Bulk Emailing in OpenCRM

Creation of a single email so that it is sent to a group of people relies on an understanding of two key areas of OpenCRM.

• Custom Views
• Email Templates

You should understand how to create a Custom View on the appropriate grid (Lead/Contact/Company), this filters the grid to display the records that you wish to email to. Make sure that you have an email template setup on the system that uses the correct formatting that you require, and insert variable names for any merge data that will be required (i.e. Contact_Firstname etc...)

• Select the Entity tab (Lead/Contact/Company) that you wish to mail from.
• Select the custom view to filter the records

• Select the ‘check box’ at the top of the grid (left hand side) that allows you to mark all records on this page, or select the tick box for the records you would like to email at this time.
• Select EMAIL BUTTON

If you are happy that the Custom View you have selected contains the records you wish to email, you can select them ALL (that really is all, every record on ALL of the pages being listed) by clicking the ‘BULK EMAIL’ link in the tools box, at the foot of the grids.

This will take you to the Email Client screen

• Select the email template you are going to use
• Send (consider some of the tips below)

 Setting the FROM name or address

On the email client screen there are two fields, ‘From Name’ and ‘From Address’, the characteristics of these are as follows; From Name = The Name that appears on the email, normally this is the users name (John Smith) or Company name (Company Limited) – if left blank the system will use the Name of the User who is logged in at the point of clicking send. From Address = The email address that is sending the email, this is also the email address used should the recipient hit REPLY. This can be really useful if you are sending on behalf of a colleague or you are sending a generic mailing that does not require a specific reply email address (accounts@, Sales@, Technical@, No_Reply@ etc...)

Confirmation Emails

The confirmation email is a feature that is useful when sending from a hosted solution and you want to be sure that the email has been despatched correctly, however, when sending a BULK EMAIL you are unlikely to want to receive a confirmation for each of the emails being generated and sent out. To stop the confirmations from being sent to you (or the address that is specified in the FROM ADDRESS field) untick the ‘Send Confirmation’ tick box.

Note; There are some key issues around mass mailing. OpenCRM is NOT primarily a mass email tool and therefore is not hosted to support large volume mass emailing, however, the application and infrastructure can support this function very well. The number of emails that you send in any given time period is initially limited to the size of each Grid Page, which defaults to 20, if you use the ‘BULK EMAIL’ feature, this can be considerably higher.

 We provide a Bulk Email Relay service for those customers that wish to send more than 100 emails in a single send. This is a chargeable service, for more information please speak to your account manager who will be happy to provide details and costs.

Our mail servers track the daily usage of email sends and will automatically suspend any service that abuses these limits.

Emailing from the Campaigns module

You can also use the Campaigns module to send bulk emails.

Option One

 To select particular records from within a campaign, please follow the method as described above in Option One (Process for creating a group email).

Option Two

Using the Email button at the top of the Campaigns Module screen allows you to send an email to ALL the records associated with this particular Campaign. This is a great way to send an email to records from different modules (Leads, Companies, Contacts) at the same time.

Be aware that if you have linked any Company, all their registered Contacts will receive the email you are sending. You need to ensure they are not also linked to the Campaign as individual Contacts, or they will receive the email twice.

Please refer to the Note above for some additional information about bulk mailing.

Important

If you need to cancel a scheduled email that has already started sending to a large group of people, simply change the status in the email to "Draft." You can read more about how this works and where to go to edit the email in this FAQ.