Sending "new course" marketing to existing contacts, not restricted to single Events
We need to be able to send marketing emails to contacts based on a query (like you'd expect in a CRM system!). This isn't always based on specific Events and we can't use Triggers. We need something like marketing groups or dynamic reports which then allow us to send auditable emails to the Contacts returned.
More context:
Obviously we can set up triggers to send generic emails e.g. six months after a course, reminding people who've done "Level 1" that they might want to check out upcoming "Level 2" courses, for example. But this isn't always sufficient, for a couple of reasons: 1) We often want to be more narrow-focused, sending marketing to help fill up particular courses, not just to point generically at a booking page; 2) some of our higher level (more niche) courses have very few opportunities throughout the year and we need to decide exactly when and how to market them.
So, we need to be able to send marketing emails (e.g. to Level 1-completers), to advertise specific upcoming opportunities (e.g. Level 2).
At the moment we work around this by using Reports, exporting the results, and then copying the emails into an email programme. Administrate support called this a "good alternative" - but acknowledged the risk we pointed out, that at some point that's going to go wrong and someone is going to CC rather than BCC a whole bunch of emails out. So it's not a good alternative, it's an alternative that almost inevitably will result in a breach at some point, however careful our admin staff may be.
We need something better than this insecure workaround. For example, being able to use the reports we already generate as the basis on which to send an email. Calling it a Marketing Group Report for example. Send the emails out through SendGrid just like you send them to Students on an course. Keep an audit log associated with the Report. Maybe have some special restrictions on such reports, so that for example only some users can edit and send the emails; and so that users are warned when they edit the Report query that it may well now reach a different set of people, for example.
This would give us the ability to market with specificity and strategic precision to our contacts across different Events. At the moment such a basic CRM need is not met.
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I love the idea of "being able to use the reports we already generate as the basis on which to send an email".
I think this would be very helpful to some of our global admins.
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Further to this, we're now looking into buying additional software to send these emails. We'll be exporting report results from Administrate to build mailing lists elsewhere. It would be so much simple if we could do it with Administrate where the data already lies. Because also we'll have to keep updating the external software with new contacts, and re-importing unsubscribe information from the external software. It's frustrating because Administrate already has the SMTP/Send Grid etc in the background, and it already has the data, and the functionality built in to send triggered emails etc. So why not marketing emails to cross-Event lists of contacts for re-marketing purposes?
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