IN THIS ARTICLE

Introduction To Email Manager

Sending High Volume Campaigns

Creating & Maintaining A Clean Subscriber List

Pricing & Terms

Using Email Manager & Tracking Performance

Sending Targeted Emails

Exporting Email Addresses & Filtering By Opened/Unopened/Clicked & Using Them In A New Campaign

How Does REC+ Validate Email Addresses When People Sign Up?

Double Opt-In


Introduction To Email Manager


Email Manager is a very powerful campaign tool for communicating with your base, driving revenue generation, increasing loyalty and turning prospects into new customers. 


It enables you to set up campaigns and send emails to your segmented customer and prospect base and track open and click-through rates. Some of its main uses include:

  • Sending newsletters to keep people up-to-date about your company, services or products (Tip: select multiple users to send to by holding CTRL-Shift)
  • Engaging and nurturing prospects until they become customers (especially useful combined with Prospect Manager and Real-time Alerts)
  • Sending promotions and offers, especially for online retailers (use Coupon Manager to create coupon codes to send out)
  • Issuing important notifications, such as changes in terms and conditions or seasonal support changes
  • Segmenting your subscribers into groups via User & Group Manager in REC for targeted campaigns, or pasting in an email address list.


Sending High Volume Campaigns


Email Manager is integrated into industrial-strength 3rd party sending services like Mailgun and AWS, so you can send timed emails and mass campaigns to tens of thousands, or even a million+ subscribers or prospects. You can also set up SMTP accounts, though these tend to be slower and less functional. Using these services means you are bound by their terms and conditions and must adhere to good practice for keeping your email address lists clean. 


To set up high volume or timed campaigns via Mailgun  read this article. 


Creating & Maintaining A Clean Subscriber List with the subscriber field (send_email) set to 0 for unsubscribe or 1 for subscribe.


It is important that your subscriber list is as clean as possible before you send your first email campaign and regularly cleaned for ongoing campaigns as the validity of email addresses degrades over time. Read this article on email list cleaning. 


IMPORTANT 

  1. We never condone sending out spam email or to purchased lists, which are often low quality whatever assurances you are given. 
  2. Your 3rd party sending account will probably be suspended or cancelled if you send campaigns with a high number of spam emails, (as per their separate terms and conditions). You will normally only then be allowed to send out your campaigns in groups of 100 until the quality has been proven. You would therefore have to create multiple user groups of 100 users to do that, which is more time consuming than doing the original cleaning.


Managing Bulk Subscribes & Unsubscribes


Use Subscriber Manager to handle bulk subscribes and unsubscribes.


Pricing & Terms


3rd party services charge separately to use their service, which is in addition to your REC Email Manager charges, and you will also be bound by their separate terms and conditions. You benefit commercially because we individually price the service to be cheaper than current email sending services wherever possible. A further key benefit is that you can manage user lists from within your REC site rather than having to export them to another system and handle unsubscribes / duplication. Please contact your sales account manager for pricing.


Contact us about enabling scheduled emails that allow you to plan when emails will send in advance down to the hour. 


Using Email Manager & Tracking Performance


For an overview of Email Manager watch our video tutorial:

Email Manager Tutorial from Wildfire Internet on Vimeo.


Note: The content block section has now been moved for improved usability, appearing on the right hand side.



The key steps for sending an email and tracking performance are:

  • Go to Admin Console > Email Manager
  • Create a campaign from a standard layout, styled theme or one of your previously saved "favourites".
  • Send a test* email to yourself to ensure general design layout and flow is good, links work, typos are removed, call-to-actions are in place.
  • Check your design and layout will look good across the main types of email clients and devices by testing it on a service such as Email On Acid
  • Send the campaign to your customer or prospect list
  • Click on View Sent Emails to track their performance including open rates, which links were clicked by which users plus the ability to sort by membership levels


*Tip: The links to Preview / Unsubscribe won't work when you send test emails, but they are fine when you send out the live campaign.


Important: Autosave and editing emails 

Make sure when editing an email that you do not accidentally have it open elsewhere because if autosave is ticked it will overwrite your changes from the other browser.


Sending Targeted Emails


You are able to send emails to:

  • All users
  • Named users
  • Users by email (though we require those emails already be in the system and be subscribed for GDPR) 
  • Users filtered by group, smart type (retail, trade, dealer, etc.), membership levels and Industry SIC codes if you have these enabled and set up. 
  • Users filtered by purchasing history (available in the Personalisation subscription)
  • Users filtered by country
  • Email Follow-ups - Sending to users who opened or clicked or didn't open a previous email.
  • Users by saved Vehicle Make/Vehicle Model
  • Users in different VIP Club levels (read more about VIP Clubs)

Sending Followup Emails Filtering By Opened/Unopened/Clicked   


When a campaign has been sent you may wish to follow up with another campaign for recipients based on what action they took when receiving the first email. For example, sending a follow up campaign to people who opened an email but didn't click on your links with an extra promotion. Set this up in section 5. Who do you want to send to:  >Email Followups


Exporting Email Addresses & Filtering By Opened/Unopened/Clicked  


You can export email addresses and Google Ads Customer Match data for Sent Emails with filters for opened, unopened, clicked and all. Go into View Sent Emails > select a campaign > use the Export Emails feature:


To import these as the sending list into a new campaign, you can paste in the email addresses by selecting Who do you want to send to > Users by email within the new campaign.  



How Does REC+ Validate Email Addresses When People Sign Up?


The system performs the following checks whenever people sign up on the site. 


The following checks will stop the sign up process as they are clearly invalid:

  • The email address is in a valid format 
  • The domain entered in the email address is valid 
  • The domain is not from obvious test or example names such as example.com, test.com, test.co.uk, test,org etc
  • The domain also has an MX record meaning it can receive email


The next level of checks can be controlled in General Site Settings. The settings do not prevent users from registering with you, but they will not be added to your newsletter list to help keep it clean:

  • Don't add standard role based emails (Such as abuse@ spam@ hostmaster@ etc.) ticked by default 
  • Don't add additional role based emails (Such as hello@ info@ accounts@ etc.) ticked by default 
  • Ignore common catchall addresses (Such as btinternet.com addresses, this setting only recommended if you're fighting a problem with spam addresses on your newsletter list. In which case you might rather want to look into NeverBounce)
  • Temporary or disposable emails will not be added to newsletter lists


The following settings also control sign up and double opt-in requirements and are in line with good practice and regulations:

  • Enable Newsletter Signup on Registration/Checkout - ticked by default (this tightens up the previous method of adding users to newsletters just because they entered a password during registration as  a way to login to see their orders)

Double Opt-In


Double opt-in applies during sign up via checkout, register, REC newsletter apps & forms. This includes the newsletter signup button/link in the customer home page they see when they have logged in (it will do a check to see if they have ever agreed to double opt in before and then send it if it hasn't been done).

  • In Site Settings > General > Registration > tick Double/Confirmed Opt-In Newsletter Signup - ticked by default on sites created after 13th June 2017. Different countries demand this by law or strongly recommend it. Check here for the UK Government's guidance. Essentially, double opt-in means the registrant will receive an email after they sign up asking them to confirm they wish to receive emails. Once confirmed, the system then marks them as opted-in for emails.To set up double opt-in:
    • Tick this setting
    • Change the Site Definitions with your display text on the Registration page to suit what text you want to appear:
      • CHECKOUT_NEWSLETTER_SIGNUP_TITLE = Newsletter
      • CHECKOUT_NEWSLETTER_SIGNUP_TEXT = Sign up to receive our latest news & offers. We will not share your email or spam you. Unsubscribe any time.
    • Change the text that goes into the double opt-in email, if required, by altering the System Page in Page Manager called email_newsletter_double_opt_in and also the "Success" page once the user confirms opt-in called newsletter_opt_in_confirmation
    • Change the site definition for subject of the email, if required: EMAIL_NEWSLETTER_DOUBLE_OPT_IN_SUBJECT = Please Confirm Your Subscription