Email Marketing

The Email Marketing module is located in the Utilities menu.

IMPORTANT: Using the email marketing module can incur charges from MailChimp. Please ensure that you understand MailChimp's fees prior to using this feature. M2 Technology is not responsible for fees charged to you by Mailchimp.

A video introduction to the use and configuration of CommTrak Email Marketing is also available.

CommTrak's Email Marketing module is used to send promotional or informational emails to customers and customer contacts.

Supervisor Role can access Email Marketing by default; Custom Roles can be assigned permission to access Email Marketing; the required permission is Utilities > Allow users to access Email Marketing.

Prerequisites

Before sending an Email Marketing campaign from CommTrak, you must:

• enter a valid MailChimp API key into the CommTrak Email Marketing Miscellaneous Settings
• create at least one Email Marketing list from a CommTrak Report

Optional

• create a predefined Email Marketing Template

Campaign Process

1. Create an Email Marketing List, e.g:
   • Customers with / without specific products
   • Customers in a specified postcode area
   • Customers with a contract expiring in a specified date range
2. Specify Email recipients
3. Select an Email Marketing Template, or type an email marketing message
4. Preview the campaign email
5. Optionally modify the campaign recipients list
6. Schedule or send the campaign email

The steps for creating an Email Marketing list are explained in the article, Email Marketing List Creation.

The steps for selecting recipients, previewing and sending the campaign are detailed in the Support Centre article, Sending an Email Marketing Campaign.

Mailchimp Plan Considerations

This section of the article refers to a third-party service, and is valid at the time of writing (April 2020)

It is vital that you review your Mailchimp plan frequently, and ensure that you are aware of any changes to Mailchimp's terms & conditions and fees.

All the monthly Mailchimp plans are compatible with the CommTrak Email Marketing module, including the free plan (although there are limitations when using the free plan).

The main consideration in choosing an appropriate Mailchimp plan is to ensure that the plan includes enough contacts, Audiences (see heading Mailchimp Audiences below), and a sufficient email-sending quota. At the time of writing, the Mailchimp free plan limits are:

• Email-sending limit of 2,000 per day
• Email-sending limit of 10,000 per month
• Maximum of 2,000 active contacts
• A single Audience (see Mailchimp Audiences section, below)

Mailchimp Audiences

Mailchimp refers to a contact list as an Audience.

Every time you click the Send Email button in CommTrak, a new audience is created in Mailchimp. This is required to ensure that unsubscribe requests can be processed correctly.

CommTrak attempts to delete the audience list for each CommTrak-generated campaign, in Mailchimp, after 14 days. However, the Mailchimp account owner can sign into their Mailchimp account and delete unused audiences manually if they have reached their Mailchimp Audience limit (this must be checked manually; CommTrak cannot report this information).

As Mailchimp is a commercial service, we recommend that their free plan is used only for testing API connectivity with CommTrak, or for sending low-quantity, infrequent email campaigns.