I would love to be able to send a different reminder email for those members who are set up for automatic renewal. I get a lot of negative feedback from members who are getting the three reminder emails regarding their membership when they are set up for automatic renewal. I do put text in bold to disregard the message if they are set up for automatic renewals, but it doesn't really seem to penetrate. I would like to see a different email that I could send to them; something like, "Your membership is set up to automatically renew in two weeks..." and "...thanks for all the fish."

Love the templates -- but want more! Like back to school, President's Day, Woman's History Month that kind of stuff... Would also like more membership samples for renewal notices, profile update, membership drives...oh and some with imagery for events that has more of a business focus. And lastly perhaps some more inclusive variations for some of the holiday templates. Example - Christmas is a religious holiday that is not recognized by some and is not necessarily appropriate to send. Since it is not common to know what holiday they would observe, and it would be nice to start with a generic winter image, seasons greetings, or happy new year image.

When people hit the "unsubscribe" link at the bottom of an email, it would be good, as a checkbox option on the page they land on, to allow them to unsubscribe from all emails, not just newsletters. I suspect some of our contacts will not be happy if they still receive event notifications when they intended to unsubscribe fully. I don't think that one should ask them to login to do this (from their full profile). At present, we will need to manually check for these people and remove them from other mailings.

PS. It would also be good if the slightly confusing terminology relating to email subscription was made consistent across the system (WildApricot has indicated that they intend fixing this aspect).

Whenever we view an email in the system, any macro appears with a yellow highlight. When we go into edit mode the highlight goes away and we only have the curly braces (as in {macro}) to indicate where the macros are.

However, if a database column has its header changed, all macros that refer to that column now fail quietly and the {incorrectmacroname} and its curly braces are sent to the recipient. This looks very unprofessional and it would be good if we had a better way to detect the error.

How about: Wherever a text string surrounded by {curly braces} is found which is not a proper macro, instead of ignoring it, highlight it in red. You already highlight the macros in yellow, can you not highlight the {non_macros} in red?

I have over 70 emails in my membership levels and any help in managing them would be appreciated.

Hello,

my name is Andrew, and I’m a member of emailing development crew at Wild Apricot.

I want to thank you for your feedback about new compose email wizard feature. In this thread I would like to explain the reasons and goals behind emailing facelift and workflow changes that we’ve done in release 5.8 - https://help.wildapricot.com/display/DOC/Release+5.8

Our main goal is to make composing mass email as easy as possible. As we planned to release new features such as scheduling, selecting and using email templates, smart recipient selection, custom layouts and many others, we realised that we cannot have them all seamlessly integrated into old interface - it would simply become a Star Trek spaceship, so what we needed is a new platform on which new emailing would be built. Also, while UX testing one of our first features (Email layouts), some testers noticed that after fiddling with the new functionality they lost focus on what they were doing, because many irrelevant things came up on the same screen e.g. recipient selection, subject, preview, and of course a number of action buttons at the top, that mixed actions (save and exit) and steps (preview, preview and send). Some of those actions were also doubled in content area, just in case.
So we decided to build a new platform for sending mass emails, that is full of features and easy to learn. We realize that new platform may be a bit confusing for people, who have used Wild Apricot in the past, so we tried to leave as many popular workflows as possible.

Our team is dedicated to making the best emailing solution for you, and we would appreciate if you spent some time to tell us a little more about problems you encountered using new email wizard.

I’m looking forward to hearing from you.

With regards,

Andrew
Husky Team at Wild Apricot

Professionalize email Unsubscribe process and let us change opt-out instructions. In many ways the opt-out process is incomplete (at best) and (at worst) amateurish. Professional marketers would be embarrassed at the omissions, awkwardness and inconsistencies as things stand now. And WA wants us to look as professional as it does, right?

UNSUBSCRIBE LINK TARGET PAGE:

We can add custom language explaining that we have "two lists" and that the button applies only to the type of email they clicked on. But then the system concludes by saying, "do you want to unsubscribe from email blasts?" Huh? For starters, some of us hate the word "blasts." Would you really want any customer to feel like they've been "blasted" (in any sense of the word), let alone someone who is not satisfied by having received your email? I suggest something like, "from this type of email?" or "the type of email you clicked on?" But most of all, we would like to customize this system text ourselves.

Why no text-box form field or other form of feedback, so we understand why people leave our list? This is Marketing 101. Although apparently we can add a third-party survey or form, my understanding is that it would take them away from the page. If you make something harder for a user, fewer users will do it. Please get us feedback, without setting up user roadblocks!

PROFILE PAGE (EMAIL INSTRUCTIONS TAB):

This, too, is in dire need of explanation, so that people know what they're (un)subscribing. But if we add text above the Edit Profile button, it's there on every tab. As you see, I don't mind long text where it is helpful, but not when it is irrelevant to the user's objective. We want to explain email ONLY when viewing the Email Subscriptions tab.

The system descriptions of the two email types are not only inconsistent with our custom explanation, they are inaccurately worded, and thus confusing:
> "Automatic event announcements. Receive advance announcements about upcoming events
> Mass emails from administrators, such as newsletters and other important notifications"

• We call them "routine event announcements." This describes them more from the user's view. That they are "automatic" is relevant only to us. (Same is the situation regarding the word "manual.")


• We also use manual email to send advance announcements of events, especially major events. So that sentence is a bit misleading, too. And, personally, I hate the word "upcoming" as unnecessarily wordy and corporate-sounding. It's like "use" and "utilize" -- as any high school composition teacher will tell you, they mean the same thing. And when did movie theaters ever show "Upcoming Attractions"? But let's let these two issues slide for now.


• "Mass emails" -- aren't Automatic Event announcements "mass emails," too?


• If the point is that these mass emails are from administrators, okay, you know that, but the reader doesn't. And the word "administrators" is wrong -- our manual emails are from our Financial Secretary, or our President, or Corresponding Secretary, or one of our other managers, or simply from the club. "Administrators" do not send newsletters, and are anonymous, impersonal and scary.


• We'd like to customize these lines, too, which would be better than a big, long preamble above (even if that preamble were limited to the Email Subscriptions tab). For one thing, we would expand the list of examples. (e.g., "... such as newsletters, announcements of very special events, policies and club issues, non-event news, dues notices and reminders, schedule changes, etc."


• Somewhere (currently only possible in our monster preamble) we need to remind Members that they should not opt out of custom emails. Luckily not many members have, and I suspect the few who did unsubscribe were confused. But ideally, it should not even be possible for a Member, unless they are warned of the consequences, or have to ask an admin or something.

Yes, it would also be nice to offer a greater range of email options as others here have wished for (such as only one email per event, or a consolidated list of coming events once a week, and a Submit "action" reminder to check our event calendar often, since they won't be learning of events by email).

But first let's finish the basics?

I like being able to send email to our list of members, and I like being able to have them maintain their own contact info via their profile.

I hate your email/HTML editing tool, it's just horrible.

Can you please give me a way to simply have an email list address to which I can send an email from my favorite email client and it will forward to the membership list? I don't really care about link or open tracking.

Example: send an email to members@mydomain.com. It forwards to all members (or whatever search subset I define when I create the email name "members") anything I send to it.

Actually, after thought, I'd probably need to send it to "members@mydomain.wildapricot.com" or something since you are not my email provider by default, but I'd be fine with that.

Simple to use.

Thanks.