Sending email blasts and newsletters

Overview

• Wild Apricot allows you to send an unlimited number of emails to people in your contact database (members, attendees, donors, etc.).
• These kind of mass emails are known as manual email blasts in Wild Apricot (sometimes they are also referred to as email broadcasts).
• Email blasts can be personalized via 'Macros' - e.g. person's name, salutation, or any other contact/member field.(see Using macros in emails).
• Email blasts can be sent to all records - or to any desired subset of your contact database (see Keyword search - contacts and Advanced search - Contacts).
• There are also various emails that Wild Apricot sends out automatically. For example membership renewal reminders, registration confirmations, event notices, and payment receipts. We call these 'automatic emails' and they are described on other help pages.
• Each record has an email subscription field to opt in or out of receiving email blasts. Contact records marked as 'Unsubscribed' via this field are automatically excluded when email blasts are sent.
• Members can change the email subscriptions setting themselves - either by editing their Profile or by clicking on the Unsubscribe link which is automatically added to each email's footer. Administrators with access to editing memberships can edit this field too - but be careful not to violate any applicable Privacy laws! Non-member contacts can only unsubscribe via a special Unsubscribe link automatically added to each email blast footer.
• There are currently no built-in email templates, but Wild Apricot email editor allows you to easily format emails, such as adding links, pictures, different fonts and colors, or via direct editing of HTML. See this forum thread on how to use free email templates in Wild Apricot.
• You can not send attachments within the email but you can insert a link to attachment loaded into your Wild Apricot site (See Inserting documents).
• You can save a draft of your email and finish it later.
• You can activate tracking of opens and link click-throughs for each email, see Tracking Emails
• The delivery status of each email is tracked. This allows you to see whether an email was delivered or if an error occurred. Email addresses that have persistent receiving issues are automatically disabled and excluded from future email blasts, see: Managing Undeliverable Emails

Sending emails

Sending email from the Contacts tab

• Use Keyword search or Advanced Search to select people you want to email,
• Then use the [Email contacts] button located on top:

• In the above example only 7 non-member contacts are included (filtered) in the initial recipient list
• Note: contacts unsubscribed from receiving emails will be automatically excluded from the final recipient list (see Contact Email Settings and Email Log)

Sending email from the Members tab

• To email all members: use the [Email all members] button on the Members list page:

• Or use Keyword search or Advanced Search to filter out and email only a specific set of members:

In this example only the 113 members in "Pending - New" state are included in the recipient list.

Sending email to one individual contact

Besides sending mass emails to all or select members, you can also contact your contacts individually. To send an email to a contact just open his record and use [Send email] button.

Email blast step-by-step example

Suppose you want to send an email to everyone who subscribed to your "Weekly Updates" subscription form (see Email Subscription Form)

Select email recipients

First, do an advanced search on "Subscription source", hit [Search] and then click on [Email Members] button:

Creating The Email

Next select "Create a new email" (at this stage you can also select to copy a previously sent email or use a saved draft):

(This step is skipped if this is you have no drafts or previously sent emails)

Copy Previously sent email

If you selected to copy a previous email, click on the email you want to copy, then [Next]:

Personalizing and Composing The Email

At this stage you can add pictures, links, macros, etc. to format your email.

Accessing Macros

• Macros allow you to personalize the email to include specific info about each recipient (see Using macros in emails)
• Click on the [Macro] button in the editor toolbar to access and insert macros .

  Use macro {Member_Public_Profile_URL} to provide link to member's profile. Password reset link: Use macro {Member_Password_Reset_URL} to provide link to resetting member's password.

  
  
  
  

[Preview and send] is the final step before actually sending the email.
[Test email] button allows you to send a test copy of the email to yourself (to the email specified in user record).

Note: Test emails use fake/dummy data to replace macros and not the actual data from your database - so do not worry if you see some unfamiliar content in place of macros you have inserted. When you send the actual email, macros will be replaced with the appropriate data from your database.

[Save and close] button allows you to save the work you have done on the current email as a draft and return to it later.
[Cancel] button cancels the process and does not save any changes you have made.

Whenever you preview or send a test email, it will automatically save the draft of your current email, see Working with Email Drafts

Preview and Send Email

Viewing Sent Emails

You can access the list of all email blasts you manually sent from Settings -> Email log

For each email you send, you will see a history of when and who sent the email, the number of recipients, delivery status, etc. If you enabled email and link tracking, you can also access and track the number of times emails were opened and links were clicked, see Tracking Opened Emails and Tracking Link Clicks

Tracking Undelivered Mail

When sending an email blast, there is a chance that the email will not reach all of your recipients. This can happen for many reasons (e.g. a typo in the recipients email address, recipients mailbox is full, server issues). When this occurs, our server will record a failure notice in the email log.

Viewing email failures

To see the list of failure notices, go to Settings > Email log, click on your email and then click on the Failures tab. The [Resend to failed] button allows you to send the email blast to the failed recipients again.

The failures tab will show details of all emails that were not delivered. The image below shows the email address that failed and the response from the server.

Clicking on a record will provide more details about the failed delivery. In the example below, the recipient email address responded with "550 No such user here". This error usually indicates that the email address does not exist or may have been mistyped. For a list of common email errors and the action required, see Troubleshooting Email Delivery Failures

For more information on undeliverable emails, see Troubleshooting Email Delivery Failures and Managing Undeliverable Emails

Automatic removal of failed recipients

If an email address is consistently failing to receive emails, our system will flag this email address. Depending on the amount and nature of the failures, our system will automatically disable the email address. For more information on this feature, please see Managing Undeliverable Emails

Draft Emails

Previously saved email drafts (not yet sent) can be accessed from Settings > Email drafts

You can complete and send the draft using the [Use this draft] button:

The recipients list cannot be changed when using a previously saved draft - sending the draft will email all the initially selected recipients only.

See also

• Log of sent emails - see Log of Sent Emails
• Email macros - See Using macros in emails
• Email drafts - See Working with Email Drafts
• Contact email subscription - See View email subscriptions for a contact
• Email tracking - See Tracking Emails
• Selecting contact records for email - See Advanced search - Contacts
• Selecting member records for email - See Keyword search - Members