Emailer Basics

Overview

Welcome to the Emailer Basics article. Emailers are an important part of the communications process and can be used to send emails to your contacts or subscribers. In this article, we’ll cover the basics of emails and how to clone, trigger, and send them.

The Basics

The emailer will allow you to specify your email's Subject, Sender Name, and Sender Email Address. For the Sender Email, know that you can enter any email address here, even if it doesn't exist, but of course, if it doesn't exist, attendees receiving the email will not be able to respond. If creating a fake email to use as sender email, it is safest to choose something that ends in @eventfinity.co.

Send To Field

This designates what attendee field to use as the list of email addresses to send the email to. It defaults to the email attendee field, but a custom field or another field can be used. Here are a couple of example cases for using a field other than email:

a) Attendees were allowed to register without entering an email address and then email addresses were provided or collected at a later time. In this case, the admin user could create a custom field, for example, contact_email which gives the flexibility to be populated after the initial registration of the attendee, and also updated. When sending out email blasts to these attendees, that custom field would be used in the Send To Field instead of email.

b) Sending out email notifications to some third party, for example, a client in charge of tracking new registrations/approving registrations, or a travel agency that needs to be notified if an attendee is set to needing travel assistance. A custom field such as notification_email can be set up in this case. The field can be pre-populated at the time of registration with a hidden field in the form that will always set the value of the field for each attendee to the same email address that is designated as needing a notification. This way, when an attendee's status changes, an email notification can be sent out to whoever needs to be notified, instead of the attendee.

Action Triggers

Each email needs a trigger, and the Eventfinity emailer offers three different types. Emails can be triggered to be sent in various ways. For instance, you can set up a “welcome” email to be sent to new subscribers or customers when they sign up. You can also trigger emails to be sent based on user actions — for instance, sending a confirmation email when a purchase is made. Each email needs a trigger, and Eventfinity emailer offers three different types.

Send Immediately: This is just a manual send of the email. The email will be triggered to send every time you hit the "Send" button. When sending, you will also have the option to prevent the email from going out to any email addresses that may have already received this email before.

Registration Form Confirmation: Selecting this option will produce another dropdown where you must choose which form you want to tie this email to. Then every time that form is submitted, the email will be triggered.

Attendee Status Change: This triggers an email to go out when an attendee field is changed to match the value specified. Selecting this option will produce 2 new fields. The first is the attendee field and the second is the value to match

Group

If Everyone is selected, it will send to all attendees or all attendees who match the trigger criteria. If a specific group is selected, it will limit the scope of attendees who are eligible to receive the email. In that case, if an attendee's status matches the required trigger for the email, they will still not receive the email, unless they are in the group that the email sends to.

Message Body

The admin user may construct a simple text email using the Visual Editor. In the Visual Editor, basic formatting can be done, as well as adding images and links. If a more advanced, styled email needs to be created, a more advanced admin user or web developer may create an HTML email using the Code Editor.

Dynamic attendee fields can be pulled in to emails by putting the field slug in double brackets. For some examples: [[first_name]], [[custom_field]], [[registration_status]]. See below sections for more advanced capabilities in the email body.

Other Settings

Send Unsafe Images: If sending a regular email, this should be checked off. This allows users to download any image that is put into the email. If unchecked, the image will not be downloadable and will be 'embedded' into the email. It will not show up by default in Apple Mail.

Use Default Template: This should also be checked off by default.

Email History

Each email has a history log available to view in the admin, as well as download to CSV. Accessed by clicking the time icon on the Email list page. The log shows the email address it was sent to along with a timestamp.