How to email multiple leads with a template?

[greenleaf108]

Hi folks:

I've got SugarCRM 4.5.0h installed in my laptop, and its working great. Kudos to all the developers for releasing such a nice product.

I have a question about contacting multiple leads. Say I have imported a big pile of leads from a spreadsheet, and would like to send them all a similar follow-up email with a template. How would I best go about doing this? I looked at campaigns, but wasn't sure I needed an entire campaign set up to accomplish this. If possible, I'd like the email to also show up on each lead's "history" area as well.

Thanks

greenleaf

[greenleaf108]

I'd like to close this thread if this is not possible with SugarCRM. Can anyone tell me if there is a way to send the same email to multiple leads, personalizing each one with a template? If not I will look for another solution.

[greenleaf108]

Here is an update for anyone following this thread. (Feel like I'm talking to myself here but anyway . . .):

I managed to muck through the instructions located here:
http://www.sugarcrm.com/wiki/index.p...mail-Campaigns

My first thoughts are - this was *way* too complicated a process for the simple task of sending a "Hi, I'm your sales rep" type message to a list of leads. Far too many hoops to jump through. I'd rather throw a bunch of leads into a 'basket', select a template and hit the send button and be done with it. Anyway, that's for the developers to chew on - hope you can add this feature in future releases.

I got to the end of the process, and have 313 emails sitting in queue, but want to send them right away. I run SugarCRM from a laptop, and would rather not have to leave it on all night long just to send out my mass email. I checked the box to select all my messages, and hit the "Send Queued Campaign Emails" but nothing happens. I will leave it on all night and see if it's any different this morning.

SugarCRM is a great product, but the email followup features are quite lacking.

Thanks

Sean

[longreach]

I believe that if you had set the timestamp on those emails to any time already passed, then the scheduler would have automatically sent them the next time it ran. And the Send Queued Emails button would have sent them when you clicked on it.

[greenleaf108]

Yes, I realized that I should have set the date in the past after putting the emails into queue. Now how can I back-date the ones that are already in there? Or do I need to delete them all and start over?

[longreach]

Neither the scheduler nor the Send button will send them until the time/day arrives - so if that is a long time coming - I think deleting may be the only way to go.

[greenleaf108]

I went ahead and deleted all the messages and resent - seems to be working fine.

As an aside, the Sugar developers might consider the fact that many people will run SugarCRM inside a protected LAN, or as a local application with one user (as I do). Since neither of these cases will have a public http server, the unsubscribe link and tracking features of mass emails will not work. I manually removed the unsubscribe link from the code and replaced it with "To unsubscribe, reply to this message with "Unsubscribe" in the subject line.

Also, plain text emails seem not to work. Other people have reported the same thing - you just get a blank email when sending in plain text (and there's nothing in the HTML editor box).

[roblaus]

I think you hit the nail on the head with your observations. I tried several times to get an answer on how to remove this tracker information but in vain. People apparently do not (or do not want to) understand that tracking/link based opt-out is almost a guarantee to land you on all spam lists of this planet.
I did the same what you did - removed it manually (actually in the language file) but got some weird results. Whenever somebody couldn't receive HTML (and there are many) this person received nothing BUT the (allegedly removed) opt out line. Did a lot of good to the reputation of my company.

And I am asking again (niceley):

Does anybody know how to remove the opt-out line without traces?
Does anybody know how to remove the tracker information (the infamous pixel) without traces?
Does anybody know how to deal with text-only recipients?
Does anybody know what to do with the blank body part when creating a template (and thus not being able to create anything)?
Does anybody know how to pick up bounces provided one does not want to patch the source?
Does anybody know how to send out bounces a second time seamlessly - or differently asked: how to re-release contacts/leads based on criteria like 'bounced but fixed...'

rgds
rl

[greenleaf108]

Robert:

I realized that SugarCRM was forcing HTML email when I received a copy of my mass email, and Thunderbird popped the warning about remote images being served, etc.

Sugar developers - this is a huge problem. You guys really ought to just have email default to TEXT, and allow HTML to be turned on as an option. HTML-based email with remote images being served is very likely to be flagged as suspicious as Robert mentioned above, especially in my case where the image is being served from localhost!

I like the idea of integrating email with customer service, but Sugar's got a loooooong way to go before this becomes really useful and practical. I support the idea though so if any devs want help troubleshooting or giving feedback let us know!

Thanks,

Sean

[vab3]

I'm using a Microsoft Word mail merge as a solution. Exporting from sugar to csv format is easy. You just search on the critera you want, and then hit the export button at the top left of the view. Building a mail merge in word to send email is done through a fairly self-explanatory wizard. I haven't tried the sugar microsoft word plug-in yet.

I tried working with campaigns for a while, but was frustrated. It didn't seem to work well, and I couldn't really get good feedback whether it worked or not. It was also difficult to test because it won't send an email twice to the same person in the same campaign, so you have to set things up from scratch evertime you want to test.

By the way, there is a way to remove the opt out message and the hidden image in the campaign messages. You have remove a coule of lines of code.

http://www.sugarcrm.com/forums/showt...mpaign+opt-out