Issue
Need to send letters to a specific list of clients via email.
Solution
In GPM you can send letters to a selection of clients via email using Microsoft Outlook.
IMPORTANT!
GPM is definitely NOT designed to bulk email. It means that your system may crash if you try to send emails in bulk to your whole database (or more than 50-100 recipients in total). If this occurs, you will not be able to know what is sent and what still needs to be sent. Also, this could result in your domain name being banned from sending emails by Amazon.
In this case, you can try sending them in blocks of no more than 50 (see: System Crashes When Bulk Emailing) or use a dedicated email marketing product.
Follow the steps below to create the mailshot and send letters to various clients:
- Create the mailshot document:
- Go to Administration >> Letter Templates
- Create the document to be sent - watch this tutorial for more information. - Select the list of clients to send the email to:
- Go to Reports >> Template Merge
- Add mandatory (and optional if necessary) restrictions that will filter the clients you need to send the letters to. In this example, we will select all clients that have had an appointment since the start of the current financial year
- The list of Mandatory and Optional restrictions are listed below:
- Click Get Matching Rows to retrieve the list of clients who have had an appointment since the start of the current financial year
- In Merge Action to Take select Create a Personalised Email for each Row to send the emails with the mailshot or newsletter as an attachment.
- Choose the Letter Template to Merge that your created above
- Enter a Subject for the email and a Reply To email address
- Click Run the Merge to send the emails with the attachment to all clients in the list.
- Email addresses populate in the bcc (blind carbon copy) area so that the recipients don't see who else the email is being sent to.
Note: When running the merge, the resulting merged document will be sent to all selected email addresses. Before proceeding to run the merge with all selected clients, it is recommended that you test the process once using a test email address (yours or a member of staff's) in order to check that the merge and attachment are being generated as expected. Please note that emails will only be sent successfully when the sender's email account has been configured with Microsoft Outlook. Contact your IT support for more information.