Campaigns and Target Lists
The Campaigns and Target Lists section includes topics covering creating, executing, and troubleshooting campaigns and groups of campaign recipients called target lists.
Topics
The following article describes adding a hidden field to a web to lead capture form. The provided example will add "lead_source" as a hidden field with a value of "Campaign". To start, we will create a web to lead capture form through the Create Lead Form tool in the Campaigns module. To access this tool navigate to the Campaigns module and click "Create Lead Form" from the Campaigns tab. Please note that a campaign must be created before you can define a lead form.
Sugar's Campaigns module can be used to create both email and non-email-based campaigns. The Email and Newsletter types of campaigns are mass emails sent from Sugar to a relevant set of contacts, leads, targets, accounts, or users. The results are tracked to measure the overall success of the campaign. This article explains how to set up and execute a simple email campaign in Sugar.
Sugar provides a simple way to allow visitors to your website or other online location to become leads in your Sugar instance. You can create a web-to-lead form via the Campaigns module in Sugar and place the form on an external website. Then when a visitor to your site completes and submits the form, their information is entered into Sugar as a new Lead record.
The heart of a campaign is its target audience which Sugar manages in the Target Lists module. Each campaign is related to one or more target lists which control who receives the campaign messages. Learning to understand and manage target lists ensures that your message reaches the correct audience. Controlling which recipients Sugar should exclude from a campaign is just as important as specifying the recipients to include. This article covers excluding recipients from receiving campaign messages both by removing them from the default target list and by adding them to the suppression target list.
There may be times when you would like to work with a curated list of targets on your local computer or for outside direct marketing purposes. If you create a target list in Sugar, you can easily export the contents of that target list to your local computer.
A target list consists of a group of individuals or organizations you want to include or exclude in a mass marketing campaign. These targets are identified based on a set of predetermined criteria such as customer type, age group, industry, etc. This article walks through the various ways of adding your relevant accounts, contacts, leads, and users to target lists.
After creating a target list, you have the option to populate it from a report. However, larger reports will often timeout before completely filling the target list. As a result, the best way to populate a target list is to break the report into multiple chunks and bring the records over in batches.
The Web-To-Lead-Form is placed on a public website where you generate leads from prospective customers who visit the site. It just so turns out, spam bots love your site as well. How to fix the this issue without modifying the Sugar source code.
After sending an email campaign via the Campaigns module in Sugar®, some email addresses may be flagged as invalid. Repeatedly attempting to send messages to invalid email addresses could make your company's mail account look like a spammer. This article explains how to prevent sending messages to invalid email addresses in the future.
Sugar® provides a simple way to allow visitors to your website and other online locations to become lead records in your Sugar instance. When creating web-to-lead forms, any fields that are marked as required in the Leads module must be included on the lead form. However, there may be occasions where you find it unnecessary to include certain required fields on your web-to-lead form. This article will cover how to remove such required fields from the HTML for a web-to-lead form. Please note that the information in this article will also apply if you wish to remove any unrequired fields from the web-to-lead form.
If you host Sugar on a server outside the SugarCloud service, you may elect to put that server behind a firewall as a security measure. In the event that you still want to send campaigns from Sugar, you will need to change some configurations to allow for tracking of the campaign activities such as when a target views a message, clicks a link in the email, etc.
When a campaign email is sent to an invalid recipient (e.g. an email address that does not exist) a bounced message is returned to the sender; in the case of a SugarCRM campaign the bounced message would be delivered to the bounce handling mailbox chosen during the setup of the campaign. SugarCRM can be setup to process messages from bounce handling mailboxes and log any relevant bounces. Occasionally bounced messages may not be processed as expected. To understand why a message may not be processed it is important to understand the criteria SugarCRM depends on to properly process bounced messages.
When working with campaigns in Sugar®, you may find that your email service provider limits the number of messages that can be sent over a given period of time. This is known as message throttling. When message throttling is imposed by your email service provider, it is important to respect those restrictions. This article will cover how to troubleshoot campaign sending limits.
When sending a campaign in Sugar®, the emails get queued to be sent out in batches in a predefined interval starting at the scheduled date and time. The sending of these batches is a background process initiated by cron. However, there may be occasions where the executed campaign is not being sent out as expected and the emails are sitting in the email queue. This article covers troubleshooting campaign emails which are failing to send from the email queue.
Once a campaign has been executed in Sugar®, you can track and view status information by accessing the campaign's detail view and clicking the View Status button. For more information on creating campaigns and reviewing results, please refer to the Creating a Campaign article. While viewing a campaign's detail view or status page, there may be occasions where certain subpanels do not appear in the layout as expected. When stock or custom subpanels do not appear in Sugar, it is possible that they may have been hidden from view via Admin > Navigation Bar and Subpanels (known as "Display Modules and Subpanels" in Sugar versions 12.0 and lower). This article covers how to verify if the subpanels are hidden from view and how to make the subpanels appear in the campaign's detail view and status page.
Google imposes limits on the number of emails you can send within a 24-hour period. More specifically, the limit is imposed on the number of recipients per message (i.e. Sending one email to many people does not circumvent the issue) as well as the number of messages sent per day. The limits are described here at the Google support site.
There may be occasions where Sugar® refuses to send email marketing messages to certain recipients. This article discusses how Sugar manages campaign emails and why some messages may be suppressed during an email campaign.
Sugar has two types of campaigns that send emails: newsletter and email. Both of these campaign types include opt-out links, however, the behavior of each is different. When recipients opt out of a newsletter campaign, they will still receive emails from all other Sugar campaigns. When recipients opt out of an email campaign, the email address in the Sugar record will get marked as opted-out and they will no longer receive emails from any Sugar campaign. Email addresses can also be manually marked as opted out by a Sugar user by enabling the Opted Out button to exclude the email address from future email campaigns. In addition, administrators can configure whether new email addresses added to Sugar records default to opted-in or opted-out by using the "Opt-out new email addresses by default" option via Admin > System Email Settings. For more information regarding this option, please refer to the Email documentation. This article outlines how the opt-outs work and how to revert recipient opt-outs so that they may receive future campaign emails.