Email Module

The email notifications tool allows you to broadcast e-mail messages to all members of your website. The email system is set to check for email blasts once an hour. That means you may get lucky and submit a minute or so before the system checks, or you may have to wait 59 minutes. The sender will receive an email providing a summary of the number of emails sent successfully.

When you first open the Email Module, you will be faced with three tabs labeled:

1. E-mails - See below
   
2. Member Recipient Groups - This is where you can assign members to various Recipient Groups
   
3. Uploaded Email Lists - Here you can upload Email lists. FYI: This is capped at under 500 names. The reason for this is that you can get your website & email blacklisted as being a spammer if you are not careful. We strongly recommend using a third party email blast system if you are sending out unsolicited email/marketing promotions.
   

To send an email to all members

Click on the "add new" icon at the bottom of your list of emails. The first screen will ask you who you would like to send the email to, members or uploaded list. Next it will give you a form to fill out the details of your email message. The fields have the following meanings:

Status
"inactive" messages are ignored by the system. Set this if you want to keep a message in the system, but not send it out until you are ready. Otherwise, the system will assume the message is "active" and ready to be sent.

Member Recipient Group
This allows you to select Agents, Members or both groups. You will also be able to select the "Test" email list to see proofs of your emails.

Send on
Set the date to send the message here. It defaults to today, but can be set to some date the future, if a scheduled mail-out is desired. If set to some date in the past, the message will be sent ASAP. (Messages are generally sent out on a regular schedule of every 15 minutes or so.)

Sender Address
This defaults to your email address, but can be changed if necessary. Note that some spam filters may filter out these messages, because they are sent from your website, not from your email account. That can look suspicious from a spam filter's point of view, so there is no guarantee that all your members will receive the message.

CC
Add additional email addresses to send to, here. Separate multiple email addresses with a comma.

Subject
This is the subject line of the email.

Body
This is the body of the email. Full HTML editing is allowed.

Include logo/letterhead
Add logo to top of message (taken from your website)

Attachments
You can optionally include attachments with your email. Attachment descriptions are optional.

To edit an existing email

Click on the "edit" icon to the right of the given email. Your email will come up in a form similar to that described above.

To re-use a previous email

First click on the Reset icon to the right of the given email. Then click on the "edit" icon, edit it as needed, and change the "Send on" date to today or later. Once you are happy with all the edits, change the Status from Inactive back to Active.

To delete an email

Click on the "delete" icon to the right of the given email. You will be prompted to confirm the deletion of the email and its attachments.

To send a scheduled email

Simply set the "Send on" date to the date you want the email to go out on.

To send personalized emails

In the email body use: 

[[EMAIL]] - recipient's email address
[[FIRST_NAME]] 
[[LAST_NAME]]
[[NAME]] - first and last name combined
[[LOGIN]]
[[PASSWORD]]
[[MEMBERSHIP_DATE]] - date of their last membership status change

To add more than 3 attachments to an email

ExSite allows you to add up to three attachments when you first create the email, but it is possible to add more in cases where that is not enough.

Click on the "edit" icon to the right of the given email. At the bottom of the next page you will see a list of the attachments. Click on the "add attachment" button to add another. Repeat as often as necessary.

If doing this on a new email that is set to go out today, it is best to temporarily set the email status to "inactive" to ensure that the email doesn't get sent out while you are still adding attachments. Once all your attachments have been added, set the email status back to "active", and it will be sent.

**We recommend always sending a test to ensure the email looks correct. After sending a test, you can go back to your list of emails, click RESET and the click "edit" to resend to your actual intended distribution group.

**REMEMBER, when you copy & paste text from Word, the Word formatting is brought into the email. You must strip out this formatting or your email will have weird characters and symbols in it. To strip out Word formatting you should:

1. Copy & paste your text from Word to Notepad and then the email message box.
2. Copy & paste your text from Word to the email message box and use our "pink eraser" icon. (second row of editor)
3. Type your message from scratch in the email message box.