There are a number of convenient ways to send mailouts in Church Management. In this tutorial, we will see how to send them from the Contacts page.
Open the Contacts page (under the People menu on the side menu), select your desired contacts, and under Actions, select Send or add to mailout.
You will have a number of options regarding the type of mailout you want to send to these contacts.
Creating a Newsletter Mailout
Select New Newsletter Email to send a typical newsletter mailout. Complete the details of your newsletter including a name, sender details and type. The name will automatically complete the email subject of your mailout but you can change this if you want. Fill out the sender details as you would like them to appear to the recipient. Please note, the original mailout will be sent from "mailsystem@fluro.io" but will include the specified sender's name and replies will be sent to the email listed under "Sender Details", not "mailsystem@fluro.io". The mailout types available for newsletters are Promotional or Transactional.
Once you have these completed, select the Newsletter Fields tab to fill in the body of the newsletter.
Here, you can add an image or a video to your newsletter to make it more interesting. Just click + to add an image from your computer, or the search icon if you want to find an image in Church Management. Images and videos appear at the top or header of the email. The header images are scaled based off of screen size and although we don't have an official required image size, a banner image of 1920 x 692 is generally preferred.
The newsletter is formatted into different sections and you have different areas to complete for each section.
The introduction area is where you can add some text which will appear before the main newsletter heading and content. You can use tokens to personalize the message. For example, select Recipient First Name and the system will pull the first name from the contact and insert it into the message.
For the main body of the newsletter, you can add a heading and subtitle and then the main content including images, videos, audio files, attachments, or forms. Note that you can also use tokens in this section.
If you want to add more sections to your newsletter, just click Add Section and continue to add as many as you need.
Add unsubscribe lists to allow the recipient to unsubscribe from any of the mailout lists you have them on so they don’t receive further mailouts. Include any social media links at the bottom of your newsletter.
Sending Your Mailout
Next, go to the Recipients tab to manage who will receive the email.
First, you will see the list of contacts that you already selected before creating your newsletter. If you want to remove any of them, you can do that here.
Below the list you have a number of additional options for adding recipients. The options allow you a huge amount of flexibility for tailoring your mailout. For example, select only users who have tickets for a particular event (Tickets).
Want to learn how to create a contact list? Check out this Mailing List guide!
Save the newsletter and see a preview.
You can use the Edit button at the top right to make any edits to the preview.
Go to the Test tab to send a test of your email to yourself or another admin user before you send it to your mailing list just to check that everything looks OK.
When you are ready to send the newsletter, go to the Publish tab. This will give you a final overview to check everything, including how many recipients it is going to. The system will also alert you if any of your recipients don’t have an email address to send to.
Next, if you want to send the email immediately, click the green Publish and Send Now button. If you want to schedule to send later, click the Schedule button and select a time and a date. You will see the name of the button change to the time and the date selected. Now when you click Publish and Send Now, you will see a countdown.
On the Mailouts page you will be able to see your scheduled mailout.
Once your mailout is sent, you will be able to see some analytics on it, including who has opened it, the click-through rate, etc.
From this screen you will also be able to send the newsletter to new recipients or resend it to those already on the list. Use the Push button and you will be asked for the new recipient details, or choose the Existing Contacts tab to select recipients already on the list and then click Push.