Your organization can now get FREE Email Marketing across all of your events and contacts on GiveSignup, TicketSignup, and RunSignup. Free Organization Email Marketing gives your organization the power to send emails across all of your events and contacts from a single dashboard.
While we will be building many more features for Organization Email Marketing over the next several months, we are excited to launch as a beta release so that current and new customers can start using for free today. This blog will answer the following questions:
- What’s Organization Email Marketing?
- Who can use Organization Email Marketing?
- How can I set up Organization Email Marketing and start sending emails?
- What’s coming next for Organization Email Marketing?
What’s Organization Email Marketing?
Every event created on GiveSignup, TicketSignup, and RunSignup automatically gets Free Email Marketing in your Dashboard. Email Marketing is tailored to each of your event needs, from marketing and promotions to pre-event and post-event communications. So what’s different about Organization Email Marketing?
When you select system contacts to send an email from Organization Email Marketing, you’ll be able to include and exclude lists across all contacts from the events that use your payment account. In the example below, I can send an Upcoming Events email to everyone who signed up for one of my 4 ticket and peer-to-peer fundraising events (Food Truck Festival, Pancake Breakfast, Apple Fest, and The Food Bank 5k) as well as my campaign donors (general donations, Giving Tuesday, and End of Year appeal).
With any Free Email Marketing option, you always get:
- FREE
- Unlimited emails, contacts, and sends
- Pre-built contact lists from your event(s)
- Free and unlimited contact lists – no limits on the number of contacts or custom fields uploaded!
- Automated event contact management
- Easy to send emails to lists from any report
- Automated data replacement tags for mail merge
- Beautiful default templates
- Build your own email templates – no coding required!
- Schedule email sends
- Simple email reports
- Two email types (Transactional and Marketing) to help manage unsubscribes
Who can use Organization Email Marketing?
Anyone can use Organization Email Marketing to send unlimited emails to unlimited contacts for free. Organization Email Marketing is perfect for:
- Existing GiveSignup, RunSignup, and TicketSignup customers, especially those with multiple events that want to send emails to contacts across all of their events. Some of our customers like Healthy Kids Running Series have hundreds of events – Organization Email Marketing brings the power of our next-generation Email Marketing to their entire organization in addition to each individual event!
- New customers who haven’t set up an event yet but want to process transactions within the next 6 months. While new customers won’t be able to leverage system contact lists because they haven’t sold tickets and registrations or accepted donations yet, they’ll still be able to upload unlimited contact lists and send unlimited emails using our default and easy to build templates for free!
How can I set up Organization Email Marketing and start sending emails?
It’s easy and free to set up Organization Email Marketing! You can get started free here: https://www.runsignup.com/EmailMarketingDashboard/New.
Just like creating an event, you’ll fill out some basic information about your organization in a Wizard so that we can customize your dashboard.
The next step of the Organization Email Marketing wizard is Customer Verification. If you’re an existing customer, you’ll be able to link or request to link your existing payment account. This lets us automatically show all of the contacts of the events that use your payment account!
If you are a new customer, you’ll be prompted to create your payment account. While you can use free Organization Email Marketing for 6 months to send unlimited emails to unlimited contacts, our free Email Marketing platform is for customers who currently process transactions or intend to process transactions. This also helps to ensure that only approved customers can send emails, preventing spam.
After you complete the Wizard, you’ll be taken to your Organization Email Marketing dashboard. As you send emails and upload contacts, your dashboard will reflect those numbers!
There are quick options from your dashboard to Send an Email or Create a List. You can also send emails, manage lists, update information, share access, and more from the left menu:
- Email
- Send Emails
- Confirm or edit From and Reply To emails and names for marketing and transactional emails
- Upload and manage custom lists – unlimited contacts and custom data replacement tags!
- Create and manage templates
- View Sent Emails, with easy options to copy and resend
- View Email Reports
- Basic Info: Edit basic info that you entered in the Wizard. We use this information to customize the headings and footers of your emails (you’ll also be able to customize per email when creating and sending!)
- Organization: Give your team members access to send emails! Right now, access is either full or non-financial (meaning the user cannot see or change the payment account linked to your dashboard).
- Payment Account: This is the payment account that you linked or created in the wizard. If you have access to multiple payment accounts, you’ll be able to switch. When you do so, the system contacts that you can send emails to will automatically update to reflect the events and contacts of the new payment account.
- Create: On this page, we provide easy links to create your events using our free solutions!
What’s coming next for Organization Email Marketing?
We continue to add more features to free Email Marketing. In addition to event-specific features like Automated Emails and a next-generation email capture website pop-up, we will be releasing more functionality to Organization Email Marketing this year including:
- Better organization and easier selection across lists: Right now, you will need to individually Include and Exclude lists. This is easy (we even have a convenient list search to quickly find and select specific lists) but can be time consuming if you have a large number of events and/or many custom lists. In the coming months, we will introduce a number of UX improvements to ‘Select All’ and better organize lists, as well as the option create & save default lists. You’ll see these improvements in our registration and ticketing platforms first, and then we will add them to Organization Email Marketing!
- More system contacts: We will add donors and fundraisers from events to the default lists that you are able to choose from in Organization Email Marketing (currently, we limit donors to those who donated to a donation form).
- More email templates and content blocks: We’ll continue to add more content blocks that you can use to build your own email templates. We’ll also grow the default template library with more options to choose from!
- More Analytics and Reporting: In this phase, we will begin to track individual email opens and clicks, and actions, like a donation is made by Bob when he clicked on a link in a specific email. This will allow our customers to keep track of what is effective in total for an email, as well as identify those supporters who are engaged in email. This data will be used by a later phase in creating lists based on engagement level.
- Drip Campaigns: We plan on creating a customer journey capability, which will allow for different emails to be sent at different times depending on actions.
- Custom Supporter Contact Lists: We are working on a project that will use AI to automatically match contacts, and then put in place a query processing capability to be able to build advanced custom lists based on the information in the GiveSignup | RunSignup system. For example, you could do a list of all people who have run your 5K more than twice and have donated more than $100. Or a list of all the people who signed up for your event from Facebook posts. We will be offering over 200 different parameters over time that can be used to build your marketing campaigns.