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Creating an Enudge Message Series
Creating an Enudge Message Series

A date triggered series of messages delivered to your contacts over time

Heather Maloney avatar
Written by Heather Maloney
Updated over a week ago

The Enudge Message Series comprises very powerful functionality, allowing you to create a series of emails and/or sms messages which will be: 

  1. Sent to the specified group of contacts on a day based on the trigger date you specify for each individual contact. The send date can be before or after the trigger date.  Each contact can have a unique trigger date.
    AND OPTIONALLY

  2. Sent out periodically – send out the same message every x number of days, months or 1 year (this is optional) .

You can add new contacts to your draft or active Message Series at any time, causing those new additions to receive the pre-configured series of messages. 

The Message Series functionality supports a wide range of uses.  Some examples are:

  1. On-board new clients, by automatically sending a series of welcome and informative emails, which educate your new client on your range of services, in an easy to consume manner.

  2. Send Standard Messages to customers, based on actions that take place in your operational system.  For example, your customers might reach a certain threshold or carry out a specific activity, at which point you need to send a particular email message.  Your operational system can call automatically add the contact into your Message Series thus causing the standard message to be sent out, giving your full visibility of the send, and all the standard interaction tracking, bounce and unsubscribe management for your operational messages.

  3. Send out an eBook, chapter by chapter to people after they subscribe (usually on different dates). You would create the eBook Message Series, and add an email to the series for each chapter sent by email. As people subscribe to receive your eBook, you simply add them to the contact list (this can be automated via an online form), and the rest is taken care of for you. 

  4. Remind people of regular activities. For example, as an accountant, you may want to remind your clients of key dates during the year, on which certain documentation would have to be be lodged with the government. In this case, you could set up a Message Series, and add an Email or SMS to the Series for each important date. Add each of your clients to the contact list, and add more as you obtain more clients. The trigger date in this case will always be the same – probably the start of the financial year. The reminder messages will then be sent out without any additional effort. 

  5. Regularly remind clients on an ongoing, date sensitive basis. For example, when you carry out certain tasks for a client based on a sign up date e.g. 6 monthly property inspection. Create a Message Series with just one email or SMS attached – the reminder message about the inspection being due. Setup the message to be triggered 6 months after the signup date, and the email will be sent out every 6 months thereafter. 

  6. Inviting contacts to an event, including providing useful information leading up to the event.  This is a special case for the Message Series, utilising our action responder functionality - this will be described in a separate article.

Creating your Message Series 

The first step is to create a new Message Series, and setup the overall information about this Series. 

In the Campaign Management screen, click on New Message Series. 


Complete the New Message Series configuration screen, as show on the next page. 

You will note that most of this information is not mandatory. Omitting the End Date will mean that the series will continue forever. The From Email, Reply To Email, Report Email and Report Frequency fields will be automatically picked up from your overall Campaign Settings if not specified here. 

When you are ready click on the Save Series button, and you will see the following result: 

NB: until you set the status to active, no emails attached to the series will be sent out. 

We’ll now step you through adding emails and adding contacts to the series (follow the same steps to add messages to your SMS series). You can do this at any time as long as the Email Series has a status of either draft or active (i.e. not closed).

 

Adding Emails to your Message Series 

Click on the Add new Email to this Series link and then complete the Email Message screen. Once you have an email in your series, you can copy that to create another.

The “Series Configuration” section at the top of the screen governs when this email message will be sent out to the contacts attached to the series. You can set the email to be sent before or after the trigger date, from 1 day through to 1 year. You can optionally set the Repeat email to send this same email repeatedly for any time frame from 1 day through to 1 year.  The repeat is more commonly used for annual or quarterly repetition of a standard email.

Similar to the standard Enudge email, you have all the features of personalisation, logos, attachments, and templates available at your finger tips. If you are creating new content for this email (rather than re-using a previously sent email), you need to give it a template name and description that will help you find it later. When you’re done, click on the Save Email to Series button. 

After saving the Email, you will see a message as follows:
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NB: until you set the status of the Email to active, and until the start date for the Email is today or prior to today, the Email will not be sent out. You can edit the email until you have made it active.

You can add unlimited emails to the Message Series.  Equally you may want to have just one email / sms in your series to help you automate a standard email that will be sent out on behalf of your organisation, to new contacts, over a long period of time.  

Adding Contacts to your Message Series 

In order to send out the messages in the Series, you need to add contacts to the Message Series. To do this, from the Message Series management screen, click on 'Contacts' in the Series navigation as shown below.

Any contacts already added to the Message Series will be shown at the top of the screen. You can add new contacts by starting to type their name and choosing them from the suggested contacts, adding the trigger date, and then clicking the Add Contact button. 

Alternatively, you can add all the contacts in a chosen category at once, assigning them all the same trigger date by using Add from Category option.  Please note, for just this option, if a contact has previously been attached to the Message Series, even with a different trigger date, they will not be added again.  This is to prevent you from inadvertently adding the same person in twice.  You can still add that same person via either of the option two options.
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The final option is to follow the instructions on screen to import your contacts via a CSV file. If the contacts have already been saved in a CSV file, simply ensure that their email address is in one column of the CSV, and the trigger date in another column and import the file.
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Managing your Message Series

All the messages created within the series will appear on the Message Series Management page as shown below.

Click on the Email Name to edit your email from the 'Email Message Details' screen.  Make your changes and then click on 'Save Changes' to save the changes.
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Once a message within the Message Series has been marked as active, you can no longer change it. If you wish to send a different message, simply mark the message as closed, and then create a new message (perhaps by copying the previous version of this message into the new one). The new message will be sent out to all series contacts as per the trigger date, from the start date of the Message attached to the series.
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Reports for your Message Series 

You will receive the reports for your series by email, at the specified report frequency. However, you can view the activity on your Message Series at any time, once it has a status of active or closed. 

The Message Series Summary Report page has 4 sections:

  1. Cumulative Summary as at the date you view the report

  2. Progressive Email Results

  3. Total Engaged Contacts 

  4. Summary of Emails in the Series 

Cumulative Summary

Gives you a summary of the following: 

  • total number of Email/SMS messages attached to the series,

  • total number of contacts attached to the series,

  • cumulative bounced email addresses across all Email campaigns,

  • cumulative unsubscribes across all Email Campaigns.

Progressive Email Results

Lists all Email/SMS campaigns that are either 'active' or 'closed'. Here you will find the following information:

  • status of the Email/SMS campaign - whether its 'active' or 'closed',

  • the number of contacts attached to each campaign,

  • number of emails sent by each campaign,

  • number of opens in each campaign,

  • number of unsubscribes in each campaign.

Total Engaged Contacts

Shows the total number of contacts, who have opened at least 1 email in the series (i.e across all Email/SMS campaigns attached to the series).

Summary of Emails in the Series

This section allows you dig deeper into individual Email/SMS campaign settings and statistics. Here you will find:

  • a summary of individual campaign settings. 

  • the View Activity Details link beside each campaign gives you access to the send, open, bounce, click-through, unsubscribe dates for each contact, to name a few.  
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