Mailings Tutorial

[Lyrek Admin]

Lyrek Mailings are an easy way to send mailings to specific contact lists that aren't associated with events. Oftentimes, clients use these for announcements of upcoming sample sales, publicity and news items for their business or clients. Because of ICANN regulations, Lyrek Mailings are outfitted with an opt-out feature so contacts have a way of removing themselves from the list of recipients.

To create a new mailing, click the Mailing menu item. From this page you'll be able to select an existing mailing, or create a new one. Once a mailing has been created, it'll be available from the drop-down list for future work. Click "Add" to create a new mailing and Lyrek loads the same rich-text editor you use for pre- and post- details text in the events section.

Enter a name for your mailing to be used to identify it in the Select Mailing drop-down (as mentioned above) for future work. You may also enter a Mailing From Name, which shows in the recipients email inbox, right before the sender's email address, and a Mailing From Email, which is the email address of the sender. If you're using this mailing for publicity purposes, consider creating an email account on your server called publicity@yourcompany.com. The email address should exist and be operational so that recipients can reply to it if they have questions or would like to inquire further. On the other hand, you can create an auto-responder for this mail account that signifies that this is a send-only email account. Should you opt for this option, ensure that you include a valid email address in the body of the mailing for inquiries.

The Mailing Subject is the subject line that appears in the recipients' inbox and email. Make sure you follow the Spam Rules to ensure that your email isn't marked as unsolicited email and your server isn't blocked or blacklisted. Avoid all capital letters, exclamation points, and the use of the words "Sale" or "Free".

Entering the content of the email was never easier. Use the formatting options to stylize your message in your company's colors and typefaces and upload unlimited images to the server to make the email aesthetically-pleasing and branded for your message. Click the "Update" button when you're done, and click the new "Send Mailing" tab in the Mailings Sub-menu. While you still haven't selected the recipients for the mailing (so the "Entire List" table on the View Mailing page will appear empty), this will give you the capability of previewing how the mailing will look in most mail clients. Click "Preview" to pop-open a window and see the mailing in your web browser or enter your own email address in the "Send Test Mailing" section and click "Send" to have the email sent to you.

Once everything looks okay, click the "Add Recipients" tab from the Mailings sub-menu and use the free-text search options on the left and the "Browse by" drop-downs on the right to start collecting recipients for the mailing. This functionality is identical to the "Add Invitees" option in the Events section of Lyrek and you even have the opportunity to add all contacts from previous mailings and events, as well as pre-existing contact groups. If you've just imported users for a mailing, select the contact group that was created in the Contact Group drop-down. If you're sending regular mailings, select the Contact Group you've created for the regular mailings, or a previous mailing's list of recipients from the Mailing drop-down to easily browse recipients. Click "Search" when you've completed selecting your search/browse criteria.

As with the Events --> Add Invitees page, your search results paginates your found contacts and you have the option to:
1. Select the checkbox to the left of the contact(s) and click the radio button by "Checked Contacts", or
2. Select the radio button by "All # Contacts"

Clicking "Add" will add the selected option of contacts to your list of recipients for the mailing. You may search again and again to revise the list of contacts for the mailing. When complete, click "Done."

If you'd like to remove contacts from the list of recipients, click "View Mailing" and then click the total number of recipients by Entire List. You can search within the results (which right now, shows all contacts that are invited to the mailing) by entering a First Name, Last Name or Company, or clicking the radio button by the option you'd like to use to filter the results (All, Opt-outs, Emailed, Not Emailed, Email Failed). Click "Search" to narrow the results. If the results are empty, try going back and mailing your search less specific.

To remove contacts from the mailing, click the checkbox by their name and click the "Remove" button at the bottom of the page. Once you've gotten your final list of recipients, you may click the "Send Mailing" tab on the Mailings sub-menu, and click "Send". Lyrek will take you to a page to confirm the submission before it actually sends the emails. You'll be able to see the number of contacts that will be attempted and the number of contacts that will not receive the mailing because they've either opted-out of mailings from your business, or they don't have a valid email address in the system.

You can further exclude users by unchecking the checkbox to the left of the contact in the "Manually exclude contacts from Mailing" section at the bottom and clicking "Remove". Contacts that are manually removed from the mailing will say "Excluded" by their name. Click "Send" to send the mailing.

Lyrek brings you to a progress page that shows the success/failure progress of the mailings. Once the mailings have all been sent, you'll be returned to the View Mailing page with updated statistics of who has been mailed and whose mailing was unsuccessful (due to the above reasons).

At this point, you can contact your recipients to get a valid email address or modify their opt-out status in the View Contact page. Resend the mailing at any time. Lyrek will not mail the same recipient the same mailing more than once.

When you're done with the mailing, you may choose to leave it in the drop-down for future work or reference, archive it by clicking the "Archive" button from the View Mailing page, or remove it by clicking the "Remove" button from the View Mailing page.

For further questions on sending mail through Lyrek, submit a support ticket and a technician will respond quickly. Thanks for choosing Lyrek and Happy Mailing!