The OpenEMM consists of various individual functional areas or modules. All the modules are interlinked and work together to enable you to achieve your aim: to create and evaluate marketing campaigns quickly and effectively. This is why in this sub-chapter, we give you an overview of the functional areas and explain how they interact.
Three areas are paramount for sending out a newsletter. As soon as you have entered the relevant data, the OpenEMM is ready to send out your first email.
• | Mailing List: here, you determine which newsletters (e.g. B2B-Newsletter and B2C-Newsletter) or mailing campaigns you are planning. For each independent newsletter you will create an individual mailing list. Details can be found in chapter "Mailing lists - Managing list subscription". |
• | Recipient: The most important item for E-mail marketing is a database with customers and prospects and their email addresses. The OpenEMM calls them recipients. Each recipient has an individual profile containing his or her name and email address as well as the newsletters (i.e. mailing lists) the recipient subscribes to. The profile contains various predefined fields, for instance for the recipient’s sex. It is possible to create customized fields in order to save individual data like, for instance, hometown or age of the recipient (see chapter "Extending recipient's profiles"). Further information on maintaining the recipient database can be found in chapters "Recipients - Managing customer data" and "Extending recipient's profiles". |
• | Mailing: The mailing module is used to send a specific mailing text by email to all recipients listed on a specific mailing list. You enter the text of the mailing using text modules from your system, insert trackable links if you wish, or attach a file. You then start sending out the mail shot and evaluate the result using the statistics function. Further information can be found in chapter "Mailings - Sending out newsletters". |
• | Archive: An archive functions a bit like a box file in your office: All letters referring to a particular marketing mailing are kept together in a file. If you want to find a particular letter at a later stage, all you need to do is search that file. Mailings can be shifted from one archive to another – just as you would re-file them – or managed individually without an archive assignment. It is up to you to decide how to attribute mailings to an archive and how many archives you want to create. Further information on archives is contained in chapter "Archives - Grouping mailings". |
Other areas are used to make mailing creation easier, control mail shots more precisely and more flexibly, evaluate responses and make database management easier.
• | Target group: Sometimes it makes sense not to send a newsletter to all recipients on a mailing list, rather to a small part. A target group can filter recipients, for instance selecting all women with a particular post code. You can then test whether a mailing is successful; if it is, you can send it to all other women on the mailing list. A target group is dynamic. As soon as you add recipients to your database, the target group will select them if the criteria match. Further information on target groups is contained in chapter "Target groups - Dynamic filters". |
• | Template: Many regular mailings follow the same pattern. For instance, you start with a heading, followed by current news, special offers, ending with a contact address and a link to unsubscribe from that particular newsletter. Templates define which parts of the mailing are always the same. You then create a mailing using a template and text modules for variable text. This will reduce the amount of work needed to create weekly newsletters and the potential for errors to a minimum. |
• | Actions: The recipient triggers an action for example by clicking on a link in the email. The action could be to activate a numeric field in the recipient’s profile or to send a follow-on email containing additional information requested. This will tell you who is interested in a particular topic and will automatically provide you with additional information for your customer profiles. |
• | Statistics: In order to check on a mailing’s success and plan subsequent mailings, you need information on your customers’ response patterns and particular interests. It is also interesting to be able to directly compare the results of various mailings. Statistics are the answer to this and other questions. Further information can be found in chapter "Statistics - To gain a broad view". |
• | Forms: These forms let you create web pages where a customer is able to subscribe to a newsletter or to amend or cancel a subscription using a web-based form. If you want to create a new web page for self administration of the recipients, you should use one of these forms. Further information on forms is contained in chapter "Forms - Recipient management". |