How to Send a Rainmaker Campaign
Sending a Rainmaker Campaign is a fairly easy process once Rainmaker has been successfully setup. This FAQ assumes Rainmaker has been fully setup and other campaigns have been sent. This FAQ is designed for the quick reference for sending out a standard campaign.
Quick Sheet
- Click "Create Mail"
- Create the E-mail with content and selecting a mailing list
- Test the E-mail
- Preview the E-mail
- Launch the Campaign by hitting "Send Mail"
Creating the Email Campaign
Move to the Rainmaker section of the Center Stage management console.
Click "Create Mail."
The next screen has several required areas.
The "To:" field will be a drop-down list of all your "Lists" you have uploaded to the system. It is alphabetical by account name first.
The Subject field will be the same line as the Subject Line for the e-mail you send.
The Stationary is a drop-down list of all the e-mail stationaries loaded into the system. Select which stationary you want to use.
The Body section of the campaign is going to be the HTML that goes as the main part of the e-mail message. If you need help with this section, please go to the Alpine Center Stage help section for how to edit a page or upload images. This body section is identical to the body section of webpages for the rest of the Alpine Center Stage product.
After creating the e-mail campaign, the message gets moved to the "Drafts" section. To further edit this campaign, click on "Drafts" and click on "Edit" for that campaign. Keep editing until you are ready to test and preview.
Testing and Previewing
There are two different pieces left, one is to "Test" the campaign and "Preview" the campaign. Go to "Drafts" and click on the "Test" button. There are four areas that come up in the Test.
Full Preview
The Full Preview is shows you as the message will look in someone's inbox if they just look at the message. This is how it should appear.
Scroll down this opened window and you will come to the Inbox Pane preview. Virtually all popular e-mail clients by default have the three paned e-mail inbox type view. Folders on the left, messages on the top and a preview pane on the bottom. This section tries to simulate what that is going to look like so you can market towards that area. That preview pane really wants to connect to whom you are sending them to giving them a good view as to the contents of the message so they will view the entire message and not send it to the trash. Notice the difference from the above image and the below image. You can see how much can get cut off.
The next piece after the Inbox Pane is the spam rating. Invariably, messages will get caught by spam services as they are designed to catch "form mail" looking e-mail. No matter how much you customize your stationary, you cannot get away from the fact that it is form mail. We include this spam rating service to help guide you as to how your e-mail might be looked at. It is a subjective scale but we recommend keeping it below 3.0. If you need some help with this area, we would encourage you to schedule up some training time with Alpine Internet Solutions so we can help!
The last section is the View Source area. This is what someone who has their e-mail client set to not render HTML. They will see this text version of the e-mail. You can see that all the image names will be included and all links in the e-mail are collected at the bottom and are called "References."
The very last thing you should do, before you hit the "Send Mail" is to Preview the campaign. Click the Preview button and put an e-mail address you want it sent to. Once it gets to your inbox, check every picture and click each and every single link. This is your last step. Once you are satisfied with your campaign, click the "Send Mail" button and launch that campaign!
