Once you've created you News article, Calendar event, Photo in the Gallery, or a new Page on your website, you can easily send the content out by email using the Contact modules built-in bulk emailer.

Go to the top of the page for your News, Calendar or Page item, mouse over the white [...] icon to reveal the rest of the admin buttons, and then mouse-over the Share button to see your options. Click on Send by Email. This will bring you to the Manage Send Email to Contacts page in the Contact module.

Send Email to Contacts

Across the top of the form you'll find the Admin buttons, such as Manage ### Contacts, Lists, Send Email, Saved Emails, and the white [...] button that opens up more Admin buttons. We'll get to those later.

The Manage Send Email to Contacts page can always be reached by going to your Contact Us page and clicking the blue Send Email button. This is what you'd do to create a new bulk email to send that is not from content already on your website, like a News item, etc.

If you want to easily share a News item, Calendar event or Page, you should go THERE first, then click the Share > Send by Email button to come here. Your content will be brought over (text and any photos) and ready for you to email out.

Emails that have already been sent can be retrieved, and even sent again, by going to the blue Saved Emails button, and choosing the email you desire. It will be reloaded into the Manage Send Email to Contacts form.

You have five fields at the top, all of which are already filled in for you:

Email From:

This is the email address the emails that you are sending will be "From:"

Email Subject:

This will be the subject of the emails sent. Note that it should be short, no longer than 50 or so characters. Keep it engaging, and if it's about an event, make sure the date of the event is in the subject so people will see it in the list when reading their emails. Think about emails that you receive, and which ones you open.

Date to Send, and Time to Send:

This field defaults to the current date and time, so when you click the green Send Email button, it will go out right away. Changing the date and time to, say, Sunday morning at 6:00 AM will delay the sending to that date and time.

In either case, emails are sent in batches of 200, once a minute. They get slotted into the bulk email server's queue. If another MWW customer just sent out a bulk email blast of 3000 emails, you'll be comingling in that pool of pending emails. So, if you intended to send the email right away... if the email doesn't show up right away, it's probably because it's sitting in the queue waiting to actually be sent.

Email Type:

The only time you'd want to not use HTML as your Email Type option is when you're emailing a list of SMS (texting) addresses. Any and all HTML would be stripped away, since SMS texting doesn't support HTML. Keep it short as well, as some SMS email gateways clip off all text after 140 characters.

Saving Options:

If you don't want to send ths email now because you're not done crafting, refining, polishing, tweaking or otherwise finishing the message, you can simply save the message by clicking Save Only. It will not be emailed out. To come back to it later, you would click the blue Saved Emails button to find a list of saved emails. Click on the title of your email to load it back into the message window.

The Message Window

Just above the Page Editor you'll see the normal blue buttons for Page Images, Calendar Images (if there are any), News Images (if there are any), Photo Gallery (if there are any) and Email Header.

Just like when editing a News item, Calendar event or web Page, you can click any of the blue buttons for the pop-up window of images you can click and drag into the edit window. More on that here (coming soon).

The Page Editor

Here you'll see the regular Page Editor. If you clicked Share > Send by Email to get here, then your News, Calendar or Page item will automatically be loaded in the Editor for you to play with.

Any changes here will NOT effect the original page. This is a copy, saved to the Contact module database. Make all the changes in here that you want.

And why would you want to make changes? Well, for one thing, when the people who receive this email are reading it, they're reading it in their email program. They're not on your website. So, the context has changed. If there is any text on the page that this text came from that says "Click the button on the right" obviously they're not on your website, so the button isn't there. They're reading this in their email!

At a minimum, if this is a Calendar event, you might want to add "Here's your two-week reminder" to the top, or something.

Choosing Your Lists

Below the page editor you'll find a section called Recipient Lists. You may chose as many as you like by checking the appropriate boxes. If a recipient is on more than one list they will not get duplicates. You may also choose "Everyone."

Each List listed here will also show a number, indicating how many people are on each list.

Choosing Attachments

You may also attach files to your bulk emails by selecting them from the list of files on the right. Click the (+) to open each File Category to see each list of files.

Sending the Email

When you're all done, click any of the green "Send Email" buttons on this page.

Your email will be put into the queue for sending, 100 at a time, once every two minutes. Thus, if you are sending 3000 emails, it will take 3000/100*2, or 60 minutes to send them all.