Autotask Bulk Email System (Contact Group Manager)

hey everyone are you looking for an easy way to send bulk emails to your customers through autotask if that is of interest to you then this video is for you [Music] hey everyone chris tim here from Sondela consulting in this video i'm going to talk about the bulk email system in autotask i'm going to show you how you would go ahead and create emails to your customers using templates that you can set up and you can send these on bulk so very similar to something that you would have with you know mailchimp or activecampaign or one of these kinds of applications so let's go and have a look at how this works so the very first thing we want to do in autotask we want to go under the users and we want to enable a particular user to be able to send bulk emails so from the admin we click on resources and users find the username that we're interested in and click on the edit button then under the security tab you need to make sure that you select this box here that says allow users to send bulk emails and that's it save and close that user will now have the ability to send bulk emails bulk emails in autotask is something that is called contact groups so here under the crm module so if we hover on crm you can see it says notify your contacts and then here we have contact groups action templates etc etc so let's go ahead and actually create a template that we can send to our customer so let's say hypothetically we're going to have um you know an outage with bt or one of the telecoms providers so i am in the uk bt is british telecom um but obviously you can call these whatever you want so i'm gonna come in here and i'm just gonna rename this one or just call it again you know bt1 for example and what you'll see now is this will allow me to create the action template so here i can come into the email and i can just simply type bt outage and then i can do something along the lines of um whatever and i can simply type this email and then go ahead and save that now this would be the email then that i would send to a bunch of customers on bulk however there are a bunch of templates already on the system and i like to use those ones very often so for example if you look at the event template one and you simply view the template itself you'll see that it's got this kind of nice looking um you know nicely formatted email which might be a lot nicer and a lot easier to send to your customers so all you simply want to do is you want to copy the html code so click on the html tab and then from here just hover over or copy down the all the html code and then what we can do is if we go back to our bt1 and we simply view this action template so here was the words i added earlier on i can just come into the html template override it and now what i can do is you know here where it says event name i can just say whatever i want to call it okay so you know it gives you the ability to really make this look a lot nicer so i'm going to save this template now i'll just save and close that okay so now we have our template ready to go what we can do now is under the crm if we click on contact groups this is now going to allow us to select a group of customers that we want to whether we want to send that template to so let's create a new group here and maybe we're going to call this you know let's call this bt outage 2 or this could say you know christmas opening hours whatever you want to call it but in this case we're just going to call this bt outage 2. so what you can see at this point is you now have the ability to go in and add to the group so you can go ahead and if you simply click on add to group this will just bring up a list of all of your customers and contacts and you can just select the customers and contacts that you want to add to this group the other thing you can do from here if you click on this column chooser if you have any user-defined fields you can actually use these user-defined fields from here as well so what you could do is i created a user-defined field called account telecoms provider and then simply all i'm going to do is um if i select that column chooser i can now come in here and select everyone that has bt entered into uh into that telecoms provider user defined field so here you can see i just at this point i have one customer where i've actually selected this user defined field as as bt so i'm going to go ahead and select this guy and then what i can simply do is click on add selected to group and this has now added this one particular contact it's added them to um to the group and you can see the window behind there so actually what you now have to do is if you click on close at this point you can now see that this contact has been added to this bt outage 2 group what you could have done at this point i just clicked on add to group but you can actually use these advanced filters as well so what i could have done in here is simply click this little funnel and the same approach would have been just going into user defined fields and then telecoms provider i could have selected you know where the telecoms provider is equal to bt click apply filter it would have found the same company i'm not going to do that now but it would have found the same company and i could have just selected it from there so the nice thing about this filter button you can choose whatever you want so if you wanted to say hey you know i only want to send this bt outage to um you know people in a particular postal code or in a particular city so you know maybe you want to send it to them you know only your customers who are based in london you could simply do that and when you click apply filter this will go ahead and find anybody that is in london i don't have anyone in london um but that would have would have then just brought in here an entire list of who all of those people are okay but what i'm going to do now anyway is if i clear this down and here you can see again we have this guy from karen properties so now because i had that template i have the ability here to go in and and send an email so i can go and select this guy and i can just say send email to selected so one of the really cool things at this point is i now have the ability to come in here and say okay i'm going to go ahead and i'm going to send this using the template to that particular person in my list so here under the open templates i can simply select the template that i want and in this case i think the template we had was called bt1 and you'll see it now brings that template in that we created earlier on and now i can choose when i actually send this email so i can go ahead and send it now after whatever date um you know whatever time i can choose whether i send a copy to myself as well and then what i can then do is also choose how i'm actually sending this email so maybe i want to send it from my help desk or i want to send it from you know my my normal email account and however you want to send this you can go ahead and do that at the same time it also gives you the ability to create it to do so what i would often do at this point come into here and say you know let's add a quick note to the system and say um you know something like you know follow up with um customer to see if they have received the email okay so we might wanna you know maybe next week sometime we may want to come in here and say you know we're going to have this bt outage we want to go ahead and say hey guys did you get our email blah blah so you might want to create a to-do for somebody on the system as well i'm going to turn that off but the ability is there for you to be able to do that okay and then all you simply do is click execute and what this will do is it goes ahead and says it's now going to send one email and then it's scheduled to be sent on this date and time do you wish to continue so i say yes and what this is now doing is it's now saying um you know sent or cued one email blah blah blah and that's it so if i close this down and i close this window down what i can now do is by going into crm i can look at the email history and this will tell me you know who the email was sent to and on what date it was sent so i can see there was one email attempted one email sent if i click on that it'll actually tell me who it sent the email to now one of the things that the bulk email system or the contact group manager doesn't do doesn't do click-throughs or any of those sort of things it simply just sends the email to the customer and it tells you in here that the email has been sent but there's there's no way to track click-throughs or anything like that one thing it does do though however is it does actually put an unsubscribe link on the bottom of that email so if your customer then goes ahead and unsubscribes to that email then then obviously next time you do this it will not send anything to that customer so just bear that in mind that they can unsubscribe to it and right in the beginning when we actually set up that user account there was a terms and conditions in there and that basically said exactly that that you know it by default it will put in the unsubscribe link and you have to give that ability to your customers to do that and that's really it so i really hope that you're enjoying this video if you are please give it a like and subscribe um it really does help me to uh to create new videos um you know and if you enjoy it then it would be really good if you could head over to buy me a coffee you know pay a small fee and hopefully i can continue to make more of these videos for you so thank you very much for watching and i look forward to seeing you on the next video [Music] you