There are several steps to creating a marketing campaign using the inform Marketing Manager. Before you begin, there a few things to keep in mind:
•If your email is being sent to more than one email address, the email under the Company Information tab in your Company Master will be used as the "From" email address. Be sure that this email address is checked for replies to your marketing email.
•If you are new to email marketing, there are federal regulations that you should review before you send your first email. A list of these regulations and requirements can be found here on the Federal Trade Commission website.
•All emails will automatically include the following information at the bottom of the email, in compliance with the federal regulations:
•Company Name
•Company Address (Street, City, State, Zip)
•Company Web Address
•A notification: "To unsubscribe from these emails, please contact us at <Company Email Address>."
This information is pulled from the fields in the Company Master, under the Company Information tab. These fields may be edited through the Company Master, but they may not be removed from the email.
•Always test before you send. Set up a test customer and contact that you will use to send a copy of the email before you send it to your customers. This will allow you to verify that your images and formatting display correctly, your email settings work, and give you the opportunity to see it as it will look to your customers.
Click on the heading of the step below to view instructions.
1. Verifying Contact Information
Customer Contact information can be found under the Contacts tab in the Customer Master. Each customer contact must have a valid email address in order to receive marketing emails. If they have an email address, but should not receive mass marketing emails, the Don't Send Mass Mail box should be checked. Additionally, the First Name and Last Name fields are included in the To field of the email by default (they may be removed), and can also be included in the text of the email. Verify that these fields are formatted correctly.
Each time you send an email (mass or direct) a note will be created for the contact with the user initials of the sender, date it was sent, and the subject and text of the email. This allows you to track the emails that you have sent to each contact. An example is shown below.
We also strongly recommend that for testing purposes you create a "Test Email" customer with a test contact email address. This email address should be used to test the appearance and functionality of each of your mass mailings before you send them. For help setting up this customer, see the Add a Customer page.
Select the group of customers that you want to email. You have hundreds of options for selecting these customers, such as by Salesman, Territory, or Source. Source codes can be created and used to group customers for different mailing occasions, such as sending holiday cards or reaching out to prospects from a trade show. For more information on using Source codes with Marketing Manager, click here.
You can also use the customer's Sales History to target, for example, customers who have purchased a certain product or product line from you in the past, customers that buy from a certain branch, and customers that have ordered products that may now be discontinued.
Once you select these customers, you need to review the contacts that will be included in the email, based on the selection criteria. Once you click the OK button in the Marketing Manager screen, the Contact Selection window will pop up, allowing you to uncheck any contacts that you want to exclude. You can also export the list to a spreadsheet to verify that the information for each contact (First Name, Last Name, Email Address) is accurate.