Content for Welcome Series

Rosie,

As a consultant for Convio I've built many of these. We have a lot of best-practices samples here: http://community.customer.convio.com/community/css/welcomeseries2010

If you would send your email to me at kgilliam@convio.com I have tons of customized welcome series messages I can share with you.

As for how many messages... It's really about the length of the initial time you want to spend aggressively cultivating your prospects while keeping them out of your regular email communication. I typically recommend one really good registration autoresponder, second message sent 7 days later that talks about the impact of your work and shares a "heart-string" story, and third message goes out 14 days after registrations... for this one I always like to go with introducing your CEO/ED or the "face" of your organization. Have them tell "how much they love" your organization.

I'm happy to share my recent examples.

Kent Gilliam

Interactive Consultant

Convio,Inc

Mathew Grimm:

What's a foolproof way to suppress any new recruits during the welcome series period? If I create a query/group that suppresses anyone that's registered in the last 14 days, for example, isn't is possible the newest recruits could get a normal message being sent if the suppression group doesn't rebuild just before the message is sent? (And group rebuilds for messages don't happen if it's been rebuilt in the last 24 hours.)

Thanks,

Mathew

Query-built groups always rebuild right before the send as long as you don't go in and try to manually rebuild them early. The best way to suppress your new recruits would be to create a "Suppress from WS" query-built group. You can always add groups to the query criteria that would create a group that you then choose to suppress when configuring the recurring send of your welcome series.

In all welcome series query configurations you should always have one more query-built group than you have messages:

- WS Message 1 Target Group

- WS Message 2 Target Group

- WS Suppression Group

Hope this helps.

Kent Gilliam

Interactive Consultant

Convio, Inc.

Kent Gilliam:

Query-built groups always rebuild right before the send as long as you don't go in and try to manually rebuild them early. The best way to suppress your new recruits would be to create a "Suppress from WS" query-built group. You can always add groups to the query criteria that would create a group that you then choose to suppress when configuring the recurring send of your welcome series.

In all welcome series query configurations you should always have one more query-built group than you have messages:

- WS Message 1 Target Group

- WS Message 2 Target Group

- WS Suppression Group

Hope this helps.

Kent Gilliam

Interactive Consultant

Convio, Inc.

Let's say you send out a message to half your list in the morning. The WS suppression group rebuilds automatically right before the message sends. Great. Now let's say you send another message to the other half of your list in the afternoon. Will the WS suppression group automatically rebuild and exclude anyone that's come onto the file since the morning? Or will it NOT rebuild because it's been less than 24 hours since it was rebuilt?

Thanks,

Mathew

Kent Gilliam:

Matthew,

A recurring send can only be scheduled for one delivery time per day so I'm not understanding how you are splitting up your WS sends. Are you doing them manually twice per day? Or do you have two separate messages? I'm not sure how you are segmenting a 50/50 send for one message using the same WS target group.

Kent

Sorry for the confusion. The other two sends were to the main list, supressing those in the WS.

For example...

9am - WS message goes out automatically.

10a - We send some action alert (nothing to do with the WS) to half our COMPLETE list, suppressing WS folks. The WS suppression group rebuilds automatically and the WS folks don't get it. Good.

3p - We send another action alert (nothing to do with the WS) to the other half of our COMPLETE list, suppressing the WS folks. Does the WS suppression group automatically rebuild? It hasn't been 24 hours since the last rebuild, just 5. If not, new folks that came onto the list between 10a and 3p will get this action alert.

Does that help clear up my question?

Thanks,

Mathew

Kent Gilliam:

Thanks for clarifying.

The system will always rebuild a query-built group before an email goes out if you check the box requesting it to be rebuilt. If you don't see that option and it says something like "recently rebuilt" that means that no new records have been created so the system sees that there is no need to run a new task before sending.

Does that help?

Kent

Yes, thank you. So "recently rebuilt" is not Convio stating that it's been less than 24 hours and that it won't rebuild the group -- it's saying there are absolutely no new records since the last rebuild?

Kent Gilliam:

Yes. That has always been what I was told even when I was on the client-side of Convio more than three years ago.

Ok, thanks!

Hi -- just piggybacking on this comment about "recently rebuilt", since I'm trying to navigate scheduling an email that is flagging a group rebuild as "No, recently rebuilt". It definitely has been recently rebuilt and up-to-date at the time of scheduling -- however, will it NOT attempt to rebuild between now and when the email is scheduled to go out, even if there are new members of the group in that time?

Kent Gilliam:

Mathew Grimm:

Yes, thank you. So "recently rebuilt" is not Convio stating that it's been less than 24 hours and that it won't rebuild the group -- it's saying there are absolutely no new records since the last rebuild?

Yes. That has always been what I was told even when I was on the client-side of Convio more than three years ago.

Hey there, everyone. I just wanted to make sure that this Community thread had this link of a post I posted in 2020 with some Welcome Series examples, in case you're looking for some on your side and you happened to find this post. https://community.blackbaud.com/forums/viewtopic/1/50495 I hope you find this post lijnk helpful. Thanks for stopping by.