Creating a mailing is the driving force of Communications Professional. Before jumping in, however, it's important to first coordinate the steps you plan to take to ensure Communications Professional is optimized for your use and for the betterment of your organization.
So, before diving into using the Mailing Designer to create a mailing, let's consider two specific important initial steps: planning and coordination.
Planning
While the process of creating, testing, and sending a mailing is easy, a little bit of planning goes a long way in your overall email marketing approach.
The amount of planning you need may vary from mailing to mailing (e.g., a small, daily update likely needs less planning than a quarterly newsletter with a variety of stories, authors, and reviewers). The takeaway here is to develop a planning process that ensures that everyone involved in the production process understands his or her role, the mailing timelines, and expected conversions or goals to attain.
Coordination
If you have multiple people sending mailings in your organization, you’ll want to ensure adequate coordination is built in to the process so that everyone understands the publication schedule. Many organizations use spreadsheets, SharePoint sites, or even web-based project management applications to facilitate this communication.
Communications Professional includes tools like the tentative send date and the mailing calendar to help everyone stay organized and on track. Additionally, if you have multiple Communications Professional accounts, you can use a rolled-up view of all your child accounts in the parent account.
Mailing Designer versions
First and foremost, it's important to understand there are two versions of Mailing Designer: Mailing Designer 1 (MD1) and Mailing Designer 2 (MD2). They both enable you to fulfill your communications strategy by creating, testing, and sending mailings, as well as obtaining reporting metrics. At its most basic, Mailing Designer 2 is simply a newer, more streamlined experience, and is the version all new clients to Higher Logic receive.
Refer to the section below appropriate for the designer your organization uses. Included are links to additional articles to learn more.
MD1
The MD1 interface is shown below. Refer to this section of our knowledge base to learn more about creating and managing mailings with MD1.
MD2
The MD2 interface is shown below. Refer to this section of our knowledge base to learn more about creating and managing mailings with MD2.
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