Sending e-mails

In the Contact management module, e-mails can be sent to contact persons stored in the system. Mails can be sent to selections and queries made earlier, but also to individual contact persons. The Selections and queries document describes the difference between the two, and it explains how they are created. What is sent to the selection, query or individual contact person can be predefined by making e-mail templates, but it is also possible to enter the mails subject and content directly.

E-mail templates

An e-mail template is a predefined mail subject and text that can be easily combined with a selection, query or individual contact person to generate an e-mail or a group of e-mails.

Figure 1 E-mail template page

E-mail templates can be made for plain text e-mails as well as for HTML e-mails. When HTML is selected here, the online HTML editor becomes available to enter the mail body text.

Below the mail body text field we see four fields to add personalized information to the e-mail templates. Using the dropdown list here, special tags can be entered into the text. These tags, that can be recognized by the {} characters around it, will be replaced by the actual values for the contact person receiving the e-mail.

For example:

{dear},

This weekend we will update the my-projects-online environment {contact_name} is currently using.

will become

Dear Mrs. McGrady,

This weekend we will update the my-projects-online environment Belkin is currently using.

in the generated e-mail

E-mail page

In the E-mail page (Contact management > Mailing > E-mail) we can generate the actual e-mails.

Create e-mail tab

We can use a selection, query or directly select one contact person to receive the mail. For the content we can either use an e-mail template or type in the subject and main body text directly. When using an e-mail template for the e-mail, it still possible to change the subject and body text after the template information is imported into the e-mail page.

Figure 2 Create E-mail tab in the E-mail page

The “only CC the first generated e-mail” provides a good way of checking if the e-mails sent are as they are intended without receiving large amount of e-mails on the cc mail account.

Attachments tab

The e-mail can be accompanied by multiple attachments. Using the “browse” button a file can be selected. Using the  icon adds the file to the list of attached documents.

Figure 3 Attachment tab in the E-mail page

      E-mail example tab

The e-mail example tab gives a preview of the mail that will be sent. The {} tags are replaced here with the real contact person data.

Figure 4 E-mail example tab in the E-mail page

Communication tab

Communication details can be added for each contact person in the selection in the communication tab. This allows the contact history built using the contact management module to also contain references to all e-mails sent using the e-mail page.

Figure 5 Communication tab in the E-mail page