Automated Emails Monthly

👨‍💻 Development Help
1

Hello all, hope you all will be fine.

Can anyone tell me how can I make a workflow to send email to my contacts on monthly basis?

OR should I have to make the custom scheduler for that ?

2

Workflow work with the data on records and are triggered by events such as On Record Save. Schedulers get triggered at a predetermined time. Your choice.

3

I think we could run workflow on scheduler too. But, I don’t know how to do that.

Run – This controls the way the Workflow is triggered.

On Save The Workflow will run immediately for a given record when a save action occurs in the module specified.
On Scheduler The Workflow will be started from the Scheduler Job Process Workflow Tasks, the next time the job runs, and will apply to every record in the module, restricted by the Run on property and by the Workflow’s conditions.
Always The Workflow will run on both the situations described above.
4

So, can anyone tell me how can I do that with the help of workflows?

5

Hello @Umair,

there are multiple approaches and it probably depends a bit on what exactly you’d like to do.

Once a month, the same email (email template) to all contacts?
Once a month is at the first of every month for instance? Or every rolling 30 days?

Via campaigns (manually)

  • Add your contacts to a target list
  • Create a campaign every month
  • Enjoy the benefits of the campaign module (including exclusion lists / campaign statistics / mail batches)

Via the Scheduler (automated)

Via mass updates (semi-automated)

There are some pros and cons to those approaches.
I’d be careful, if you’ve got many hundreds of contacts. Depending on what mail blaster you use, you could be blocked.
Without campaigns you’re missing out on their features like statistics etc.

1 Like
6

Sorry, but I wasn’t able to understand. Can you please be more specific ?

Isn’t there is any simple way to do it via the scheduler.

7

It’s actually not that easy and there is no standard scheduler to send drip mail campaigns.
There are multiple approaches and which one to chose, depends on your requirements / what exactly you’d like to do.

If it’s only 12 times per year, maybe you don’t have to automate it at all and use campaigns?
If you want to automate, can you explain your case in more detail?
Once a month, the same email (email template) to all contacts?
Once a month is at the first of every month for instance? Or every rolling 30 days?

8

I’ve tried to do this type of “drip” campaing using workflow in the past with SuiteCRM. It’s not only extremely hard to setup, but very difficult to track and you don’t get open/deliverability info like you would with a campaign. SuiteCRM is just not very good at this I’m affraid. I use Mautic for this type of thing. It’s free and Open Source just like SuiteCRM, plus it fully syncs with SuiteCRM. It really is the best way to go if you’re trying to do Marketing Automation with SuiteCRM contacts/leads.

9

I might be highjacking this topic somewhat but:
Do you use transactional or marketing emails @pstevens? Do you see a drop of successfully inboxed mails with cold outreach and marketing when using Mautic over SuiteCRM?
I’ve used Mautic as well but for cold outreach as drip campaigns was concernced about Mautic lands in promotions or spam folders, seems to be impossible to tweak, any idea? - Product Support - Mautic Forums

10

Haven’t had any issues. I use Mautic for marketing emails and have high open rates. When I send to myself they go to the inbox. Setting up your DNS properly is critical.

11

Sounds good, thanks.
So far, I haven’t seen many problems as well - mostly concerns, depending on the size of the list.

12

I have one client who sends out 500,000 per week through Mautic. He routes it through AWS. This scale does involve some issues though. The tracking database grows to like 30GB fast. It hast to be cleaned out in a realtively short period of time so the DB doesn’t become so massive it crashes out.

1 Like
13

2 years ago we added a Recurring feature to the Newsletter Campaigns, and have been fine tuning it ever since - a lot trickier than I ever thought it would be!

Basically the creator can choose to send a Newsletter out Daily, Weekly, or Monthly, and can specify the day and time it gets sent. The custom code checks a Drop Down for which module and field to monitor for new or updated records since the last Newsletter went out. This is fully automated, all you have to do is create new content! If there is nothing new or updated, it skips sending it out that day or week.

Prior to the Recurring feature, about 3 years ago, we customized the Campaign Module to allow for user self service to subscribe or unsubscribe to any newsletter. We use security groups to designate if it’s a ‘Members Only’ (paid/subscribing CRM users) and if they are not a member, then those appear as ‘greyed out’ boxes (with upsell text).

I’ve been thinking of packaging this up for the Store, anyone know if there is an appetite for these features?