Overview

With Ambassador as your communication co-pilot, you'll save time and resources using automations to send emails that grow your program enrollment and engage existing ambassadors to participate. Click here to review supported engagement use-cases. 

Please Note: To utilize Automations to send engagement emails, you must purchase an email package and work with the Ambassador team to enable the necessary features and automations. Looking for transactional referral campaign emails or loyalty/advocacy program emails? Click here. 

In this article, you will learn about the following information and setup for engagement email automation: 

• Strategy
• Email Limit & Usage
• Email Usage Notifications
• Email Queue
• Email Templates
• Automations
• Email Dashboard Metrics

Step 1: Strategy

We recommend reviewing the supported use-cases in this article to inspire and strategize on the emails you'd like to send outside of your programs transactional emails. For example, do you want to upload a list of customers and invite them to enroll in the program? How about a reminder nudge to a contact after they've been enrolled for 7-days with no activity (clicks, shares, referrals)? Another simple but great option is a monthly or quarterly reminder email or newsletter to all enrolled contacts! 

If there's a use-case or trigger not listed in the use-cases article linked above, submit a support case and we'll be happy to look into if / how it can be accommodated. 

Step 2: Understanding Email Limit & Usage

When using an Automation to send emails, you will have a monthly email limit that resets on the 1st of each month. 

At this time, transactional emails setup in referral campaigns and portal reward redemptions are currently excluded from the email limit. 

View your email limit and monitor usage anytime from the Ambassador Admin 2 > Emails > Email Templates > click on "Email Usage" at the top. As seen in the below image, an in-app banner will display the current monthly usage and limit. 

The email limit is either set during your upgrade conversations with Ambassador or as part of your plan. If you have any questions or would like to change your email limit, email your CSM or support@getambassador.com.  

Recommendation: Consider your complete email strategy for advocacy and/or engagement emails when finalizing your email limit. If you're unsure what volume you might need for engagement purposes, start small and then then analyze what activity looks like for you and increase your limit and/or scenarios from there. 

Step 3: Understanding Email Usage Notifications  

Notification via email

If your email usage (for automations) reaches 75%, 90% or 100% of the monthly limit, Ambassador will trigger an email notification to the primary account owner/admin. 

To send these notifications to other people, just let our team know of your request and the email address(es) it should be sent to, and we'll update it on the backend for you. 

Notification via in-app popup

If the usage reaches 100% of the monthly limit, the in-app banner (located at the top of Email Dashboard and Email Templates) will adjust to a more prominent display as shown below.

Step 4: Understanding Email Queue

If 100% of the email limit is reached, any emails attempted by an automation are held in the "Email Queue". You can access it by going to Emails > Dashboard > Email Queue. 

Emails in the queue are not automatically sent after the budget is reset.

This gives you the flexibility to review and choose which emails to select > send and/or select > delete. 

For example, you may want to prioritize some emails over others if you are concerned about reaching your email limit again.

Step 5: Setup & Manage Email Templates

From the main navigation, click on Emails, then Email Templates. This is a centralized area to create and manage all email templates sent from the Automation tool.

Email templates should be created first, before creating automations that send an email. When setting up automations, there will be a step to select from the available email templates you've created. 

When ready, follow the below steps to create each email template:

1. Click the New Email button, and fill out the form fields:

• Email Template Name: Name the template for internal purposes, but make it unique and applicable to the use-case so that it's easily recognizable to select when setting up the automation.  
• From Name & From Email: These fields will default to the Outgoing Email Address & Domain verified in your Account Settings. You can change this for each template, as long as the email address follows these rules:
  • Rule 1: The email must include a domain that is verified in your Account Settings to ensure deliverability, otherwise you'll get an "Invalid Email Domain" error or your emails will be blocked or sent to spam.  
    • Valid Example: You input the email as person@company.com and the verified domain in account settings is company.com.
    • Invalid Example: You input the email as person@company.com and the verified domain in account settings is referrals.company.com. 
  • Rule 2: The email address must be able to receive mail incase someone responds to the email.  
• Subject: Check out these subject line best practices from our Sendgrid partner. 
  

2. For the Body of the email, use the editing tool bar or enter your own HTML to customize the email design and copy for it's intended purpose and to reflect your brand. 

On the left-hand side, you'll find merge tags available to insert for personalized content, populated dynamically when your email is sent. 

Important Tips:

• Referral/Share Links - You can include up-to 4 share links assigned to the recipient across campaigns/landing pages using {var.sharelink.1}, {var.sharelink.2}, {var.sharelink.3}, or {var.sharelink.4}.
  • Note: The automation setup will include steps to define which campaign and landing pages to populate the recipients share link(s). This is one of the reasons you must create your email templates before setting up the automation. 
• Unsubscribe - The {unsubscribe_link_url} or {unsubscribe_link} is required for all emails and provides the recipient with a choice to unsubscribe from the program and/or emails sent from Ambassador system on your behalf. This will not unsubscribe them from the emails sent from your company unless you've setup a customized integration to do so. By default the merge tag is hyperlinked within "update your preferences" at the bottom of the email, but if it's replaced when customizing or uploading your own HTML, make sure to add the merge tag back in order to save the template. 

3. When ready, click Save Template. Then, you can click to Preview. 

Tips:

• It's always a good idea to save your work as you go along to ensure there's no issues with a login timeout. 
• We also recommend sending a test to different email address/providers, such as Outlook and Gmail. Outlook is notorious for breaking the format of images that look excellent in preview mode & Gmail. 

Step 6: Creating and Managing Automations

From the main navigation, click on Automations. This is where all of your automations are created and managed. Currently, this is specific to marketing/engagement emails and advocacy use, but will be expanded this year. More to come!

For the time being, Automations are read-only for Ambassador clients. Your Ambassador support team will work with you to define the automations needed for your use-case, setup each of them for you, and assist with any updates you need to make. We plan to open this up for clients to manage on their own after some upcoming design updates are released! 

Once an automation is setup, you will be able to access the following:

An Automations table where you can find a list of each automation in your account. There you can quickly turn an automation On or Off with the toggle of a button. 

Click the name of an automation from the table to access a read-only version. From this view, you can see a preview of each step in the flow and the execution summary. The execution summary will provide you with the number that were successfully completed, in-progress/delayed, and failed. 

Click on View all executions to access a log of each execution. 

The Execution History table, is a log of each time that specific automation was triggered and sorted by status - Completed, Processing, Needs Attention, All.  In addition to those status, the All tab will contain a log of each time the automation was triggered but did not complete as expected because the conditions were not met. 

The Filters button will allow you to search by a contact's email or UID (internal id assigned to their contact record by you), the Execution ID, and Triggered date/time stamp. The contact related filters are especially helpful if you need to search whether an automation ran for a specific contact, such as to send and email or issue a reward. 

Step 7: Email Dashboard Metrics

Once you start sending emails from automations, you can easily monitor the deliverability metrics from the Email Dashboard. From the main navigation, click on Emails > Email Dashboard. Filter by date-range, email template, and workflow. 

If you're looking for the metrics of emails sent from Referral campaigns, go to Referral > Dashboard and click on Referral Email Metrics in the top-right corner.

For any questions or feedback, email your Customer Success Manger or support@getambassador.com.