Make it Personal - Creating HTML Email Newsletters with Conga Conductor

It happens almost every day.  I get to work, fire up my laptop and immediately check my email.  The first exercise in daily inbox cleanup involves a cursory glance at my unread mail, mostly scanning for messages from colleagues or new responses to an existing email thread.  The main goal is to quickly sift through what’s important and what isn’t, and the unimportant communications are usually automated updates, messages from services I’m subscribed to, and finally, newsletters.

I feel a little ashamed that my gut reaction is to move newsletters directly to the trash folder.  I’ve created a few email newsletters myself, so I know firsthand that the crafters of those emails spend hours fine-tuning the content, drafting witty subject lines and optimizing them for mobile devices.  So why do most of us toss email newsletters aside like any other piece of junk mail?

My theory?  Lack of personalization.  The defining feature of junk mail is that it’s not intended for an individual.  Rather, it’s a shotgun approach to mass communication that typifies a true email blast.  Sadly, most newsletters have fallen into this unfortunate category.

So how do we solve this problem?  Mass email communication is a tough nut to crack, but as more and more nonprofit organizations adopt cutting-edge CRM systems like Salesforce, information about donors and their activity is more readily available than ever before.  This provides a huge opportunity to communicate with a donor base en masse with unprecedented efficiency and effectiveness, as long as one important rule is observed: make it personal.

For those of us on the Salesforce platform, there are a wide variety of applications and software vendors who can help make this dream of creating and delivering personalized newsletters a reality.  A quick look at the “Mass Emails” category on the AppExchange yields 30+ options, both free and paid.  Depending on your requirements and the complexity of your email communications, different apps will appeal to different organizations.  However, for Salesforce administrators and consultants looking for a truly personalized, data-driven solution for creating and delivering email newsletters, Conga Conductor may very well be the best tool for the job.  Here’s why:

1. You can gather Dynamic Data and Rich Content

When sending a batch of emails, Conga Conductor can gather virtually any data in Salesforce to include in the body of an HTML email template.  This means data from Households, Contacts, Accounts, Donations, custom objects, you name it.  Conductor can also show or hide email content conditionally.  For example, information about an upcoming local event might only show in a newsletter for recipients located in the city or state where the event is being held.  When a newsletter contains Salesforce data and content specific to the email recipient, communication can be highly personalized and is more relevant to the reader.

Conga Conductor can also merge rich content into the body of an email including images, hyperlinks and dynamic calculations.  After all, nobody likes reading a newsletter in plain text!

2. You can leverage Salesforce Reports for List Management

Conga Conductor uses Salesforce Reports to define lists of email recipients.  This is extremely useful for building highly segmented email lists – all the wonderful filtering criteria available with Salesforce Reports can be used to determine which records will be included in an email batch.

This makes geographic segmentation a breeze, but you could also be creative and use criteria like donation history (high-value donors receive a newsletter inviting them to an exclusive event), household size (households with multiple children receive a newsletter with family-oriented content) or just about anything you’re tracking in Salesforce to create highly-targeted communications.

3. You can use Flexible Scheduling

Conga Conductor comes with a built-in scheduling feature that’s about as flexible as it gets.  Email newsletters can be set to be delivered daily, weekly or monthly with a whole host of options for more granular settings:

If you’re curious and would like to learn more about Conga Conductor, additional information can be found here on the Conga website.

By Robert Boyd, Product & Partner Marketing Specialist at Conga