Email Campaigns

Tool

Email campaigns

Description

You can send an email campaign through TrackVia to any view in any table (that contains one or more valid email addresses). Your email can merge values from database fields to create a highly customized message to a targeted set of contacts.

Notes

Email campaigns cost $0.01 per email sent, with a minimum charge of $1.00 per campaign. Previews do not count toward your total. When you send a campaign, an invoice will appear in your account for the amount due, and will be charged before the campaign is sent.

Note that you might have a custom pricing plan that includes bulk discounts or a certain number of free emails per month. See the Billing page for details.

Approval process

Your email campaign must be approved by TrackVia Support before it's delivered. The approval process happens automatically behind the scenes – you don't need to do anything to request it. If your campaign is denied, we'll contact you directly with an explanation. If you don't hear from us, your campaign was approved.

When approving email campaigns, we check the recipient list and the email message content to make sure they adhere to the following terms of use:

• Unsolicited "spam" emails are not allowed.
• You must have an existing business relationship with your recipients, or have collected their names through a voluntary opt-in process.
• You must respect each recipient's desire to unsubscribe from your list (TrackVia provides a built-in unsubscribe mechanism, described below).
• Abusive, obscene, or pornographic content is not allowed, nor is any content that promotes an illegal activity.

Opt-in and Bounce Tracking

To send an email campaign, your table must have a checkbox field called Email flags. If it doesn't, TrackVia will provide a button in the Email Campaign tool that will create the field for you. The checkbox field has two independent options, which are both checked by default: opt-in and valid address. Whenever you send an email campaign, any records that don't have both options checked will be skipped. In addition, TrackVia will add a link to the bottom of every email campaign message that allows recipients to unsubscribe. (You can see what this link looks like using the Send me 3 preview messages button in the Send a Campaign tab.) When recipients click this link, their opt-in checkbox will be unchecked, and a note to this effect will be added to the History section of that record in your table. If the message bounces, it will be received by TrackVia's automated bounce tracking system. The valid address box will be unchecked, and a note to this effect will be added to the History section of that record. Note that bounces can be due to non-existent email addresses, temporary delivery problems (e.g. mailbox is full), or the receiving system rejecting your message as suspected spam.

Uploading email message templates

Before you can send an email campaign, you must upload the message you intend to send using the Email Message Templates tab. A message can be plain text or HTML, and can be created using a text editor or HTML editor.  After uploading the file, you can click the send preview link to have it sent to you by email – this will give you an idea of how the message will look to recipients.

Send a campaign

Once your Email Flags field is created and email message template is uploaded, you're ready to send an email campaign. Use the main Send a Campaign tab of the Email Campaign tool. There are a few pieces of information you'll have to provide:

• View to use as a recipient list
  For each record in the view, TrackVia will send your message to the first email address found in the view (i.e. the left-most column in the view whose data type is an email address). Invalid and blank email addresses will be ignored. Using a view as the recipient list allows you to send an email to a subset of your table: by creating filters in the view (see the View Filters article) you can choose to email (for example) all paying customers, all overdue accounts, or all contacts in Nebraska.
• From name
  This is the name (not email address) that the messages will appear to come from. It is optional.
• From address
  This is the email address that the messages will appear to come from. Replies and bounces will come back to this address. This address cannot be an address that TrackVia monitors through its email collection feature (otherwise, an auto-reply from a campaign recipient, such as an out-of-office notice, could trigger an auto-reply by TrackVia, leading to an infinite loop). Use a real person's address, or something like no-reply@your-organization.com.
• Subject
  This is required.
• Email message template
  This is one of the email messages you have uploaded in the Email Message Templates tab.
• Skip duplicate email addresses
  If this is checked, TrackVia will not send a message to any email address it has already encountered in this campaign, even if the other fields in the record (such as Full Name) are different. If this is unchecked, TrackVia will send more than one message to the same email address, as many times as that address is encountered in the view data.

Finally, send the email campaign using the Send email campaign button. Testing is highly recommended! It's a good idea to verify the appearance of the email both from an offline email client such as Outlook and a web-based email reader like Yahoo Mail or Gmail. You can send yourself a preview of your campaign using the Send me 3 preview emails button. This will send the first three messages in your view to your own email address, so you can verify the appearance of the email and any personalization.

Merge database values into emails

When the emails are sent, actual data for each recipient can be substituted into the message using placeholders. For example, if your table contains a field called First Name, you can put the word ~first name~ in your email message, and each recipient will see their own first name instead of the placeholder. This feature is often called "mail merge." Any table field can be substituted this way – the field does not have to be a column in the view. When creating placeholders, be sure to use a tilde character (~) before and after the table field names.

The Send 3 preview emails button is very useful for verifying that the personalization is working. If you have problems, please contact us.

Hosted files

This tab allows you to upload images or files that TrackVia will host for you, so they can be linked to in your email messages. There are two main uses for this:

• Images
  If you're sending HTML messages, you may want to include a logo or background image in your message. HTML editors will refer to these images in your HTML file using a tag that looks something like this:

  • <img src="my_picture.jpg">

• For this to work, the file my_picture.jpg has to be hosted on a public webserver, for example your own website. (TrackVia does not support multi-part messages with encoded MIME images.) Even if the email looks correct on your local machine, your recipients will not see the image correctly unless it is publicly hosted.

• To have TrackVia host the image for you, upload it in the Hosted Files tab. You will be given a URL that you can use to refer to the image in your HTML source. For example, the image tag above would look something like this:

  • <img src="http://acme.trackvia.com/.../EBA_wU8zq9arl3.jpg">

• Attachments. TrackVia does not support attachments in email campaigns. However, you can upload your intended attachment (for example, a .pdf version of your newsletter) in the Hosted Files tab. Then use the URL you're given to refer to it, or provide a link to it, in your email campaign message. If you make use of this feature, please use the preview feature to test your links.  There is no additional charge for hosted files.