Email in Membee – Part 3: Powerful Email Capability in Key Areas of Membee
This post is the third of a three part series outlining how using Membee gives you a platform from which you can quickly and easily handle the delivery of emails to various groups and for varying purposes. In the first post, “How Membee Handles Different Types of Emails”, we outlined how the size of the …
This post is the third of a three part series outlining how using Membee gives you a platform from which you can quickly and easily handle the delivery of emails to various groups and for varying purposes. In the first post, “How Membee Handles Different Types of Emails”, we outlined how the size of the email’s recipient group and the purpose for the email determine the best way to construct and deliver that email. In the second post in the series entitled “Using MailChimp for Promotional Emails”, we reviewed how Membee’s tight integration with MailChimp makes it easy to deliver great-looking emails to large groups of members with minimal steps and effort.
In this post, we think we’ve saved the best for last! We’re focusing on great new email capability coming to Membee. We have looked closely at how the use of email fits into the day-to-day operations of a well run association. Each day, there is a need to send a “quick email” to a member or this committee or that group of event attendees and producing the email is a “task” on a staff member’s to do list. While this task obviously needs to be done well, it also needs to be done quickly because its not the only task on the list. We call these emails the “working emails” that keep things moving in your organization and we wrote this question to guide our design of this new Membee feature:
How can we make it as easy and as fast as possible to construct and deliver these working emails?
We think this new feature answers this question by making it easy to deliver emails in a couple of clicks to:
- Any person
- A Group
- A Committee
- A Committee Meeting’s attendees
- For a specific event
- Purchasers
- All purchasers for the event
- Purchasers of a specific event item
- Attendees
- All attendees for the event
- All attendees for a specific event item
- Purchasers
There is a tremendous amount of capability in this new feature, so why don’t we walk through an example to highlight some of the key features.
Lets use the example of a change in location for the upcoming Board of Directors meeting. In Membee, you simply navigate to the committee as outlined below:
So, in one click, the new Membee Email form is presented to you. Below is the full form.
Lets focus in on some specific features.
Membee assumes that the current user is the “sender”, in this example, Ray is logged into Membee but Ray could send the email on behalf of a co-worker by choosing another Membee user from the pick list.
Membee has a look at the list of recipients, in this example, the Board of Directors and identifies recipients with missing or invalid email addresses. In this example, we click the “1 recipient is missing an address” link to see which Board member that is.
Membee makes it easy to have a quick look at the list of recipients and even modify the list.
Recipients with a blank or invalid email address are highlighted on the list of recipients.
If you wish, you can remove a recipient from the list simply by un-checking the check box.
Closing the Edit Recipient List form returns you to the Email form.
Lets move on and highlight a few more features. Next, the ability to upload and attach a file to your email is done using the “Add Attachment” feature.
Membee’s email feature includes a full text editor make it easier to format the body of your email. You can even fully personalize the email using the built in merge variables. In our example, the email will use the recipient’s first name.
We want Membee’s Notes & To-Dos feature to be the one-stop-shop for all the contact with a member. For this reason, we’ve integrated the new email feature to make it easy to insert a copy of the email into each member’s Notes & To-Dos. In our example, the 19 Board members will have a copy of the email automatically attached to their member record simply by checking the “Summarize and attach as a note in Notes & To-Dos” check box.
Maybe your email requires follow up. You can easily create a “To-Do” for yourself or a co-worker and have Membee attach the To-Do to each the recipient’s member record. Common uses for this feature would include emails to a sales lead or a retention email. Let Membee create the To Dos for you in seconds by checking the “Create future To-Do” check box. You can then specify the date and time for the follow-up, which staff member should do the follow up and provide a description of the task to be done.
Use the “Preview” feature to have a quick look at the email before it goes.
Hit “Send the Email” and you’re done!
To summarize, whether it’s to a single member to a group, a couple clicks and the email is gone!
How Does Membee Send the Email?
Good question. Basically, Membee is going to use your existing email server to send the emails. For each member of your staff, you will provide Membee with the very same information you currently use to connect your Outlook email software client with your existing email server. For each of your staff members, you will provide Membee with some basic information to set this up including the URL to your email server, each staff member’s username and password on that server and the level of security used to connect to the server. You only need to do this setup step once.
when will this function be available?
Great to hear all of the positive comments about the upcoming email function in Membee. The functionality is nearing the final development stages (as you can see from the screenshots above) and will be entering the testing phase very soon. This means that we are close to announcing the official release date. At this point, we are expecting the official release will be late in April or perhaps early – mid May. It may be a bit sooner if the testing period goes well 🙂 We will keep you informed via this blog and our monthly newsletter – the Beeline.
Looks great, I see others have asked….when will this be implemented, we could use this ASAP!!
Thanks for the comments everyone, we will provide an updated (and more specific) release date very soon 🙂
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PING:
TITLE: Kamron Gillenwater
URL: http://toyswholesale.hq06.co.uk
IP: 97.74.86.85
BLOG NAME: Kamron Gillenwater
DATE: 12/13/2011 02:20:04 AM
Muchos Gracias for your blog article.Really thank you! Cool.