Want to send out emails to communicate with your auction attendees? Email Campaigns are what you’re looking for! You can create emails to share event information, remind attendees to update ticket information, and more. And using the new AI-powered Fundraising Content Assistant, you can generate email content in a flash!
Contents:
Getting Started
To create a new email, navigate to the Messaging area within Communications on your auction form.
Then click New Message.
Select Email Campaign as the message type. Then, click Continue.
If you'd like to learn about Notification messages, check out this article.
Notification Content
Next, you'll write the content of the email You're required to provide a Reply To Email Address, Subject, and Email Content.
The toolbar in the Email Content section contains a number of features to help you customize your email. We've highlighted a few of the most popular tools below.
Source displays the email in HTML format and allows you to make changes.
Basic text editing tools allow you to change the font, style, size, color, and alignment of your text.
Insert Tags is a drop-down menu containing a complete list of %info% tags you can click to insert as needed.
To insert and/or remove a hyperlink click the icon shown below:
Once you've configured your email's content, you can send a test by clicking Send Test at the bottom of the screen.
Enter the address you'd like to receive the test and then click Okay.
Please note: If you've included content tags in your email, they will not be populated in the test email.
Fundraising Content Assistant
If you need help getting started with your email content, you can use the new AI-powered Fundraising Content Assistant!
Please note: The Fundraising Content Assistant is a great starting point and should get you about 75% of the way there, but you'll want to fine-tune the results to your campaign's needs before sending.
Clicking Get Started with Our Fundraising Content Assistant above the Email Content area will open the content assistant modal.
First, use the drop-down to select the topic of the email campaign. Your options are General event promotion, Add payment method, and Assign unassigned tickets.
The Fundraising Content Assistant will customize the email's content based on the topic you choose, as well as some information about your organization and campaign.
You can further customize the email content by adding up to five keywords or phrases.
To add a new keyword, simply type it into the box and then click Create a new keyword.
To learn more about using keywords, check out this article.
Once you've added your keywords, click the Generate Content button.
After a few seconds, your email content will appear in the modal.
Read through the content, and if you like what you see, click the checkbox to acknowledge the disclaimer and then click Copy Content To Campaign.
If the email content isn't quite right, you can generate new content by clicking Regenerate Content. You can generate new content using the same keywords or change your keywords to tell the content assistant to go in a totally new direction.
Once you click the Copy Content button, your AI-generated content will be copied into the Email Content box so you can edit it before sending.
Please note: You should thoroughly read through the email content and edit as necessary before sending it out to your constituents.
Choose Recipients
Once you've completed your message content, you’ll need to select to whom the email will be sent. To protect your donors’ privacy, BCC is the default mode for any emails sent from your organization to auction attendees.
Click in the Select Some Options field to display and select recipient options. You can select multiple filters.
You can filter your recipients by Attendee Status, Packages, Payment Type, Table Seating, and Tickets.
When you're finished selecting your recipients, click Continue.
Delivery
Next, choose if you’d like to save the message as a draft, send it now, or schedule it for later.
If you click Save as a draft, click Save, and you'll be returned to the main Messaging table, where you'll see your message listed as a draft.
If you click Send now, you can simply click Continue. If you click Schedule for later, you’ll see an area to choose a date and time.
Previewing and Sending Emails
If you choose to send or schedule the email, the final step will be to preview it.
If you like what you see in the Preview, you can click Save & Send or Save & Schedule to finalize your campaign.
If you'd like to change anything, you can return to an earlier step to make your adjustments.
Once you're done, you'll see all of your messages in the main listing.
In this table, you can quickly see your email's Status, Title, Body, Type, Date it was last sent, the number of recipients to was Sent to, and any available Actions.
Email status is indicated by the dot next to the email's title. Scheduled messages have an orange dot, sent messages have a green dot, and drafts have a gray dot.
Above the table, you can search for notifications by their Title or Body content. You can also filter the list by Status and Date.
For draft or scheduled messages, your available Actions are to Edit, Send Now, or Delete the message.
Once a message has sent, you'll see View in the Actions column.
Clicking View will take you to the Email Campaign Details screen. At the top of the screen, you'll see three tabs.
The Messages tab includes lots of helpful information, including:
- When your email was sent:
- A dashboard with more detailed delivery information:
Sent tells you how many people the email was sent to.
Delivered tells you how many people the email was successfully delivered to (but not necessarily opened by).
Clicks tells you the total number of clicks for the email campaign; one click per email address is counted.
Unsubscribed tells you how many people unsubscribed from the email campaign by clicking the unsubscribe link in the email.
Bounced tells you how many emails could not or would not be delivered by servers.
Dropped messages may be counted as such if they're sent to email addresses that were previously unsubscribed from your mailings.
- The content of your email:
The Activity tab shows the message's editing and send activity, including the user who modified or sent the message.
The History tab shows a list of the message's recipients. You can also Resend the message from this tab.
Viewing All Notifications for an Attendee
The Messaging area in the form-level control panel only displays custom messages that you have created. To view all notifications that have been sent to an attendee, including automated system notifications, head to the Attendees tab in the Auction Virtual Terminal.
From there, you can click an attendee’s name and navigate to the Messaging tab to view all notifications the attendee has received.
The table displays the content of the message, when it was sent, and how it was sent. You can also resend a notification from this screen by clicking Resend.