Sending personalized mass emails using Filmchief Mailroom
Overview
This article describes how to use Mailroom. With Mailroom, you can create personalized mass emails.
Audience
The Mailroom module is only available to festivals with a Premium Filmchief license.
By default, you need one or more of the following Roles to work with Mailroom: Administrator, Programmer or Guest service.
Getting started
Mailroom uses Lists to define mail recipients. Please familiarize yourself with working with Lists first, before working with Mailroom.
Before setting up a personalized mass mailing, you need:
- A Style template to define general appearance of the email. You can use the standard Festival template, or create one yourself (see the tab Style templates on the Mailroom page).
- A Recipient list. This can be any List of People, Films, or Accreditations.\
- Optionally, a Message template to define the contents (subject and body) of your email. If you don’t want to use a message template, you can compose your email in the Mail job.
Now that you’re all set, click on New in the Mail jobs tab.
In the dialog that appears, you can define the Mail job:
| Name | Name of the Mail job, e.g. ‘Selected filmmakers 2024’. |
|---|---|
| Decription | Description of the Mail job, for internal reference. It is recommended to describe the purpose of the Mail job, and who is in charge of it. |
| Style template | Select which Style template to use in this mailing. |
| Message template | Optionally, select which Message template to use in this mailing. You can leave this blank to compose a custom message. You can customize the mail subject and body later on. |
| Recipient list | Select a List that defines your mail recipients. If you’re using a Message template, you can only select Lists with a corresponding same base table (e.g. Films). You may choose to leave this blank for now, and select one later. |
| Sender | This defines the To and Reply-to fields of your email. By default, only your festival’s primary email address is available. Contact support@filmchief.com to create more senders. |
| Subject | The Subject section of your email. |
| email content | The Body section of your email. To personalize the message, use the icon in the toolbar to insert fields. |
| Auto-send | Check to automatically send emails to all recipients in your Recipient list. Important notes when auto-send is enabled: emails are sent to all contacts in your Recipient list immediately after you have created the Mail job. If you add recipients to your Recipients list later on, they will also automatically receive the email. |
Once you have created a Mail job, click Open to show its details page.
Managing your Mail job
The Mail job details page consists of two panels: Mail job details and Recipients.
Mail job details
On this panel, you can edit the properties your Mail job. Most of the fields you see here are described above.
To see how your email looks from the receiving end, click on the Send preview to ... button to let Filmchief send you a preview copy to the email address associated with your Filmchief account.
Recipients
This panel offers a live overview of the Mail job’s processing status. The pie chart displays how many emails are queued, sent, bounced or skipped. You can click on any section of the pie chart to filter the recipients table below.
The recipients table shows the status of each of your recipients. Depending on the current status, the Info column offers individual actions, including:
- Confirm: Send a single queued email to its recipient (only applicable if auto-send is disabled)
- Preview: Preview the personalized instance of a queued email
- Exclude: Exclude a specific recipient from your mailing.
- View sent email: View the personalized copy of a sent email
- Try again: If an email has bounced, you can retry sending it (plase make sure you have verified/corrected the recipient’s email address)
Example use cases
Mailroom can be used for a wide array of workflows. Here are some common examples:
Requesting external film verification
You can use Mailroom to ask filmmakers of selected films to verify, correct and complete the details of their film, to make sure that the correct information is published.
Please see External film verification for more details about this process.
Requesting video uploads
Using Mailroom, you can ask filmmakers to upload their video via Filmchief, directly into your connected Vimeo or Kinescope account. Here's how:
- Create a list of the films that you want to request a video upload for
- Pull the column VOD upload status into view, select all records and set it to Requested.
- Create a new mail job in Mailroom, set Recipients and message based on to `Films` and select the film list that you created in step 1. In Recipient type, choose who will receive this email (typically this is the primary contact of the film).
- In the message that you compose, be sure to include the merge field `VOD upload link (external)`. Clicking this link will take the recipient to the video upload page for the related film.
- When the upload and transcoding process is completed, the film's VOD upload status will be automatically set to Available, and the VOD URL will point to the uploaded video.
Mailing directly from your festival domain
To prevent your emails from being flagged as spam, Filmchief sends from noreply@filmchief.com and uses the Reply-to field to let recipients know who the Sender is.
For more professional-looking emails, it’s possible to authorize Filmchief to send emails on behalf of your festival. This way, Filmchief could send emails from the official info@your-festival.org address, and no longer needs to rely on a custom Reply-to field.
To set this up, you need access to your festival’s DNS records - please have your IT staff contact support@filmchief.com about this.
Disclaimer
Please use Mailroom with care. By using Mailroom, you assume full responsibility for the emails you send to your contacts. ThisWayUp won’t be liable for any indirect, punitive, special, or consequential damages resulting from erroneously sent emails.