Hi everyone,
Our Development office would like to create an email message to our patrons that refers to them as Donors, or Subscribers, or board members or certain other (selected) Constituencies.
They plan to use Constituency Codes to determine how each patron is referenced and they have ranked the Constituency Codes accordingly. They will Extract the patrons with an Output Set that pulls the Codes (after we add Constituency Codes to Ouput Sets).
Do any of you have experience in personalizing e-blasts in this way? Some people are concerned that we are limited to referring to a patron as either a benefactor or a subscriber (when they are both). I don't know if that will be an issue or not but would be very interested to know how other organizations personalize their e-blasts. Thank you.
Debby
We have done a number of different personalized emails using TMS. It's really quite easy, you just need to make sure that the data you have is clean. Is there any particular reason why you aren't considering a Prefix, First Name, Last Name type personalization? It would avoid the issue of patrons having multiple consituencies all together. The coding with TMS is very simple, you just need to link up the data from your output file to the code in the email. We also use this for inserting membership level, membership donation amount, membership increase donation amount etc. On the ticketing side we use this to provide different offers (so 10%, 15%, 20% etc.), different paragraphs of text to address members and non members all within in one email. This prevents us from having to create multiple emails to address all the different variables.
I'd be happy to share more if you'd like. Feel free to email me.
Paula
We have done a few different personalised emails using TMS.
The simplest is when we just add a salutation and we tend to use 'Salutation_inside' for our emails.
The most complex email we do is for Reminder emails, and for this we set up a table function in impressario which we call from the query elements.This allows us to do some more complex data extraction and also data formatting eg. * finding the first performance they are attending in a that week so that this becomes the primary performance* concatenating the segment times into a single string (twice once for HTML and once for Text)* calculating the approx end time of the performance* flagging whether the customer has tickets to collect from Box Office.
Use of a local function might help you out here as the value to display could be the output that is included in the output set, and the logic for this would be determined by the function you write. It would mean the code you use in the email would be very simple and can easily be copied for use in other emails.Also this email code would not change as evenif you change the logic in the function that determines this display value the email is only using the resultant value.
At last year's conference there was a presentation about using functions for Query Elements given by someone from Bridgwater Hall which was really useful.
Hope this helps, if you need any further details just ask.
Mark