SeedCode Support Forum

Greetings All.
Having just purchased the Complete Calendar I am very impressed and am slowing wrapping my head around integrating it into our business.

We need a daily (ideally 'automated') method of sending out email as part of a marketing campaign. That campaign could be 3 or 12 on-going emails spread out over 3 days or 10 weeks.

When previewing the DEMO version it appeared as though the Projects/Phases/Mailing tabs might do the trick. Has any other user had similar needs and found a best way to do this? Or is there a better solution through additional plug-ins someone may have experience with...?

Any suggestions are appreciated.
Thank You.

Hi,

As you suggest, the Mailings component of Complete will certainly be part of the solution: you can use that to send a mere-mail template to a found set of contacts.

What you'll need to add to Complete is some kind of "funnel" to determine which contacts are in need to receiving which mailings. I'd suggest using Project Activity for this (instead of project phases) so that each project might have the following (very simple) funnel: introduction email, progress report email, followup email. Each of these milestones would be an activity record with a date when the email needed to go out.

I'd suggest building a library of project milestones as described here:

http://www.seedcode.com/support/viewtopic.php?t=1426

This would let you automatically assign a funnel to each newly created project (or to each newly created contact if that makes more sense).

Once each project or contact has its funnel set up, your task would then be to find all the mailings of a particular type that need to go out on a given day or week; you'd then create them using the mailings function built into Complete. One you have the hand of this you could consider automating this using one of the script trigger plugins running on an agent to actually send then mails. See this post for more information about adding "alarms" and other automated tasks to Complete:

http://www.seedcode.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.p ... ete.Alarms

Finally, you might look at the new email plugin by 360Works as part of this automation as it can not only send the mails, but can be run on FileMaker Server 9 so you don't need an agent machine to schedule your mails.

Hope that helps,

John

John, thanks for your quick reply.

If I am reading this right, it looks like the Task Template in your previous post is central to executing this process - and is offered as custom development?

I've sent you a follow up email...
-DG

It is, of course some folks build it (or something like it) themselves. I'll check out your email and we can finish this up back channel.