About Mailers

See Also

A Mailer is a means of communicating electronically with Targets as part of a Campaign. It consists of information that you can distribute as e-mail to a select group of e-mail addresses or as an SMS message to mobile phone numbers targeted by a Campaign. The Template Manager enables you to create and manage Mailers in Talisma. Mailers can be created for the following base Objects:

•   Contact

•   Lead

•   Enrollment

•   Order

•   Opportunity

•   Application

•   Custom Object

When you create a Template, Talisma prompts you to select Create Mailer Template or Create SMS Template in the New Template dialog box. When the Mailer Template or SMS Template option is selected, the value of the Template Type Property is updated to Email and SMS respectively.

For Mailers whose Template Type Property is Email, Talisma enables you to personalize the Mailer by adding Offers, your signature, base Object Properties, AutoText, attachments, pictures, hyperlinks, Trackable URLs, and Forms with controls. Canned Responses can be inserted only for Mailers with Contact as base Object.

For Mailers whose Template Type Property is SMS, Talisma enables you to personalize the Mailer by adding your signature, Offers, base Object Properties. Canned Responses, and AutoText.

Email Type of Templates

In Talisma, you can create plain-text as well as HTML versions of a Mailer Template so that mail clients that are not HTML-compatible can still receive professional looking text Mailer Templates.

When you create both HTML and plain-text versions of a Mailer Template, Talisma sends the correct version depending on the capabilities of the recipient’s mail client. Talisma identifies the capability of the mail depending on the value selected in the Message type base Object Property. If the selected value is HTML Type, Talisma sends the HTML version of the Mailer. If Text Type is selected, the text version is sent.

If the Message type of the base Object is Text and HTML, both versions of the Mailer are sent, and the base Object’s mail client can pick up the version it is capable of displaying.

About the Email Tracker in Campaign Mailers

In the context of a campaign, Email tracking is the process of determining the number of times, a campaign mailer was accessed.

If the email tracker is configured (in Business Administrator), the tracker URL is sent in the response to a query, or in a new message to campaign targets. This tracker URL is typically hyperlinked to an image that is automatically inserted into the body of the email.

When the target opens the email (and downloads the image, if images are not displayed by default on the email client), the URL is triggered and a response is sent back to Talisma indicating that the mailer was opened.

This information on the number of times that a mailer has been opened, is updated and displayed in the Mailer tab on the corresponding Campaign Dashboard.

Note 

If the target is using a Plain Text email client, or has blocked all images from being displayed, then the tracker URL is not triggered (because the image is not loaded), and the response is not sent back to Talisma.

About the URL Tracker in Campaign Mailers

This option enables you to track the number of times a URL, which is inserted in a campaign mailer, has been accessed by targets.

After configuring this feature in Business Administrator, users must set this feature property in the required mailer template in Talisma CRM as trackable.

When a target clicks the hyperlink that is inserted in the mailer, a notification is triggered automatically, and sent back to the associated Windows service, which in turn, updates the URLs Clicked tab of the corresponding target record (for example, contact or lead record) in Talisma CRM with information on the number of times that a URL was accessed.

Note  •   To work with the trackable URL and Form features in Mailers, your administrator must see the steps described in the topic Post Installation Tasks for Desktop Client in Installation Manager Help. •   To work with SMS type of Mailers, while your institution must have the Campaign license and the SMS license.