Rock U - Communications - Communications - Sending Email

Transcribed Video Content

So let's talk about sending emails within Rock. Whenever you see a grid of that list people at the very bottom you'll see a communication icon And that is gonna be your your, button to push to go and send any kind of communication whether it be email or SMS. Okay. So once you push that, you'll come over to this new communication screen. Now, you can get to it directly from under people, new communication and you can manually add the people. But generally, you're gonna use the button at the bottom of a grid. So let's go ahead and take a look at this screen. So for our example here, I'm just gonna search for Decker which will bring back a list of of people and then I'll go ahead and hit the new communication button. Okay. So here we are looking at a new communication. And note that a couple people are actually showing in red and that's because they don't have email addresses or they don't have active email addresses. So that's just your way of seeing that, hey, not everybody's gonna get, this communication. Now at the top, I've selected to do an email. I could optionally also do an SMS message and we'll talk about that at a different video. So the first thing we're gonna do is pick a template for our email and this is your place where you can create default organization templates, maybe by ministry or by topic. And there's a whole video on on how to set those up. And you just enter your your from name and your from address and this doesn't have to be necessarily your logged in person. It is by default, but you can change that. The reply to address and then the subject. And note your subject can actually use Lava, so feel free to put dynamic variables in there. And then you have the actual body of the email. Now below that, you can put a different message that's basically gonna be your text only message if the browser or email reader does not support, rich messaging through HTML. And you can, trigger that this would be sent in the future. So this gives you a place to put the date and then also the time. Now down below, once we get this all set, you can go ahead and choose to send a test which will send the test to the from address or you can save it as a draft and come back and finish it later. Note, you can also put, attachments here. So as you add one attachment, you'll get another attachment, so you can do multiples. And at the top two, it's also important to note that you need to check this box to determine whether it's bulk a bulk communication or not. So by default, this box will be checked if it came from the bottom of a grid. And the difference between a bulk communication and a non bulk communication is when people go to unsubscribe, they can choose to unsubscribe just from bulk communications, which still allows their email address to receive emails that are more personalized just to them. So how and when you use this is probably something that you need to decide as an organization on. But typically, if you're if you're sending it from the bottom of the grid, you're probably gonna wanna leave it as a bulk communication. Now since again this came from the bottom of the grid, that's why I have these four people. I can choose to add additional people. So just because I start from the bottom of the grid doesn't mean I have to end that way. I can keep adding people as I need. Now once I choose to send a communication, it's not over. So assuming that you have an email provider that supports, the tracking of opens and clicks, you can actually come back to your, email and you'll see certain analytics about that email. So you can see how many time how many people it was delivered to, how many people opened it, how many of those were failed and then it'll give you a list of how of who and when they actually opened the email and if they hit any any any of the links on it. It gives you a lot more information too. It'll show you information about, what email client they were using, what they did it mobilely or on a PC or Mac. And so there's a lot of analytics that you can actually get inside there. Now, this all comes down to how are you gonna send your email. So out of the box, we support sending it through an SMTP server. So that'd be kind of using your exchange server or your Google apps server. But you can optionally use a service called Mailgun and so there's a provider built into Rock for using Mailgun. Now, if you use Mailgun, not only will your deliverability go up, so they support a lot of the making sure that your domain and your IP address is is healthy and not gonna be treated as spam. But they also give you, other options it this is what will allow you to determine if it was clicked or opened. And also if, the email for some reason bounced, it'll actually come back into Rock, let Rock know that that email bounced and that you, it'll auto disable that email address for you, which is really important when it comes to tracking your spam. In the store, there's actually another provider called SendGrid and it's just Mailgun. It's just another option. So when would you use that? 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 a great option to go to and and use that gives you one email provider that just does it all. Also, , we just believe the options are good. So having multiple options is a beneficial thing. So that's how you set up and send email inside of Rock.