Campaign Automation: Send Email Action

The Send Email action is used in campaign automations to send a ClickDimensions email to an individual contact/lead/account that is in a campaign automation. Actions can be placed directly on the Campaign Automation canvas or within a series. To learn more about series and actions, read this article.

Note: Please ensure that you open the email editor either here or within the Email template section before attempting to send the email. This will allow the template to be saved correctly on the backend. 

If there are multiple participants running through this action within 12 seconds of each other, then up to 1000 recipients at a time will be added to the same Email Send record. Otherwise, one Email Send record will be created for each participant that runs through the action. We still only process 5 email jobs per minute per our throttling limit, but the difference is there can be up to a 1000 participants in each job. For example, if you have 30,000 participants coming into a Send Email Action from an Added to Marketing List Entry Point, all at the same time, they would be divided into 30 email sends (1,000 per send).

The Email Send record's Created On value will indicate when the Email Send record was created (so as soon as the Participant hit the Send Email Action). If throttling does occur, then the Sent On value will indicate when the email was processed by CD and actually sent.

NOTE: The Send Email Action will check the values of the recipient's Do Not Allow Bulk Email field Do Not Allow Email field and will not send to them if the value of either field is set to Do Not Allow. It will also check to see if the recipient has a global unsubscribe record and will also not send to them in this case.

Goals

• Learn how to add a Send Email Action to a Campaign Automation
• Learn how to set up a Send Email Action's properties

Add the Action to a Campaign Automation

To add a Send Email Action to a Campaign Automation, click on the Action icon in the sidebar and drag in onto the Campaign Automation Canvas.

Action Properties

Once the action has been added to the canvas, click on it and you will see the right panel change to show the properties of this action.

The properties for the Send Email action are very similar to an Email Send. Here are the fields to enter:

Display Name (required): The display name is entered by default, however when you add the email template you want to send, the display name will automatically change to the name of the email template selected. You can also change the display name to anything you like.

A/B Testing: Enabling this option will allow you to setup two different configurations for your emails in order to see which setup performs better. The size of the test groups, the winning strategy and the time at which a winner should be selected can all be set. The "Test Amount for each version" option will allow you to set how many participants should receive one of the test group emails and after this amount is met, any following participants should receive the winning strategy.

Campaign Automation A/B Testing: When using split test in a Campaign automation it will send the emails as : 1 version A and then 1 Version B until it finishes all of them. If the time set for the Split test expires and version A had more opens then B the rest of the emails will be sent as A. Users can edit the Test group size after the automation is published.

Select Email (required): Use the lookup field to select an existing email template you want to send. For help on how to create an email template, start with this article.

After updating to version 10.7, it is also possible to select an email send record. The content from the email send will be converted into a new email template with the same name and details. This means that the selected email send record itself should not be sent out and any changes to the email will need to be made in the new email template record.

Please note. The "name field" will not populate for emails sent through RSS or Campain automation as they are not referenced in the email send action.

Subject (required): This is the subject of your email. This field is populated automatically once you select the email template. You can also change it manually.

Preheader: This is the piece of text that appears under the subject line in your recipient's inbox preview.  If the selected email template has a preheader, the preheader will automatically populate once the email template is selected.

Transactional: Denote whether this email is a transactional email or not. Transactional means it is a non-marketing email that sends regardless of preferences; for more information see here. Non-transactional emails require a Subscription List to be specified and an opt-out method provided within the email content.

Subscription List: This field is used to specify the Subscription List that this particular email will be related to. Subscription Lists help manage opt-ins and opt-outs, so selecting the appropriate Subscription List will ensure that only your recipients who opted-in to this subscription list will receive the message.

NOTE: The Subscription List field will only be present if you are utilizing the ClickDimensions Opt-In Subscription Management style instead of the default Opt-Out style. As of version 10.6, the Transactional field is available for both Opt-in and Opt-out environments.

NOTE: If you are utilizing the ClickDimensions Opt-Out Subscription Management style, the Send Email Action will not reference any preexisting Subscription List preferences because the email is being sent as a one-off email rather than being sent to a Marketing List associated with a Subscription List.

From Record Owner: Check this box if you want the email's From Name and From Email Address to dynamically populate based on the owner of the contact/lead that receives the email.

From User: Use the lookup field to select a Microsoft CRM user. When you select a user, the From Name and From Email Address fields will automatically populate with the user's name and email address.

From Name (required): This is who your recipient will see as the sender of the email. You may enter a FreeMarker interpolation in this field, if desired.

From Email Address (required): This is the email address that will be listed as the sender's email address.  You may enter a FreeMarker interpolation in this field, if desired.

Reply To Email: If you don't want replies to your email to go to the From Email Address, you can enter an alternate email address here.  You may enter a FreeMarker interpolation in this field, if desired.

BCC Emails and CC Emails: These fields allow you to add one or more email addresses that will receive a Blind Carbon Copy or regular Carbon Copy of the email, respectively. The following conditions apply when using these fields:

• When adding multiple email addresses, you will need to separate the email addresses with a semi-colon.
• Each of the email addresses added to these fields will receive an exact copy of the email that was sent to each recipient, including any processed freemarker statements. This should allow the CC recipients to see exactly what the recipient received.
• The generated CC emails will be counted as part of your total email usage. Since each BCC/CC email address will receive a copy of each email sent to each recipient, please be aware that this will multiply the number of emails that you are sending.
• Email events from the BCC/CC emails, such as clicks and opens, will not be counted in the email statistics of the Email Send.
• When using Opt-In subscription management, the BCC/CC recipients will still receive the emails regardless of their subscription preferences.
• Freemarker cannot be used in the BCC/CC Emails fields.

Suppressed Marketing List: Specify a Marketing List of Leads or Contacts who should NOT receive this email.

Email CNAME: A CNAME is a way you can brand certain links when using ClickDimensions.  If you require multiple email link brandings, you may choose to set up multiple email CNAMEs.  Learn more about setting up multiple email CNAMEs here.

NOTE: If you select an alternate Email CNAME that is later deleted from your CRM, ClickDimensions will revert to using the default Email CNAME listed in your DNS Settings of your ClickDimensions Settings for the Email Sends created by this step in your Campaign Automation.

Email Address Field: You can choose which Email Address field on the Lead or Contact record you'd like to send the Email Send to. By default, the Email Send will be sent to the Email Address 1 field on the Lead or Contact record, but you can change this to Email Address 2 or Email Address 3 if you would like. For accounts, the account's email field should always be used.

Category: You can select a predefined option to help identify the purpose of the email send and better understand your email statistics.

Campaign: You can associate the Send Email action to a CRM Campaign. This means that all sent email records created from this action will appear under that CRM Campaign. If your campaign automation is associated with a CRM campaign record, this field will be populated automatically with the preselected campaign.

NOTE: If you select a CRM Campaign for this step in your Campaign Automation and the CRM Campaign record is deleted from CRM at a later time, this field will become blank.

Note: A note is an optional field for any details that need to be written about the action.