Mailing SIG members

Sending mail to SIG members.

(This page is for those who have volunteered to act as DHACA SIG Champions)

To make it easier for you to communicate with members of your SIG, you should have received an email inviting you to join the DHACA “Mailchimp” account. (If you need a reminder email, please contact Nigel.Dallard@dhaca.org.uk)

Once you have accepted this invitation, you will be able to access the account. This has full contact details of all DHACA members and their SIG memberships, and allows you to send an email in the DHACA corporate style which will automatically be delivered to those who have signed-up to your SIG without you having to maintain a separate mailing list. From here on the DHACA website, members are able to register with DHACA and then customise their SIG membership either at time of registration or later.

Sending an email to your SIG members

For those of you unfamiliar with Mailchimp, here are instructions on how to send mails to DHACA members via Mailchimp…

Visit www.mailchimp.com and log in.

Starting a new communication

On the main navigation on the left, click “Campaigns”.

Either:

Click “Create Campaign” (top, right-hand) and then select “Regular ‘ol Campaign” on next page,

click drop-down next to “Create Campaign” and select directly.

Choosing who to send to

Select the “Members” list (currently it has 322 members, ignore other test lists)
Select either
- “Send to entire list” or
- “Send to a saved segment” if you just want to send to members of your specific SIG (in which case, select the SIG from the drop-down list which will appear – if you need to send to a combination of SIGs, let me know and I’ll create a new “segment”).
Click “Next” (bottom, right-hand)

Starting the email

On the next page:

name your “campaign” (unique name that will identify your email in the list of emails sent – perhaps include date, author, subject – if you leave blank, it will use the email subject)
type in the email subject line as appropriate
change the from email address to your own (unless you want the mail to appear to come from Charles!)
leave everything else as default and click “next” (bottom, right-hand)

On the “Select a Template” page, select “Saved Templates” and then select “Single-column email”.

Composing your message

You are now presented with the email composition page. This is split into two halves – the left-hand side shows you the email as it is being composed, the right-hand side is where you compose it. The template is made up of a number of blocks. You need to click on the appropriate block on the left-hand side, then edit the text in it on the right-hand side.

To change the style of the text, after writing it, select it on the right-hand side and click the “Style” control to apply the appropriate style. You will see that there are a number of pre-defined “merge-fields” that will get converted to the appropriate field in the member’s record, e.g. their first name is included by typing “*|FNAME|*”.
To insert a hyperlink, do not type in the link directly – instead, type the text you wish to be hyperlinked, then select it and click the “Link” tool (looks like a chain link). This will result in a tracked link being inserted so we can see who has clicked through that particular link.

DO NOT delete or change the legal bumf at the bottom – if this isn’t included Mailchimp will auto-re-insert stuff in an unformatted manner to comply with legal requirements.

Before you send

To see what email looks like, click “Preview and Test” and “Enter Preview mode” – you will see preview of how mail will look on desktop and mobile device.
Click the “X” (top, right-hand corner) to leave preview mode.
You can also do “Preview and Test”, “Send test email” if you want to be 100% sure.

When you’re happy, click “Next” (bottom, right-hand corner).

Sending the email

You will now get to the “You’re all set to send” page, which confirms all your settings.

From here you can either:

send immediately, or
schedule the mail to be sent at a predefined time.

At any point in the above, you can click “Save and Exit” (top, right-hand corner) and your email will be saved as a draft in the “Campaigns” folder, from where you can later retrieve it and edit it.

From the same folder, you can also retrieve a sent campaign and use it as a basis for sending a new one.

Keeping track

Once sent, you can also track who has opened it, who has clicked on what link etc by looking at the report for the campaign from the “Campaigns” folder.

Any problems, please shout!

(Nigel.Dallard@dhaca.org.uk)