Group Mail

The Group Mail feature in Ezy Invoice allows you to send Personalized Emails to Email Groups contained within your database. An Email Group here may be your entire Customer or Vendor list or a special mailing list that you defined yourself in Ezy Invoice.

This feature is very useful when you want to keep customers / vendors or mailing list informed about your company announcements, new products, specials offers, change of address, company closing for public holidays and other important notices.

Conventional email programs also allow you to send email to groups of recipients. The difference in Ezy Invoice's group mail is that you can send personalized email. This means that you can specify a Recipient Name field or Company Name field within the body of your email. When sending the email, for each recipient in your group, Ezy Invoice generates the email one at a time replacing the fields with the actual Recipient and Company Name. This gives your email a personal touch. Another important difference is that your recipient list is kept private and never displayed. A recipient of a group mail never knows who else the email was sent to. Conventional email programs often display the entire email recipient list in the header.

The steps involved for a successful email campaign is as follows:

1. Check your Customer/ Vendor Main Contact if you intend to send group mail to your customer or vendors list.
2. Define your Mailing List if you intend to send group mail to a custom mailing list.
3. Specify your Email Delivery options. This is to indicate to Ezy Invoice how you want your group email delivered.
4. Compose your Group Mail, check and send it out.

Mailing List

You can define custom mailing list or groups for use with Ezy Invoice 7 Group Mail. These mailing list may or may not be existing listings from your customer/ vendor list. They may be possible customers or prospects. They may be a particular sector of your existing customer base or any list you require.

Bring up the Mailing List form using the menu option : Go To | Mailing List.

• Group Name : Enter a name for this group. This name will not appear on your emails but is merely for you to identify the group.
• Remarks : Any comment or remarks you may have for this groups. Again this field does not appear anywhere in your outgoing emails but is just for your own reference.
• Group Members : Here you can specify the individual members or recipients of this group. You can specify as many members as you wish for each group. Double click the grid to edit each member individually. You can select members from your existing customer / vendor list by clicking the Select button.

Email Delivery Setup

Bring up the Email Delivery Setup dialog by clicking the Setup button in the Group Mail form.

SMTP Server : The host name of the server providing mail delivery services to you. This information is usually provided by your Internet Service Provider. If you are already setup to send & receive mail from your existing Email Software (e.g Outlook Express), you can obtain this information there. In Outlook Express, click Tools | Accounts then click on the Mail page. Look for the Default mail account and double click it. This will bring up the Account properties dialog. Click on the Server page. Copy the entry in the Outgoing Mail (SMTP) over to Ezy Invoice SMTP Server field.

• Reconnect Every : Some mail service providers may impose restrictions on bulk email of this sort. You can set up Group Mail to disconnect from your SMTP mail server at a specified number of messages sent. This will prevent overloading the mail server. Hence your group mail will be sent in batches.
• Pause between reconnect : You can specify a pause interval between each batch of emails sent.
• Requires Authentication : If your Mail Server needs Authentication , check this option.
• Authentication Type : The type of authentication used by your email server.
• User Name : The User name (if necessary) to log in to your SMTP mail server.
• Password : The Password (if necessary) to log in to your SMTP mail server.

Group Mail Form

Bring up the Group Mail form by using the menu option : Go To | Documents | Group Mail.

The Group Mail form is made up of a few pages as follows:

1. Header
   Date : The date of the Email
   From Email : Select or enter your own Email address. This address will be used by the recipients of the email when they reply to you.
   From Name : Your name.
   To : Enter the Group whom you wish to send the Group Mail to. You can chose from your Customer/ Vendor list or you can define a custom Mail Group. If you are sending to your customer/ vendor list, you should check that the list is ready for group mailing. If you want to define a custom mailing list, click on the Define Group button
   Subject : Enter a subject matter for the Email.
   Attachments : If you have any file attachment that should accompany the email, click the [+] button to add it in.
2. Body : In this page, you enter the main text of your email. Ezy Invoice allows you to insert 3 fields to the body of your email. You can insert a Date Field, a Name Field and a Business Name Field. The Date field causes Ezy Invoice to insert the sent date in the email body when the email is sent out. The Name & Business Name fields inserts the Recipient Name and Business/ Company name respectively when the email is sent. These fields give your email a personal touch.
   To insert any of these fields, simply place your cursor at the point at where you want the field inserted then click the appropriate field button.
   Example on how to use fields:
   Date : $(SentDate)
   To : $(BusinessName)
   Dear $(RecipientName) ,
   Your text starts here ...
   Warm Regards
   ........
   When the Email is sent out, it will appear to your recipients as say:
   Date : 15/11/2003
   To : ABC Company Pty Ltd
   Dear Mr Jeremy Richards,
   Your text starts here ...
   Warm Regards
   ........
3. Format:
   Content Type : Select Plain Text or HTML. Advanced users with knowledge of HTML can send the email as HTML.
   Character Set : You can specify the Character set if the Email needs to be sent in other languages
4. Send Log : This page displays the progress of the Email once it is sent. All successful and failed emails will be listed on this page.
5. Notes : List information on who created and who last modified the group mail.