One of the best ways to keep your community informed about current consultations is to send them regular email campaigns. Email campaigns can be used to send project updates, regular communications and can also be used to drive participation in your new projects.
Note: Only Site Administrators (and Hub Administrators in the Enterprise License) can send newsletters. Project Administrators cannot send or view newsletters in EngagementHQ.
Newsletter emails in EngagementHQ are directly linked to your community database allowing you to accurately target specific community segments for participation. This database is captured through the signup process for your EngagementHQ site and your segments will be dependent on the signup form questions you asked your community to answer. To find out more about setting up a registration form, you can read our article "Developing a registration form."
Create a new email
Click on the Newsletters link. The Newsletters page is displayed as shown below. You can create a new newsletter and then email it. Or, you can pick the ones already existing in the Newsletters page.
2. Click the Create Newsletter button to create a new newsletter.
The Design Newsletter page is displayed as shown below.
3. Enter a subject in the Subject text field.
4. Select the Include site logo checkbox to include your site logo. This is optional and in many instances not necessary if you have attached a banner that incorporates your logo as detailed below.
5. Enable the 'Add Banner Image' option and Click on the Select Banner drop-down list to apply a site banner or project banner. This section will pull through the banner that you have attached to an individual project.
Note: To add a custom banner to your newsletter, disable the option - 'Add banner image' and then you can upload a custom banner using in the content area of the newsletter, using the Image option in the newsletter text editor.
6. Enter the newsletter content in the Description area. You can edit the already existing sample text, or delete it to enter new information.
Note:
As the option to set the text 'inline' has been removed, the text in the newsletter will not wrap around an image. Also, the insert table feature in the newsletter does not have the option 'No border'.
The content should be copied to the newsletter body without any formatting or styling e.g by using a notepad. The text formatting should be applied only by using the text editor on the newsletter.
If a font is not supported by Gmail/Outlook, then a fallback font is used and hence sometime you may see different fonts on Gmail or Outlook for the same Newsletter.
EngagementHQ has automatic font resizing from 16px to 22px on mobile (if the email client supports it), when you specify a font size this will override any automatic font resizing. We do this resizing to make sure the text is legible on mobile devices.
To enable the default EngagementHQ font resizing, you can remove where
font-size:16pxhas been used, and in the browser, it will take the default16px. If you are setting font size, then it is 'locked in' for all email clients - ie adding a font size to the HTML prevents it from automatically resizing to a font that displays correctly in different email clients (eg Outlook, Hotmail, Gmail) and on different devices
7. Click the Preview button. Click the button 'Save & Preview'. This saves your changes and shows the Newsletter preview, where you can check for errors or improvements.
8. Click the Back to Edit Design button located at the end of the Preview Newsletter page to edit the newsletter.
9. Click the Send Test Email button to send yourself and your colleagues a test email/newsletter. This can be done by entering one or more email addresses separated by a comma in the box as shown below.
The test newsletter will appear as shown below with the participant screen name placeholder in place. The screen name of the user will appear when the actual newsletter is sent.
Selecting recipients
10. Click the button 'Add Recipients' on the bottom right, to add the email addresses of the recipients. The Select Recipients page is displayed. When you are ready to select your recipients, there are two distinct ways to communicate with your community. The first way is by targeting project association, using the drop-down 'Select Projects', which will find community members that signed up against specific projects and the second is by creating a group of participants in your database. The latter allows you to better target your campaign and choose from a range of attributes.
11. Click on Select All to select all the listed projects. OR, click on the checkboxes located next to the project names to select only the required projects.
NOTE:
When you select a project, a participant who has registered through that project initially or is an engaged participant of that project is added to the mailing list.
You have to specifically select 'Include project followers' to include the subscribers of your project. Read our article on How to include project followers to understand who your project subscribers are.
All admins on your site can receive the newsletter by subscribing to the project via the Follow Project widget. The option "Include project followers" has to be selected.
12. Click on the drop-down 'Select Groups'. The following page is displayed. The number on the Groups drop-down indicates the number of groups available. Groups save you the time and effort involved in entering the email addresses of each recipient individually. There are detailed instructions on creating or editing a group in the article Create and manage your participant groups.
13. Click on the checkbox 'Select All', to select all groups. Or, select only the required groups by clicking on the respective check-boxes. In case of many groups, you can use the Search box to search for the required group.
The following screen displays the screen names, email addresses and subscribed status of the recipients. Here, you can click on the checkboxes to unselect a recipient. In case of many recipients you can use the Search box to search for a recipient.
NOTE: Duplicate recipients will be automatically removed, i.e. if the same email id appears in more than one group, it will appear only once in the recipients list.
16. Click the Add selected recipients button for a final review of the newsletter OR click on Back to Edit Design button again to make further changes to the newsletter.
17. On click of Add selected participants button the Review & Send page is displayed. Glance through the newsletter once again, then click the Send button to send the newsletter to the recipients. The emails are sent out immediately once you click on Send.
Note: Option is provided to edit the recipients list.
Once sent, the following page indicating that your newsletter is sent successfully is displayed.
The time taken to send a newsletter can go up to 50 minutes depending on the newsletter email traffic.
You can track if your newsletters were delivered, opened, and clicked upon once sent, read the article on Understand the newsletter recipient metrics to understand this better.
Clone option
If you'd like to send an existing newsletter to more users, you can click on the Clone option of the respective newsletter and continue adding recipients.
For more information on how to create html emails in EngagementHQ, please refer to this help article.
Contact our support team if you need any further assistance via chat or email support@engagementhq.com