Rock U - Communications - Sending Email (Simple Mode) v13

Transcribed Video Content

Whenever you see a list or a grid of people in Rock, you can send an email to those people using the simple email editor. Let's take a look at how that works. So to start, we're gonna need a list of people. And there's a bunch of different ways that you can get lists of people from data views and stuff that. But we'll go ahead and just use a a search. We'll search for Decker here and get our list of Deckers here. And we're going to click the, bubble icon here, the communication bubble icon, to initiate a communication with these people. So initially, you're brought to the communication wizard. But for simple emails, we won't be using the wizard. Instead, we can click on the use simple editor button up here near the top right of the block. And once we click that, working our way down, we're we're doing this for email. So email is selected up here. You'll note that down in in the list of people that we're sending it to four people, that some of them are showing up in red. Because we're sending an email and not an SMS message, the people in red are people without an email or without an active email. So Alex and Noah Decker aren't gonna get this communication because they either don't have an active email or they don't have an email at all. Okay. So the first thing that we're gonna do is pick a template for our email down here. You could create templates of your own, maybe by ministry or by topic, but either way, there's a separate video for setting up communication templates. So for now, we'll just leave it as the default, which is the default organization template. Next, we'll enter in the From Name and the From Address. These fields default to the currently logged in person, but you can change them here. Then down below, you can also add a reply to address if it should be different from your from address. And then down below that, you'll also need to it's required, so you'll need to add a subject line to your email. And just remember that the subject can use Lava, so personalization is definitely an option here. And then below that, we have the actual body of the email itself. And then below that, you have the delay send until option. If you want the email to be sent sometime in the future, you can use that. So once this is all set up, down at the bottom, can choose to send a test email, which will be sent to the from address email address listed above. So in this case, if we sent a test, it would go to adminorganization dot com. Okay. So you can send a test, or you can choose to save it as a draft and come back and finish it later. And don't forget that you can also add attachments here. Once you upload one attachment, you'll get a spot for a second attachment and so on, so you can attach multiple files. And then again, just to note up at the top here, this bulk communication checkbox. It is really important to set whether or not this is a bulk communication. And by default, it's checked. And really, the difference between a bulk communication and a non bulk communication is when people go to unsubscribe, they can choose to only unsubscribe from bulk communications. And that still allows them to receive emails that are more personalized just to them. So how and when you use this is probably something you need to decide on as an organization. And don't forget that we can also choose to add additional people to this email under the bulk communication settings. So we have this add person option here. So we got these, recipients from a grid, but if you wanted to add people that weren't in that grid, you could do that too. So that's all you need for the communication. But, , once we come down here and hit send communication, the process isn't necessarily over. , assuming that you have an email provider that supports the tracking of opens and clicks, you can actually open up your email in communication history and see it's in analytics. So if you go to communication history under people communication history and click on an email, you can see all kinds of information about that email. You can see how many people it was delivered to, how many people opened it, how many of those were failed. And then below, it'll tell you whether they opened it, if they clicked on any links in the email. And it also shows a lot of other information, what email client they were using, whether they did it on mobile or a PC or a Mac. So there's all kinds of stuff that you can tell from the communication history. But this all comes down to how are you going to send your email. Out of the box, we support sending it to an SMTP server. So that would be kind of using your Exchange server or your Google App server. But Rock also supports Mailgun and SendGrid out of the box. If you use Mailgun, not only will your will your deliverability go up because they have systems in place to make sure your domain and IP address are healthy and not gonna be treated as spam, But they also give you other options, determining if an email was clicked or opened. Also, if the email bounced, it'll actually come back into Rock and let Rock know that the email bounced, and it'll automatically disable that email address for you, which is really important when it comes to tracking your spam. There's also a second provider called SendGrid. It's just Mailgun. It's just another option. So when would you use SendGrid? Well, it's probably the case that some churches are already using SendGrid for their exchange servers. And if that's the case, that's a great option to go to and to use. And that gives you one email provider that just does it all. Also, we just believe having options is a good thing. And that's about it for sending a simple email. So for more details on sending emails or communications in Rock in general, be sure and check out our communicating with Rock guide posted to the community website. And thanks for watching.