Building Your Business

Launching your first email campaign with Relevant Tools is easy. First you must create your newsletter or email message by using one of the methods available in the message area. You can upload your message, mail it in, create a text only or image email, upload a file or use a specially designed template. Once your message has been created you are ready to send it out to your database. Click on Mailings in the top navigation bar and select your message.



Your mailing will automatically be assigned a mailing name that will be used for viewing the mailing progress and results. You can change the mailing name if you would like. Next you will select who the mailing will be sent to. Many times you will be sending it to everyone in a particular database but you can also select people who signed up in a particular time period, from a particular signup form, or do one or more searches on your database to select people by any parameters you would like.



You should ALWAYS TEST before sending or scheduling the real mailing. Enter your email address to receive a test message.



After sending the test message you should look at the statistics displayed for the mailing. It will show how many records are selected, the number of deselected records due to duplicate, bad or missing email addresses and the number of records that have been previously unsubscribed. Verify that the database is the right database and this is the number of records that you are expecting.



You should have also received the test mailing in your inbox. Verify that it is indeed the message that you want to send. Do not be alarmed when you see that the unsubscribe link in the footer of the email is not your own email address. The system randomly selects a record to use for the test mailing.

You can choose to either send the mailing now or schedule it for later. When you schedule a mailing for later everything associated with the mailing - the message and the records selected for the mailing - are copied over to the mail server queue and held until the specified date and time. If you change the message in Relevant Tools or records are added or changed in your database that will not be reflected in the mailing unless your delete the scheduled mailing and submit it again.



When you send the mailing out now it is immediately submitted to the mailing queue. Depending on how many other mailings are already in the mailing queue it may start going out immediately.



You can track the results in the results area and see real time how many messages have been sent. If you have open and click through tracking turned on you will also be able to see how many people are reading your message and taking action.

Labels: email campaign, email messages, send email, tutorial