Sending Your First Email: Part 4

Sending Your First Email

Day 8 brings the end of the first mini-series in the 25 Days of Sitecore EXM. Sending Your First Email which is designed to be a short, step by step guide for creating your first Sitecore Email Experience Manager message. Today we’ll be exploring the delivery options dispatching our Hello EXM World message in EXM.

Review Tab

Let’s start off by bringing our message back up! Picking up where we left off, the next tab to quickly review is the Review tab. This simple tab provides a space to send a test email, to one or more email addresses.

Entering in an email address and pressing the send button will send a test message to the email address provided.

Sending Test Emails

The biggest difference between sending a quick test message and sending a full dispatch is that the email links are not encrypted in a test email. More so, links are not touched at all in the test email. This allows you to see for sure which link is being encrypted. There is also no tracking or analytics are part of the test send.

Delivery Tab

The delivery tab is where the magic happens. We’ll review each numbered item below.

1. Schedule Delivery

These options are fairly easy to understand. You can dispatch the message now, or later at a specified time, or send the message recurring over and over again.

2. Notification

In the event of a large dispatch, you can include a comma-separated list of email addresses that will receive an email when the dispatch is complete (or fails).

3. Personalization

If the message includes component personalization (by way of the rules editor) then in order for EXM to process those rules, personalization must be checked.  This does not affect personalized token replacement.

4. Classification

New in Sitecore 9.1, is the addition of the message classification. Selecting this options turns a message into a service message that will bypass Sending Limits. We’ll explore sending limits late on in 25 Days of EXM.

5. Multi-Language Preferred

Select this check box to send the message in the preferred language of each recipient. Recipients, that do not have a preferred language specified, receive the message in the language that is currently the default language.
The default language is: English

6. Sending Mode: Emulation

This is a special function that will process all of the messages and recipients that are intended to be dispatched, but without actually sending the message to the designated recipients.

The Variant Variant

If you have variants in play, the Delivery tab is a little different. It’s expanded to include the rules for setting up the A/B test of the email dispatch.

You can set the size of the test to send and rules for selecting the winner, upon which it will resume sending to the rest of the recipients.

Ready For Dispatch

Once all of your settings on the delivery tab are selected appropriately, it’s time to dispatch! Simply click on the “Send Message” button, and Sitecore will begin it’s dispatch. When dispatching there are a few steps that EXM takes:

1. Initializing the dispatch
   1. This fires up the number of threads that are going to be used.
2. Contact Queueing
   1. Loads all of the contacts that are going to be recipients from the Included Lists into EXM Master database table.
3. Sending Dispatch
   1. The actual work of sending the dispatch through threads.

With small lists, this process is hard to see, and it could be that you go from Draft email to Sent in a matter of seconds after hitting the Send Message button.

Verifying Results

I use Mailtrap.io for local development. This allows EXM to be tested fully without having to worry about spamming peoples inboxes. Looking into my Mailtrap I see that we received our message!

Dispatch Complete! You did it!

Congratulations you have successfully sent your first message via Email Experience Manager thus completing the Sending Your First Email series! This was a super simple test, but if this works without an issue, you know that your EXM configuration and environment has been setup appropriately.

Don’t forget to register for my Sitecore EXM webinar on December 13 EXM Live! An Email Automation Experience!

Register for EXM Live! Webinar

Tagged as: 25days, EXM

Categorised in: EXM, Sitecore