Using a mailing to track emails sent via Mailchimp or Constant Contact

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Once you send an email from Mailchimp or Constant Contact, you may want to record a copy of it in your LGL account. This article explains a way to achieve that, but first please note that in many cases doing this is not advisable.

Your Little Green Light account is designed to help you manage individual and personalized relationships. Saving copies of every general monthly email that someone received, which also went in identical form to hundreds of other recipients, does not add much value in nurturing that relationship. Generally speaking, looking at the mailing list you used to create your email can show you who received it.

However, in cases where you need to store a copy of your Mailchimp or Constant Contact mailing in each recipient's LGL record, here are instructions you can follow.

Create a mailing

This will be a dummy mailing. You aren't ever going to send it. It will simply give you a way to save the email you want to track to the recipients' records.

Select your email recipients

In the mailing, search for the recipients who received your email blast. For example, if your email went to your top 100 donors, select that same list here.

Also, uncheck the Exclude "Do not mail" and Exclude invalid addresses boxes. Those settings have to do with physical mailing restrictions, not email restrictions.

Copy the contents of the email into the mailing

Copy and paste the content from your newsletter into the Letter Content window. The formatting probably won't be perfect, but this mailing won't go out to anyone, so that shouldn't matter too much.

Name your mailing

Choose a name for your dummy mailing.

Mark your mailing "Sent"

Confirm and save your mailing, and then mark it as "Sent" (without ever printing or sending anything, of course).

Caveats

Keep in mind that the recipient list for this dummy mailing might not match the list of people who actually received the email you sent from Mailchimp or Constant Contact. These situations can cause this to occur:

  • They might be unsubscribed from your email list
  • The email might have bounced (is undeliverable)

In addition, if you have the LGL Direct Email integration turned on, you might be tempted to use the Send email option as a way of creating your dummy mailing. We strongly discourage this, because it would be too easy to accidentally click Queue for sending and actually send that email blast out to everyone. Using the physical mail merge prevents any accidental sends.

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