How to Create, Send, and Edit a Campaign

Here's the link to the company video tutorial on how to create & send campaigns. Be sure to watch it!

Planning your campaignon paper firstmakes it easier to create a cohesive campaign series that is well throught-out and has a good flow. Decide what kind of campaign you want (by date or by sequence), which cards you will use, and how many cards you want in the campaign. Draft your message for each card so you have a “master plan” in mind as you are creating each card.TIP: When you write the messages, write it to your favorite customer. If you need to edit it later to make it more generic you can, but writing a message to a specific person will make it sound and feel much more personal.
Log in to your SendOutCards account and search through the card catalog to find all four cards you want in your campaign.There’s a Keyword Search feature in the Card Catalog to help you find cards.For example,if you put in the keyword “flowers,” all the cards with flowers on them will come up.When you find the card you want for each campaign piece, write down the location in the Card Catalog on your piece of paper!!

Here’s how a sample campaign looks when you create it in the SOC system:

Think of card campaigns as autoresponders that send cards. Line them up and they'll automatically be mailed for you in the sequence and timing of your choice.

Yes, there’s a little work involved at first to find the cards, write the messages and set them up, AND it is soooooo worth it when you can send a whole campaign to a group of people throughout the year with just one single click of your mouse!

How to Create a Campaign

Once you have designed your campaign on paper, here’s how you set it up in the SOC system:

  1. From the Main Menu, click on Campaigns and then Create a New Campaign (blue button)
  2. Go to step #1 and enter a name for your campaign
  3. Go to step #2 and enter the return name and address if different than listed. This return address is for this campaign only.
  4. Go to step #3 and click “create a new card for this campaign”
  5. You are now in the card catalog. Choose the card you want to use, including whether it will be a postcard, 2-panel, 3-panel or big card. NOTE: If you want to use a card that you create yourself, you will need to do this before you create the campaign. (See instructions for How to Create a PicturePlus Card.)
  6. Copy and paste your message that you drafted into the card. If you’d like the recipient names to be automatically merged into the card when you send it, put your cursor in the “click here to type your message” box and click. Type whatever word you want to precede the name (Dear, Hi, Greetings, etc.) and enter a space after that. If you do not want anything preceding the name, just click on the box below that says “insert name.” If you want the system to enter the first name, choose the FirstName. You have three other options besides first name. Continue creating your card with text, pictures, elements, videos (QR code), etc. If you need more help with this, refer to the webinars under Help on your Main Menu.
  7. Press “print preview” at the top and make sure the card looks the way you want it to, and that nothing is cut off in the margins (green dotted lines). Close out of the preview by clicking on the x at the top to return to the inside of the card. Edit if needed, or click CONTINUE when your card looks the way you want it to.
  8. On the gift page, choose a gift or gift card, or or just continue without gift. Remember if you choose to include something with the card, it will go out to every person you send this campaign to.Click continue.
  9. You are now at the last page where you choose when to send the card. It defaults to “immediately” for the send date. You can change this to immediately plus x number of days, weeks, months if you like by clicking that option. You can also change it to birthday or anniversary, and the system will mail the card a week “before” that date (you must have the birthday or anniversary entered into each contact record for this feature to work) so they will get it by their birthday or anniversary. You can also choose a specific date for it to be mailed.

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you choose a specific date, when you actually click SEND for the campaign, if you trigger the campaign ON that date, it will not go out until the next year. Cards are always printed the night before the Send Date and are delivered to the Post Office ON the send date.

  1. Click “Save Card” (lower right corner) once you have selected the send date.
  2. Click“Save Campaign” at the bottom.
  3. Go back into campaigns and you‘ll see your campaign there. Check to be sure your card is there and everything looks correct.
  4. If you want to create a multiple-piece campaign, keep clicking “create a new card for this campaign” and repeating the steps above for each card. Be sure you save the entire campaign at the bottom by clicking Save Campaign when you are all finished.

About campaigns: You can create one-card campaigns or you can create multiple-card campaigns. Let’s say you want to touch your customers 4 times a year with a 4-card campaign. You can set the date or the interval of timefor each card. Here are a couple of examples as to how you can set those up:

Card 1: Happy Holidays, Send dateis December 5

Card 2: Happy New Year, Send dateis December 24

Card 3: Valentine’s Day, Send date is February 7, etc.

OR

Send cards every 3 months over the next year:

Card 1: Send date is Immediate

Card 2: send date is Immediate + 3 months

Card 3: send date is Immediate +6 months

Card 4: send date is Immediate +9 months.

You determine the interval of time between cards.The recipient will receive a card from you four times throughout the year, even though you only clicked SEND once.You can send a campaign to one person or to a group of people, all with a single mouse click. This is a huge time-saver!

How to Send a Campaign

  1. If you are sending a campaign to an individual, click on Contacts from the Main Menu. Select Find a Contact and enter the name of the individual. Click Find Contact. If more than one name comes up, click the “Uncheck All” on the left and then check only the name of the person you want the campaign sent to.

2.If you are sending a campaign to a group:

a. From the Main Menu, click on “Groups.” If the group you want does not already exist, create it here by naming it under Add New Group. Click the Add Group to save it.

b.Select “Contacts” and“Find a Contact.”

c. Click “List all contacts” and then click the “Uncheck All” and re-check only the names you want to add to the group you are creating. Or leave them all checked and uncheck the names you do not want in the group -- whichever is easier.

d.When all the names for that group are checked, go near the top and click the box “Add Checked to a Group” and select the Group name you want these contacts to be added to.

3.To pull up the names in a Group:

a.Click Contacts and select Find a Contact.

b.Go down to the bottom of the page where the Groups are listed and uncheck all groups by clicking the Clear Group Selection button.

c.Check the appropriate group (or groups) and click above on “Find Contact”. You may want to send a campaign to more than one group. If a contact name is in more than one group, the individual will only be listed once.

NOTE: You can create a new group from old groups. For example, let’s say you create a group for your personal holiday card, and you want to send it to Family, Friends, Church Members, Neighbors (4 groups). You can do a search for these four groups and then click “Add Checked to a Group” and select the name of the new group you’ve just created (2014 Personal Holiday Card). When you save this combined list, you have just created the new group.

d.Once you have checked the group(s) you want to send the campaign to and have clicked on Find Contact, only those nameswill be listed. Uncheck any you don’t want to send the campaign to.

  1. To send the campaign to the names selected, up near the top of the page you will see “Send Campaign to Checked” and to the right of that is a box with a pull-down menu (will not appear until you have created your first campaign). Click the arrow to expose the alphabetical list of campaign names.
  2. Select the correct campaign name, then click on “Send Campaign to Checked.”
  3. The system will calculate the number of points (for your cards) and amount of expense account funds (postage) you’ll need to already have in your account in order to proceed. If you do not have enough points or expense account funds, you will need to purchase this before you can proceed. If you have enough, click Continue. You will see a screen pop up that says, “Campaign successfully added to the send queue!”

How to Edit an Individual Card Sent in a Campaign

NOTE: There are two ways to Edit in a campaign:

  1. Edit the campaign itself (this will change it for all future cards sent out). Do this under Campaigns and save your changes.
  2. Edit a single card within a campaign that was already sent but has not yet been printed. (Once it is printed, it’s too late to change anything.) This enables you to customize individual cards. For example, you send holiday cards to 200 people and you want to add personal notes to 7 of them. You send the campaign, then go back to those individual 7 cards and edit them before they get printed.

From the Main Menu, choose “Card History,” enter the date(s) the card is scheduled to go out, and click “Search”. The name of the recipient(s) will appear and will say “View/Edit card” to the right.By clicking on this, you can edit each card in the queue anytime up until it is actually printed (typically at 11 PM Pacific / 12 AM Mountain / 1 AM Central / 2 AM Eastern, except during the busy holidayseason when we print several times during the day).

You can also go to Campaigns and click on the View Unfulfilled Campaigns link and you will see every campaign card that has been “sent” but not printed yet. From here, you can edit or cancel individual cards up until the time they are printed.

IMPORTANT HOLIDAY NOTE: Around December 1 each year, SendOutCards pulls the print run multiple times a day because of increased volume, so the schedule above may not apply. Be sure your card is ready to go if you choose Immediate for your send date around the holidays. If you need time, put in a specific date that gives you at least one day to edit individual cards within a campaign. For example, if it is December 3 and you want a day to edit the cards, choose December 5 for the SEND date. Why an extra day? Because the cards are printed the DAY BEFORE the send date so they will be at the post office ON the send date.

If you change your mind and want to DELETE the card out of the system, follow the same instructions as above, except instead of clicking the “View/Edit card” on the right, check the box on the left and click the button that says “cancel selected cards.”

To edit the card and further personalize it with pictures or text, videos, etc., follow the directions above. Be sure to continue through all screens, and press “save” or “send” on the last screen.

If you learn better by watching, click hereto view a webinar on how to create and send a campaign.

I have created a Customer Training website that has much more helpful information, and you will find that by visiting

Kathy Paauw
Relationship Marketing Consultant ~ Gratitude Coach
SendOutCards Executive Distributor and Trainer

I help business professionals usestrategies
and toolsthatincrease business and profits!

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