Email broadcasting with an Email Service Provider (ESP)

You can upload and broadcast or upload only an Audience to one of the many Email Service Providers (ESPs) Apteco already integrates with. Within Orbit, you can create a target Audience and then Export directly to an ESP.

See Apteco Integrations.

For those with Apteco PeopleStage already licensed, an Orbit user can upload and broadcast to their chosen ESP and automatically record communication history for their Orbit campaign. They can also see the campaign automatically drawn in their PeopleStage instance in an Area called Apteco Orbit.

Those without a Campaigning bundle can still benefit from the integration, with the ability to upload only to a chosen ESP. Perfect for occasions where an email is required to be sent without personalisation or the need to track the success of the campaign in Apteco. Communication history is not recorded for those without a Campaigning bundle.

Useful to have before you start:

• The Message Name in the ESP to use

• The Email Channel name to use in the Delivery drop down

• The Channel must already exist in PeopleStage

• You will need to have the Publisher role to see the Channels in the Delivery drop-down in Orbit

• The Export Audience To Campaign Feature must be Enabled in Application Settings - Features

• Have any Upload Only Channels prepared, it's useful to name the channel to identify it as Upload Only - See note below

The Upload and Broadcast is not scheduled, It is on a NOW schedule.

We are adding the ability to configure the ESPs email Channel from within Orbit in a later release

Upload Only - To use the Upload Only you must configure an Email Channel by selecting the Upload but don't broadcast check-box on the Output Settings tab of the Channel Editor, Orbit will reognise it as an Upload Only channel.

Audience

You can create an email broadcast in Orbit in three ways:

• Create a new Audience

• Use an existing Audience

• Create an Audience from a Dashboard

Step 1 - Create an Audience

• From the Audiences page select New Audience

• Start adding Data Variables under the Includes section

Find Data Variables

To add a data variable, you can either search or browse:

Searching or Browsing Data

• Click Include codes in search to show the defined codes

• or Browse data to access your FastStats System explorer folders and navigate and select the require variable and category:

• or Search for URNs or FastStats Selections

Variables, or categories within variables, containing the keyword are presented in the filter list for selection.

Exclusions

Exclusion criteria are added to the Excludes section of your Audience. Follow the same process to search for criteria and apply AND or OR logic.

The counts for both the Includes and Excludes are displayed against each grouping. The overall Audience count is displayed at the top of the screen next to the resolve table level.

Adding AND OR Logic

To continue building your Audience criteria:

• Hover your mouse over the variable added to access and select AND or OR logic to combine the next variable

In this example we are applying AND logic to combine Gender with Banded Region of the “North”.

• Click on AND
• Use Search data… to find the Banded Region variable and select the North category

As you define your Audience, the count continually updates to reflect the number of records currently meeting your criteria.

Important: Where you hover determines where the AND/OR logic is applied.

In this example, hovering on the Banded Region variable name and selecting OR will apply OR logic between Banded Region and the next variable, e.g. Region – “South East (Outside M25):

However, hovering on the edge of the outer border (as shown) allows you to apply the AND or OR logic to the Gender variable as a grouping:

• Use Search data… to locate the Email Address variable
• Click on the drop-down menu and select Has ranges and wildcards of and enter *@*.*

This allows you to select only people who have a valid email address.

Step 2 - Prepare the Export section

• Select an Export Template to use with the Upload

The Template should be arleady prepared by an administrator to use with your ESP

See Export Templates

• Select the ESP to use in the Delivery drop-down menu

If you choose to use use an email channel that has been configured for Upload Only you will not see the Message Template

• To Upload and Broadcast search for a message in the Message Template cell.

• Click Export

The Confirm Export message box loads

• Click Export to Upload and Broadcast the List to the ESP

Step 3 - Orbit Creates a Campaign

• You can click on the Campaign link to monitor the progress

Campaign Monitoring Steps

When a campaign is being processed it moves through several steps, these are displayed in Orbit:

Running Steps

The first step to run is the Audience step, Apteco creates an Audience to use in the campaign

Next is the Delivery step, this indicates that the list has been delivered to the email service provider

Completed Steps

Audience and Delivery steps will be listed with details about the campaign:

• Time Started - The time the step started

• Time Finished - The time the step finished

• Communications - The Count of the items in the list which will be People for an email

• Error Messages - Any error messages will be displayed here

• Status -

Additional message at the top of the Campaign Monitoring page

PeopleStage status: Manual Approval is not currently displayed in this tab

If the Campaign only shows an Audience step it may be a campaign started in PeopleStage with a Manual Approval step