Emailing an organisation's representative contacts

When an email campaign is aimed at organisations rather than people, SwiftFox needs to know which actual person at each organisation should receive it. Representative contact is where you answer that: you choose the roles you want to reach, and decide whether each organisation gets one email or one per role.

It sits on the Recipients step, under Audience, when you build a campaign — see The campaign builder — Campaign, Recipients, Design & Schedule (Document ID: 84).

When the panel appears

Two things have to be true before the Representative contact panel appears:

• the campaign's Recipient list is a list of organisations, not of people; and
• your account has at least one representative role configured — see Roles and titles, address tags & category types (Document ID: 336).

On a campaign aimed at a list of people the panel does not appear at all, because every recipient is already a person.

The roles you can choose from are the ones your account has configured, and the people who fill them come from each organisation's own role records. See Roles and relationships (two-way People to Organisations) (Document ID: 291) for how a person is linked to an organisation in a role, and Roles and titles, address tags & category types (Document ID: 336) for where the roles themselves are set up.

Choosing the roles

Until you choose any roles the panel reads No roles selected and offers a Select roles button.

1. On the Recipients step, find the Representative contact panel under Audience. It explains itself in one line: Choose which representative contacts at each org receive the email.
2. Select Select roles. The Edit contacts drawer opens, headed with the line Select the roles to contact and choose how the email is sent.
3. Under Send to, choose how the email is distributed — One, with fallbacks or All selected roles. The two behave very differently; they are described below.
4. Tick the roles you want to reach.
5. Select Apply, or Cancel to close without keeping your changes.

Once roles are applied, the panel shows a toggle (switched on) and each chosen role as a chip, with a pencil icon beside them that reopens Edit contacts. The toggle switches representative targeting on and off.

The two Send to options

This is the setting that decides how many emails each organisation receives, and it is the one to get right.

One, with fallbacks is selected to begin with.

One, with fallbacks — the priority order

In this option the ticked roles are ranked, and the ranking is what the fallback follows. Each ticked role carries a chip showing its place — Priority 1, Priority 2, and so on — while roles you have not ticked show Not included. Drag a role by its handle to change where it sits in the order.

SwiftFox tries Priority 1 at each organisation first. If nobody holds that role there, it tries Priority 2, and so on down the list.

At the foot of the Edit contacts drawer, under Always ends with, sits Primary contact, marked Fallback. It is fixed and cannot be unticked or reordered: if none of your chosen roles is filled at an organisation, the email goes to that organisation's primary contact. That is what stops an organisation being missed altogether.

All selected roles — no ranking, and no fallback

Choosing All selected roles changes the drawer in three ways worth knowing before you send:

• The Priority chips disappear, and so do the drag handles. There is no order, because every ticked role is emailed.
• The Always ends with — Primary contact row disappears entirely. There is no primary-contact fallback in this option.
• An organisation where none of your chosen roles is filled therefore receives nothing at all. Empty roles are skipped rather than falling through to anyone else.

If you need the certainty that every organisation is reached, use One, with fallbacks. Use All selected roles when the point is that several people at the same organisation each need their own copy — for example a notice that both the finance contact and the events contact have to act on.

Personalising the email

Open the merge field menu in a text block on the Design step to see which fields your account offers for an organisation-targeted campaign — see Merge fields & personalisation (Document ID: 76).

Things to watch

• A representative role has to be selected, not typed. A free-text role with the same name as a representative role is not one, and will not be picked up when you target representatives.
• One person per organisation holds each representative role, so each organisation has exactly one current holder of a given role, or none.
• If a role you selected is later removed in Settings, the campaign warns you that a selected representative role no longer exists. Reopen the role picker and choose again before sending.

Before you send

• Check the option, not just the roles. The same set of ticked roles sends one email per organisation under one option and several under the other.
• In All selected roles, think about who is missed. Organisations with none of your roles filled get nothing, silently. If that matters, either use One, with fallbacks or build a list that excludes those organisations.
• In One, with fallbacks, check the order. The order is the message: whoever sits at Priority 1 is who normally hears from you.
• The roles shown are your account's own. Examples such as Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Finance Contact or Events Contact are whatever your account has configured, not a standard SwiftFox set.

Related

• The campaign builder — Campaign, Recipients, Design & Schedule (Document ID: 84)
• Merge fields & personalisation (Document ID: 76)
• Roles and relationships (two-way People to Organisations) (Document ID: 291)
• Roles and titles, address tags & category types (Document ID: 336)