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Session Notes: Bulk Emails

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Last week on our Tuesday call, we had a question posed to us about presenting a summary of the call. We're going to give it a shot here and see if it proves helpful! We're always happy to get you as much information in as many accessible ways as possible.

Without further ado, here's our first go at the cliff-notes version of our Tuesday call.

What is the difference between badges and marketing lists?

  • BADGES: Badges are general segmentors. They provide characteristics and help you segment your donor into a specific group.
  • MARKETING LISTS: Marketing lists are made up of user badges (characteristics of a donor) to help you target a specific group of people.

Steps for sending bulk emails to a specific group of donors:

  • Use your Badges to Create Marketing Lists
    - Access your Reports page and load a system-generated or custom report

    - Access Filters and include anything you want to be included in this list. In particular, the badge(s) you want to include so you can pair down this report to a specific target market

    - Click on Run Report

    - Go to Add in the top right corner of the report and click on Marketing List

    - Either choose an existing marketing list or create a new one to add all of these contacts to, then click Apply

    - Review the video Email Marketing Lists from Badges and Reports
  • Next, you will build an email that you want to send
    - Go to Emails and Add Email
    - - Pro Tip: The owner will always default to the user creating the email but can be changed to a different DonorDock owner, showing the email came from them.

    - In the Send To field is where you will pick your Marketing List(s)
    - - Note: If you choose to send the email to more than one marketing list and a contact is in more than one list, the system will automatically de-dupe that, only sending one email to that contact.

    - Tie to your Campaigns and/or Appeals for tracking purposes.

    - Then either load your template in the top right corner under Templates > Load Template, or begin creating your template from scratch.

    - Whether you create a new template or edit an existing one, you can use the right-hand side tool menu to create and edit your masterpiece.
    - - Any time you are in a component, you will be brought to the properties of it letting you make adjustments specifically to things like background color, row color, background images, padding, etc.
    - - Any time you are clicked out of a component in the white space of the template, you will see the visible main toolbar.
    - - Pro Tip: Column to the right of the main toolbar will allow you to do additional things like search and choose free stock images or change details about the body of the email from a global level, like background color, link colors, etc.


    - When you are done with your template be sure to review your work by toggling between the desktop and mobile previews, accessed by the eyeball in the lower left-hand corner of the template.

    - Before you send it to your contacts, make sure to send a few test emails you can review on desktop and mobile.
    - - Note: If you've used merge tags in your email you won't see it in a test email. The email will populate fake merges so you can see what it will look like to your donor.

    - Then, you will save your template so you can re-access it in the future by clicking Templates > Save As Template > Give it a Title

    - Lastly, send your email if everything is ready to go, or schedule the send at a later date by accessing the Send button in the upper right-hand corner or checking the Schedule Send right below it.
  • Once sent, you have the ability to review the email performance statistics.
  • Review these instructions and video Emailing Multiple Contacts

Q&A:

  • What is the benefit of tying an email to a campaign or an appeal?

    Strictly for tracking purposes, showing you what was sent for a particular touchpoint to these contacts. Tracking at the Appel has an additional benefit in which it will show how many solicitations were sent by appeal and will show you gifts tied to an appeal and how effective it was compared to others.
  • Can DonorDock recommend a company where you can buy email lists from?

    It's our experience the costs of email marketing lists are pretty expensive and the quality of them tends to not be ideal. You should always do your research before buying lists and then soliciting those contacts without first having a relationship with them. DonorDock has stumbled upon a company we feel is a pretty good source called Donor Search. They allow you to prospect by specific filters you would then be able to import into DonorDock.
  • How can I include more than 50 receipts in a bulk receipt printing?

    There is currently a limit of 50 because any time we go over that, it becomes a server-side problem to generate PDF's since they are resource-intensive (meaning, they take a really long time for processing to happen). There have been recent performance improvements to PDF generations and we will do some research to see if we can bump up the receipt limit. As a workaround, to do batches of printing, we suggest saving a couple of different lists, filtering by gift size (i.e. $1-$100, $101-$500, etc.) to make sure they stay within the limit applied at this time.
  • Is there a way in which we can make our emails look better in Outlook?

    Outlook is not always the best at rendering email. We will look to see if there are guidelines we can provide on that perspective.
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The DonorDock Team
Written by
The DonorDock Team

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