from inside the message. The maximum number of recipients is currently set to 1,000.

The group recipients feature uses your own email service as specified under Webmail > Settings > Sending. Ensure your email service permits sending the required number of messages. Services like Google, Rackspace etc. have specific sending quotas and if you exceed them, or they detect a misuse of their system, they may prevent you from sending messages. For this reason we provide an option to specify a custom outgoing mail server for delivering the group recipients messages. This override option allows you to choose a service that is purpose-designed to handle larger mail volumes, such as SendGrid, than services like Google or Rackspace are tuned for.

3) Email campaigns

How cool would it be to send out email marketing campaigns to your CRM contacts, then track those campaigns from inside your CRM? Sound hard, even impossible? Not so …

Solve is pre-integrated with two third-party online email-marketing services: Constant Contact and MailChimp. When it comes to connecting with your legions of clients via email marketing, these leading services support you through the entire process of creating and launching professional-looking email campaigns and monitoring the responses. They also manage important details such as avoiding spam blocks and unsubscribe options. Having these email marketing giants seamlessly pre-integrated into your Solve account broadens and streamlines the way you communicate with your clients. Let’s review how easy they are to use …

Constant Contact integration

Introduction

Using your Solve administrator account enable the Constant Contact feature under Solve menu (top right) > Add-ons > Constant Contact > Add.

Enter your Constant Contact username and password then click update.

Now each of your Solve users have the option to copy (“Push”) a list of contacts from Solve into Constant Contact. This is done in the same way that you would export a list of contacts. Solve menu > Manage Contacts > Data > Push this list to Constant Contact - when chosen this option will copy all contacts currently selected by the filter e.g. Show … to Constant Contact.

The key to linking the contact records between the systems is the Business Email address. If Business Email is empty then Personal Email is chosen. Other Email is used if the Personal Email is empty. If all three fields are empty, the contact is not copied.

When a contact is copied to Constant Contact, Solve automatically adds a special activity to the contact’s page which tracks the campaigns that have been sent and how your contact has responded to them.

Sending a campaign

In Solve’s Manage Contacts window search for the contacts you want to target using the “Show …” option in the toolbar. Most often you will be targeting a subset of contacts using category tags e.g. “Show > Category tags > {your list name}”

Now the targeted contacts should be showing in the search results list choose Data > Push this list to Constant Contact. Solve will connect to Constant Contact, create a list in Constant Contact named today’s date & time, copy the selected contacts to that list, then add a Constant Contact activity on each contact’s page for tracking individual progress. All of that with one-click.

Next, login to your Constant Contact account and follow their instructions to create and send your campaign targeting the list name that Solve just created for you.

Constant Contact’s system only stores a single copy of the contact record in their system, but that contact record can be in multiple Constant Contact lists. So be aware, should a contact choose to unsubscribe from one of the campaigns, Constant Contact will not send them emails even if they are added to new lists.

MailChimp integration

Introduction

Using your Solve administrator account enable the MailChimp feature under Solve menu (top right) > Add-ons > MailChimp > Add.

Enter the MailChimp API Key and press update. The API key allows Solve to access your MailChimp account. You will find your MailChimp Key under your MailChimp Account Settings.

Now each of your Solve users have the option to copy (“Push”) a list of contacts from Solve into MailChimp. This is done in the same way that you would export a list of contacts. Solve menu > Manage Contacts > Data > Push this list to MailChimp - when chosen this option will copy all contacts currently selected by the filter e.g. Show … to MailChimp.

The key linking the contact records between the systems is the Business Email address. If Business Email is empty then Personal Email is chosen. Other Email is used if the Personal Email is empty. If all three fields are empty, the contact is not copied.

When a contact is copied to MailChimp Solve automatically adds a special activity to the contact’s page which tracks the campaigns that have been sent and how your contact has responded to them.

Sending a campaign

In MailChimp ensure you’ve created a list where you want the contacts received from Solve to be saved.

In Solve’s Contacts window search for the contacts you want to target using the “Show …” option in the toolbar. Most often you will be targeting a subset of contacts using category tags e.g. “Show > Category tags > {your list name}”

Now the targeted contacts should be showing in the search results list. Next choose Data > Push this list to MailChimp. Solve will prompt you to choose which MailChimp list to save the contacts to, then it will connect to MailChimp and copy the selected contacts over.

Next, login to your MailChimp account. Follow their instructions to create a campaign and send it to your MailChimp list.

MailChimp’s lists are like separate databases of contact records. If a contact chooses to unsubscribe from one of the campaigns MailChimp will unsubscribe them from that list only. To unsubscribe a Solve contact from all MailChimp lists going forward, simply create and add a category tag entitled “Unsubscribed” to the record. This will omit the contact from the “Push to MailChimp” feature when pushing a list.

Managing “do not email me” requests

If a contact has a category tag named “Unsubscribed” applied Solve will never send a Group Recipients or Scheduled Email and will not include the record in requests to sync to Constant Contact or Mailchimp.