Email People - Tips and Suggestions¶
Whether your target audience is large or small, TouchPoint is a great tool to help you communicate and stay in touch with people via email.
What Is a Target Audience?¶
This is the group of people who need to read what you are sending, or who you think would be the most interested in the content of your email.
Advertise a New Bible Study
You want to advertise the start of your weekly women’s Bible study, so your target audience will be adult females who live in your local area. Search Builder allows you to ‘target’ that group of people, so that you do not send to your entire database. Do not invite men if the study is for women, and do not include people that have moved out of your area if the study is not an online study.
Advertise a Class for Teenage Boys
Your Wednesday night discipleship program is offering a class just for boys age 12-15. So, use Search Builder to find parents with male children greater than or equal to age 12, and less than or equal to age 15. Then send the email with a RegisterLink2 to the parents, so they can register their boys. Don’t bother those adults without any children or whose children are girls or are the wrong age for this class.
Why Use a Target Audience?¶
You will have more people reading what you send if you send material that is appropriate for their age, gender, or stage of life. By doing this, you are showing respect to the recipients by not bombarding them with emails about things that they would find uninteresting or inappropriate for them. If your congregation gets emails from you about every event at your church, when only a few apply to them, they will eventually stop reading anything that you send.
Another reason for using a target audience is so the recipients will not be tempted to mark your email as Spam.
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Sending Targeted Emails Using the Blue Toolbar¶
Below are the email options that are available from the envelope icon on the blue Toolbar:
Individuals
Parents
Current Members (available when sending from an org)
Child with Parents CC’d
Single Email Addresses
Leaders under this Org (available when viewing a Parent org)
Members under this Org (available when viewing a Parent org)
Send Event Reminders (for Volunteer Calendar orgs)
Sending from the toolbar allows you to compose one email, send it to many people at the same time, and yet have the email appear to be personally addressed to the recipient. In other words, the same message is sent to everyone in your Organization (or filtered list in an Organization), Search Builder Results, or Tag, without the recipient seeing the email addresses of the other recipients.
Throughout TouchPoint, you will see Convert to Search links that make it super simple to find a target group, as the system builds the search for you on-the-fly.
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Targeted emails are perfect for communicating with:
First-time guests
Absent class members
Parents of children
An entire organization
A sub-group within an organization
A tagged list of people
Any list of people who fit the conditions in a Search Builder search
Basically, you can send email wherever you see the blue Toolbar.
Features and Tips for Sending Targeted (Mass) Emails¶
Save as Draft is a great feature that allows you to work on an email for over several days before sending it.
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Personalize the email by inserting email replacement codes such as {first} which will insert the recipient’s first name in your message. There are many other replacement codes that you can use in emails.
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Send a Test to Yourself to check the content before sending to everyone.
Make online registration a snap for your recipients by inserting one of our special type of RegisterLinks in the body of an email.
Send links to files or to videos
Schedule an email to be sent at a later date and time.
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After you send an email, you will receive a sent email confirmation with links to the email details page, to help you manage your emails.
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TouchPoint allows for email Templates to be created to help you brand your emails for your specific ministry.
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TouchPoint allows for an {unsubscribe} link, so that people can easily unsubscribe from emails sent by specific senders.
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If you have a Word document that you want to include in the body of your email, you can copy the text, and then paste it into the body of the email, using the Paste from Word icon in the toolbar above the body of the email.
Send mass newsletter-style emails out under a different username/email address than a real staff member. For example, a newsletter to children might come from childrensministry@mychurch.com. The email address would be on a fake people record called Children’s Ministry. You could even have a fake family with the last name of Ministry and add these fake records for various ministries as part of that family. Then coordinators can send on behalf of those people/email addresses. Then, if people unsubscribe, they are not unsubscribing from a person but rather from a specific ministry newsletter.
See also
See also
Sending Emails for detailed how-to steps and links to other help articles.