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HOW-TO guide for Email Campaigns.
Following are the steps that you need to follow in order to send email campaigns using 4.0 or later version of sugar.
1. Setup a monitored mailbox.
This mailbox will be the sender of campaign emails and will also receive any bounces. this is an administrative task and needs to be done only once. One mailbox can be used with multiple email campaigns.
Use the Manage Mailboxes option from the Admin panel to set this up. In addition to required fields on the form do not forget to set these field values:
a. Possible Action = Bounce Handling
b. From Name: Email Campaign Sender Name. This will be the default value, it can be overwritten during the campaign definition.
c. Form address: A valid email address. Campaign emails will be sent from this account. All bounces will land in this account. You should have pop access to this account.
2. Campaign module relies on the scheduler to send emails and process bounced emails. There are two predefined scheduler jobs that perform these tasks. "Run Nightly Mass Email Campaigns" and "Run Nightly Process Bounced Campaign Emails". You need to configure your scheduler and activate these jobs.
3. Define a campaign of Type Email.
if you set values for both tracker text and tracker url. The text will be appended to your email message as a link with the tracker url as the target. When the recipients of your email click on the tracker text they will be redirected to the tracker url and a click-thru campaign log entry will be created.
If you want to control the location of the tracker text then leave the tracker text field empty and set tracker url. when composing the email template add tracker text add the desired location and surround it with TRACKER_URL_START and TRACKER_URL_END macros. The text will be converted into a link and associated with the tracker url.
4. Add targets list, a collection of people who will receive the campaign email. You can add leads, contacts, targets and/or users to a target list. A target list can either be a list of targets to send emails to, or, pattern of/a list of email address exempted from the campaign. lists of type default, test and seed belong to the first category.
Target List Type: Default: Everybody in this list will receive the campaign email.
Seed: List of people who need to be notified when a campaign has been sent. The will receive a copy of the email. Typically you would add users of the application to this list.
Test: List of people who would receive the test emails, Can be used to work on the email messaging before it is sent outside.
Suppress - By Id: List of people exempted from the Campaign email. say for a campaign you have a default list of 100 targets of this list you do not want to send emails to 20 targets, first add these targets to a list of this type and then associate the list with the campaign.
Suppress - By Email Address: Same function as previous type. In this case exemption is based on email address comparison.
Suppress - By Domain: with this type you get an additional field "No emails to Domain", you can set a domain name in this field. say you want to suppress emails to <everybody>@yahoo.com, set yahoo in the domain field.
Target lists are integrated with import functionality. After a successfully importing a list of targets you get an opportunity to add imported records to a target list.
Target lists are integrated with reports, you can link output of a report to a target list, this feature is enabled for leads, contacts and target reports.
After defining the target lists associate them with the campaign.
5. Define the email marketing message. This will be the message that the campaign targets will receive. A campaign can have multiple email marketing messages, with each message you can associate target lists. This allows for sub-grouping of targets in a campaign, and provide a different messaging for each sub-group.
In this step you will be using the monitored mailbox that we defined in the first step, upon selection of the mailbox the default "From Name" will be filled you can override this value, since the recipients of the email will see this name as the sender of the email.
Create an email template that constitutes the subject and body of the email, in this step you can use the TRACKER_URL_START and TRACKER_URL_END macros defined above.
6. You are now ready to test/send your campaign. for these action you will be using the "Send Test" and "Send Emails' buttons from the Campaign detail view.
Send Test: Use this option to test you message, you will need at least one target list of type test. When selected with take you to a scheduling screen where you will see all the Email marketing messages and the associated target lists. you can choose the message that you like to send. Messages will be sent only to test lists even if you have other type of lists associated with the email marketing message.
Messages will be sent immediately upon selection of the send button from the scheduling screen. you can see the status of the messages and campaign response by switching to the status view. "Delete Test Entries" button from this page can be used to delete campaign log entries associated with test lists.. you can perform this step at any time.
Send Email: This function works like send test except for 2 difference. first, it deals with default list and applies the exemption lists, second, messages are not sent immediately instead they are queued for sending. The "Run Nightly Mass Email Campaigns" job described in step 2 takes the queue as its input and sends messages. if the schedulers are not configured you can use "Mass Email Manager" option from Admin panel to send messages manually.
7. Mass emailer. This component processes the campaign email queue, for each item in the queue the emailer,
a. Checks the target's email address against the suppression lists for the campaign. If it is to be suppressed then item is deleted from the queue.
b. if the target is opted out the appropriate campaign log entry is created and item is delete from the queue.
c. if the target has an invalid email address a campaign log entry is created and item is deleted from the queue.
d. composes a message for target from the email templates, assigns a unique id to the email message (tracker_id) and adds a bot to the email to track email viewing. if specified, appends tracker text and url to message. Appends opt-out url and message to the email, the message text can be changed in the module's language file.
if you are concerned about number of emails sent by the mass emailer per run, you can control that value by navigating to Admin Panel->Email-Campaign Setting option, set a different value for "Number of emails sent per batch" property, default is 500.
The other setting on this page lets you change the location of files that track how recipients of the campaign email are responding to the message. files of interest are, campaign_tracker.php, image.php and removeme.php. these files are in root of your install directory by default. you may need to move these files if you are sending the email campaign from site what is not publicly accessible. if you move them you will need to make some changes to these files.
8. Campaign Tracking: Once the campaign has been sent you can track its progress by switching to the status view. Campaign module integrates with inbound emails component to process bounced message, make sure that "Run Nightly Process Bounced Campaign Emails" job, described is step 2, is configured properly.
Thanks for you constructive feedback.
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Originally Posted by siros 
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