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Email to inactive users

E-mail notifications
Tomas Gomez
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Posted on 18/09/2020 12:31:08

Hi,

We are migrating a site to DW, including the users from the old site. We need to send them a mail to renew its passwords and activate their accounts (the accounts are inactive by default, as they didn't give permission yet for the new site).

We prepared an Email Marketing Campaign to send a mail to this users with a link to renew its password. We encounter this difficulties:

  • Is it possible to send the campaign mail in batches? There are around 35k users.
  • The users have to be activated to receive a campaign mail. Is there any possibility to bypass this restriction? Or should we activate all these users to send the mail and inactive them again afterwards? Is so, which is the best way to do it?

​Regards,
Tomas


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Morten Bengtson Dynamicweb Employee
Morten Bengtson
Posted on 18/09/2020 17:50:35
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This post has been marked as an answer

Hi Tomas,

Batch emails

I'm not sure if batching is needed. You can always devide the users into groups if you like.

Make sure that you are using a pickup folder for sending the emails, so that Dynamicweb doesn't have to handle the actual sending but only generates the emails.
Alternatively you can use SendGrid or Mandrill as external delivery provider.

If something goes wrong during sending (timeout maybe) then it is possible to "retry" and then it should resume from where it left off.

For testing you can also try to configure a "Dynamicweb Save Provider" as delivery provider in Settings and then use that provider configuration in your email campaign. 
This allows you to generate all the emails and save them to a folder on disk without actually sending them.

Inactive users

As you have found out you can't do much with inactive users.

In order to send emails from Email Marketing the users have to be active and marked with "Email permission" .
In order for users to access their profile they also have to be active.

I would just activate all the users. I'm not an expert in legal issues, but they must have given some kind of permission on the existing website.
You can then send emails to the users where you ask them to renew their password, give consents and read about any changes to privacy policy, terms and conditions, etc.

See Extranet and Data Processing for details.

Best regards,
Morten

Votes for this answer: 1
 
Tomas Gomez
Posted on 21/09/2020 11:51:33
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Thanks Morten for your detailed explanation!

I understand to generate the mails with DW and use SendGrid or Mandrill to send them. Is it possible to send them with DW? (without being considered spam) Which is the maximum numbers of mails to do so? Why?

And about the activation of the users, we can do it in Users > MyGroup > [Select all usrs] > [Menu] Activate... but the page only displays 200 users so we have to do it 175 times as there are 35k users! Another way is changing the data in the database by Firehose, but we don't know if this is a safe procedure. Is there any other way?

Regards,
Tomas

 
Tomas Gomez
Posted on 24/09/2020 10:45:54
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Does anybody know about this?

 
Morten Bengtson Dynamicweb Employee
Morten Bengtson
Posted on 24/09/2020 12:07:41
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Hi Tomas,

Max number of mails

As far as I know the only hard limitation is the number of recipients allowed by the license (see Settings > System > License information). You can buy an add-on to your license if you need more recipients.

Avoid mails being considered spam

Whether mails are considered spam depends on the content and how mails are being sent over the network.
You should probably check the SPF records. See https://doc.dynamicweb.com/forum/rapido/rapido/mailing-goes-to-spam-folder

Activation of users

You can either import the users again as active or you can make all users active by executing a sql update.

/Morten

Votes for this answer: 1
 
Tomas Gomez
Posted on 25/09/2020 13:56:29
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Hi Morten,

Thanks again, now it's much more clear.

One last question: Are the notification mails taken into account (as the marketing mails) for the maximum limit of the licence? I mean, these mail notifications are not sent by the Marketing  module (actually it doesn't matter if the user "Email allowed" field is checked or not) so we are uncertain if they are considered mails. We have quite a lot notifications when changing the state of an order, so there might be a substantial quantity of them per month.

Should we consider the notifications to estimate the limit of the license or not? 

 

 
Nicolai Pedersen
Posted on 25/09/2020 16:10:51
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If you use email marketing, that license applies. If you use user management notifications, it is not email marketing, and license free.

 
Tomas Gomez
Posted on 28/09/2020 10:53:32
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Thanks Nicolai!

Is there any place where we can see the number of marketing emails sent along the current month? I mean, a faster way to estimate it instead or checking the logs at Files/System/Log/EmailMarketing/MessagingHandler/Events

Regards,
Tomas

 
Nicolai Pedersen
Posted on 28/09/2020 10:57:39
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This post has been marked as an answer

Hi Tomas

Email marketing is licensed on the number of subscribers, see price list under downloads section (Sales & Marketing).

You can see what is included in your current license and the number of email marketing users in the license page under settings: https://doc.dynamicweb.com/documentation-9/platform/platform-tools/license

BR Nicolai

Votes for this answer: 1
 
Tomas Gomez
Posted on 28/09/2020 11:11:41
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Thanks, I was confused about that.

 
Tomas Gomez
Posted on 28/09/2020 11:11:41
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