Create email campaigns in SharePoint

Introduction

You might not know it, but you can easily implement fully-automated email drip campaigns in SharePoint. You do not need to know how to write code, all you need is your browser.

First, we need to define what an email drip campaign is. Wikipedia is always a handy research tool for these things: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drip_Marketing. In short, you send a series of timed messages to your customers. These messages follow an event, such as registration, product download, etc.

These messages can contain instructions, advertisements, images or anything else you need. The main goal here is to create a meaningful virtual conversation with your customer. And the idea is to do it without having to hire a horde of marketing people.

What are the requirements for the implementation? You need Infowise Ultimate Forms, and in particular, its Alerts component. This component serves an upgrade to the good old SharePoint alerts. Ultimate Forms works both on SharePoint Online (Microsoft 365) and on premises.

It greatly improves and extends the alerts functionality, introducing a plethora of useful features, such as:

• Flexible recipients - SharePoint alerts only send within your organizations. With the Alert component of Ultimate Forms, you can send to anyone in the world. You can also send to recipients defined at run time, for instance, based on a column value in the item.
• Attachments - you can enclose attachments or documents.
• Full control over the email content - specify exactly how the email messages looks like.
• Timer-based notifications - date-based alerts that automatically send according to a date in column. The notifications can go out both before and after date. You can also set them to repeat
• Conditions - only send alerts when they are relevant. For example, you can specify that the alert only goes out when the Importance of the list item is High.

You can install a 30 day trial here.

Implementation

Overview

What we need is to create a contacts list in your SharePoint site. That is where you will enter the contact information of your new customers/leads/contacts. The list will have a set of custom alerts attached to it. Each alert will then execute after a specific delay starting from the moment someone adds a new contact.

In our case, we will have 3 alerts:

• One will go out after a week
• The second - after two weeks
• The third - after a month

Obviously you can create as many alerts as you need and define the intervals the way you want them. You can even set conditions for the alerts. For instance, if the contact unsubscribes, the system will stop sending to that contact.

Step-by-step instructions

So, let's start:

1. Make sure you've installed Infowise Ultimate Forms. If the app is still missing, you can install a 30 day trial here.
2. Create a new SharePoint list to store contacts. You can start with a blank list and add columns according to your needs. You just need to make sure you designate one of the columns for email addresses.
3. Click on the Add Alert button located on the toolbar of the list. Make sure not to not confuse with Alert Me, which will take you to the built-in alert mechanism. Alternately, you can click on the Design button and then proceed to Alerts.
4. The side pane for adding a new alerts will open. If you used the Design button, simply click on Add new alert to display it.
5. Provide a meaningful name for your new alert. You do not need to change the site or list settings.
6. Open the Recipients section.
7. The To field contains your name for now, remove it by clicking on the X.
8. Add a new "Persons in column" recipient by selecting the email column and clicking on Add to To.
9. Optionally, add yourself to the CC or the BCC recipients. This way you will receive the same email when the contact receives it.
10. In the What to send section, clear all the checkbox related to item added, modified and deleted events. Our alert will work only based on intervals.
11. Mark the According to date in column checkbox.
12. Select Created as your date column.
13. Specify that you want the alert 1 week after date.
14. Open the Email content section
15. Define the email content by specifying the message subject and the message body. Your subject and body can contain functions and column values from the current contact item. Use Add column button to display the list of columns and functions for selection.
16. In my example, I'm using the Full Name column token. The system will then automatically replace the token with the runtime value coming from the list item.
17. Save your new alert.
18. Repeat steps 4-17 to configure additional email messages of your campaign. You just need to make changes to the time interval and the message content.

This is it, your drip campaign is ready. Now create new contacts in the list and they will start receiving the mailings!

Conclusion

SharePoint is the main tool for many internal processes that you do not have a special system for. Infowise Ultimate Forms is a no-code add-in for SharePoint. With its help, you can quickly and easily implement a wide variety of such solutions. SharePoint email campaigns are a common need that will take little time and effort to implement.