Social Good Software

Creating amazing guest experiences through innovative software solutions for the social good community

Email Designer

How to handle the delivery of emails, bounced emails, and complaints

By

Introduction

There are times that when sending out emails with the Email Designer, some of them might get delivered, bounce, or have a complaint filed. It can happen for a few reasons, but the most common is not getting the correct email addresses at the time of purchase with Altru. We recommend that you set up the email validation service with your Altru account and follow this guide on how to handle the delivery of emails, bounced emails, and complaints to manage any email concerns you have accordingly. 

Bounce messages

Sending emails through Email Designer is not always perfect. At times it will bounce because of various reasons like invalid email addresses due to typos, the account is no longer active, or an incomplete email address. You can handle bounced emails by following the steps below.

1: Go to your Social Good Software account and proceed to Email Designer.

2: Click on the email template you want to set up and proceed to Settings.

3: Whenever an email bounces, it will go back to the From Email Address with a notification containing details of why the email bounced and other information you might need. You need to monitor the origin of your emails to capture bounce messages and correct them.

How to handle bounced emails and complaints
How to handle bounced emails and complaints
Bounce message notification

4: Click the Resend Email link. It will redirect you to the email you are trying to send to your customers. You can also see the status of your email and information related to it.

How to handle bounced emails and complaints

5: You can resend the message and correct the recipient’s email address by clicking the Send Email button. A dialog box will pop out where you can type in the correct email address and click Send Email. With this, you will be able to send the email to the appropriate person and correct any mistakes before the message goes out.

6: You can check your recent email sent by going to the Activity tab.

How to handle bounced emails and complaints

Complaints

There is a chance that your email sent is flagged as spam. It might happen because the recipient did not give their consent to receive this kind of notification, the information is not relevant to the person, or you sent the email to the wrong email address. We recommend doing an email validation before your customers submit their orders. That way, you can avoid delivering the email to the incorrect email address.

Go to the Activity tab to check if the email you sent was delivered. The From Address in your email template will always receive the complaint notification where you can check the complaint details.

How to handle bounced emails and complaints
Complaint email notification

Resending email

There are circumstances when customers ask for help because they can’t find their tickets or did not receive a reminder. Learning how to resend an email using the Email Designer will be helpful in this situation.

1: Go to the Activity tab of the Email Designer.

2: Click on the calendar and select the date you sent the email.

3: Do command+F for MAC or Ctrl+F for Windows. Type in the email address you are looking for, and click on Resend Email.

4: another way to resend an email is to go to your query in Altru and remove the note type on the sales order so that it will kick off a new email. Note that if the email address is wrong, it will still be delivered to the incorrect email address. 

Note: Only original emails that you sent out are the ones attached to Altru

Summary

We emphasized that you check the origin of your email or the From Email Address. That way, you will know if there are undelivered emails, bounced emails, or complaints and handle them appropriately. Please reach us through our support channel if you have questions or clarifications.

How the relative to date email setting works

By

Do you have members who auto-renew more than once? Or do you have a monthly membership program where you would like an email to go out to members every month? Keep reading to learn how to use the relative to date frequency option in your email settings to send the same email relative to date. 

You may want to use the relative to date option for an email if you would like to send the same email to a recipient relative to dates such as a membership renewal or expiration.

View our recommended auto-renew query

There are many kinds of emails with different purposes based on the needs of an organization. Social Good Software supports three types of emails. 

What is the difference between the 3 email types?

Email Frequency settings 

You can find this setting on the email settings page under the option called “Frequency”. The frequency automatically defaults to be sent out immediately.

1. Frequency – Immediately 

  • This option will send the email immediately after you create it. 
  • It requires a note type in the query to determine if the email was sent out.

Learn about how to create a note type for a sales order query

2. Frequency – Specific time 

  • You can set the time when you want your emails to go out. 
  • Note type is also needed to know if the email was sent out at the specified time.

Learn about how to create a note type for a membership query

3. Frequency – Relative to date 

  • Needs to add to the query output fields the purchase date, transaction date, expiration date, or another relative field. 
  • This option does not require a note type in the query but needs a date like the renewal date, date of purchase, and so on to be able to send out an email relative to a datel
  • A note type is still required in the email settings in order to create a note in Altru that the email went out

Do you need to email the same person multiple times?

Read about how to bypass the email limit of one email in the following article.

How to bypass a single email limit per email type

Summary

Sending emails can be right away, at a specific time, or relative to date. Depending on which frequency option you select, you will either need a note type in the query or a date in the output field.

If you have additional questions, please reach out to us at support@socialgoodsoftware.com.

Auto disable emails when queries change in Altru

By

  1. Prevents you from making mistakes with queries which could end up emailing the same person multiple times
  2. Auto turn off the email for you so you have time to review the changes on the query
  3. Notify you of the change and to which email the change was made
  4. View the history of the changes in the SQL using an excel or CSV file

Summary

We recommend temporarily disabling the email before making changes to the query to not receive alerts and so they won’t get turned off automatically. Once disabled, you can modify and review it before re-enabling it again.

How to add the eTicket link to the default acknowledgment email in Altru

By

How-to-add-eTicket-email-to-the-default-acknowledgement-email-compressedDownload

In this guide, you will be able to learn how to add the eTicket link to the acknowledgment email in Altru. With this,  your constituents will be able to download and check it easily as it was already in the transactional email sent to them.

Steps on How to Add eTicket Link to the acknowledgment email

1: Go to your Altru account and proceed to Web.

2: Click on Default acknowledgment email.

how to add the eTicket link to the acknowledgment email

4: A dialog box will pop out which helps change the link into eTicket link inside the email.

5: You can add the link anywhere you are comfortable inside the email. For illustration, we will add this link below the Receipt Grid.

6: Add the merge field by going to Insert and clicking the merge fields.

how to add the eTicket link to the acknowledgment email

7: A dialog box will pop out in which you need to click on Summary > eTickets.

how to add the eTicket link to the acknowledgment email

8: From the dialog box under eTicket, drag the Begin link to eTicket page and drop it at the beginning of Download eTicket. Same with End link to eTicket page but drop it at the end part.

9: Once done, click on Save.

The link to your eTicket is now added to your transactional email. If you have more questions or clarifications please reach out to us through our support channel.

How to enable email automation

By

If you are done with your emails and are now ready to send out all your outbound messages, the email automation of Email Designer is very helpful. All you have to do is to enable this function and it will do the work of sending messages on your behalf. Make sure you follow the steps below for the best result.

Email automation process:

1: Log in to your Social Good Software account.

Screenshot

2: Click on the Email Designer on the left side of the navigation.

3: Find the template which you would like to enable the outbound messages for. In this example, we will be using “Tickets Sold Today”.

4: Click on the “Settings” option at the top of the navigation.

email automation

5: In the settings section, you will see the option “Start sending emails?”. Enable this function and click on the “Save Settings” button.

email automation

6: You can go to Preview to see all the emails you are currently sending and the Activity tab for the emails already sent out.

email automation

Summary

Make sure that you troubleshoot and that you are satisfied with your emails before you turn the option on. Once you enable the email automation, the Social Good Software application will monitor the query you built and send out emails every 5 minutes on your behalf. You don’t have to do anything.

If you don’t understand something or you have more questions please reach out to us through our support channel.

How to do manual tagging of emails for resends in Altru for digital membership cards

By

Manual Tagging comes in handy when guests who already received an email but lost access to it due to various reasons like they accidentally deleted the email or lost access to their email address and requested to receive the same email again.

Keep on reading to learn more about manual tagging. To illustrate, we will be resending a Digital Membership card to a member. To do that, just follow the step below:

1: Open your Altru account and find the membership record of the guest who requested to resend an email.

2: Proceed to Documentation at the bottom part and delete the welcome email attached before you click on Add then select Note.

manual tagging

3:  A dialog box will pop out. Click on the drop-down menu for Type and select Resend Welcome Email. Click on Save.

manual tagging

Once you manually tagged a guest, Altru will pick it up on the query which is looking at sales orders that do not have a note type and automatically send the email.

No need to switch from Altru to Social Good Software to resend the email. Just simply tag the guest in Altru, and delete the previous welcome email attached. The moment that note type is added, Altru will resend the email to the guest.

Types of emails for eTickets

By

eTicket-email-optionsDownload

Introduction

Email designer is an app that allows you to customize and send automated emails for your Altru transactions. This tool is useful for different types of emails for eTickets because through it you can send messages with tickets in PDF form. Guests are no longer need to click on the link to download the ticket since it was already replaced by a ticket in PDF form.

In this guide, you will learn what are the types of emails for eTickets, the components of each email, and some of the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) that we received regarding this topic. 

How to set-up your emails in three (3) steps:

1. Write your email in Google Docs or Microsoft word

  • We recommend that you first draft your email to Google docs or Microsoft word and check that you include all the merge fields that you need.

2. Create your query and note type with Altru for your email

  • Make sure that your query identifies who the receivers of the email are. Create a Note type in Altru to be able to monitor if the emails were sent.

3. Setup the Email Designer with your content and query.

  • To be able to send out this email, put together the content and the query to the Email Designer. 

The process of setting up your emails starts from running the query and feeding it to the Email Designer. If there are individuals who match the query, an email for that particular person will be sent out. Once the email was sent out, the app will grab a copy of it and attach it to Altru as Note Type so there will be an email attached inside the particular sales order.

Three (3) Types of Emails for eTickets

1. eTicket Email is great for sending out a PDF that auto generated an eTicket number and a PDF with their tickets.

types of emails for eTickets

There are two emails that Altru sends out. The first email is about what the guests’ purchased and the second is the link to their eTicket. 

With the use of the Email Designer, we will replace the second email that Altru sends which is the link to their ticket with our eTicket email where we will instead attach a PDF to the tickets.

2. Reminder Email is great for sending out a reminder of their upcoming visit with tickets attached as a PDF. This email can go out the day of or one day before.

types of emails for eTickets

3. Post Visit Email is great for following up with guests who have visited. You can send a membership offer or just collect feedback on their experience. 

types of emails for eTickets

It is an email to thank  the guests for visiting. Typically sent out the day or the following day after the visit.You can send this email without PDF or tickets.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

1. Do these emails account for sales orders over the phone, online and in person?

  • The discussed type of emails above will account for all three types of sales methods. You can also exclude a specific sales method at the query level.

2. If I manually resend an email, will my tickets be updated?

  • Yes, If you resend an email the tickets will be generated at the time the email is being sent.

3. If I delete the note type from the sales order, will the email go out with the right tickets?

  • Yes, the query is looking at sales orders that do not have a note type and sends an email. If you remove the note type from the sales order, another version of an email will get off with another PDF. Typically, you won’t be doing this unless you need to resend it.

4. If I open the eTicket preview on the Email Designer, will I see the latest ticket available?

  • Yes, you will see the latest ticket  available whenever you click on the link

The purpose of this documentation is to help you understand the three (3) types of eTicket emails, and how these emails work so that it will be easier for you to create and set up eTicket emails based on their type for your organization.

How to create reservation note types in Altru

By

Introduction

Having reservation note types inside of Altru is very helpful when you create your reservation emails with Email Designer. Reservation Email is useful when you are doing any group sales like field trips, weddings, venue rentals, and things alike. When you have Note Types, it will be easier to create a query that helps to exclude or include certain individuals.

Process of creating a Reservation Note Types Inside of Altru:

1: Go to your Altru account and head over to Administration.

2: Proceed to Code Tables.

reservation note types

3: Select Ticketing on the drop-down menu then Apply.

reservation note types

4: Proceed to Reservation Note Type then click on Add.

reservation note types
reservation note types

5: A dialog box will pop out wherein you can type in the name. In this case, we can call it a Confirmation Email. Once done, Click OK. 

You now have your Reservation Note Type called Confirmation Email. You can also set up another Note Type for your Reminder Email and Post Visit Email by clicking on Add if you are already in the Reservation Note Type table entries or follow the same step above.