How to send an e-mail to a group of clients using a template.

There might be occasions where you wish to send a message, generated using a message template, to a group of your clients in a way that is in no way connected to your Glide jobs. For example you may wish to alert your payroll clients to an upcoming change in the national minimum wage, regardless of whether they have an active payroll job or not. Another example would be to alert VAT clients to a change in VAT rate, you might want to send this to all clients regardless of whether they have a VAT job active.

For these purposes we have the concept of a client message template. To create a client message template follow these steps:

1. Click on the menu labelled with your business name.
2. Click on Messaging centre.
3. Click on Template editor.
4. Scroll down past Job related messages until you see Client messages - click on the green button labelled New client template.
5. Create your template and save it. Don't forget to use images, links and dynamic links if required.

Client template can merge in your client data including any custom fields and your recipient data. You can not merge in job related data such as job dates, deadlines etc as these require a job link and so are available on job message templates which are sent either via a workflow action or an alert.

To send messages based upon your new template to a group of clients you would follow the steps outlined further down in this article. Firstly you will likely want to ensure you have tagged your intended recipients with a unique tag so that you can target this tag when sending. This will ensure that you only send your message to the clients that need to receive it, as opposed to all of your clients.

Your tag might already exist, if you need to create a new one then follow the steps in this article.

Next ensure you have applied this tag to the appropriate clients/contacts, follow the steps in this article if you need to do this.

Now you are ready to send the client message in bulk, to do so follow these steps:

1. Click on the menu labelled with your business name.
2. Click on Clients.
3. If applicable apply filters such as client type to reduce the number of clients that the message will be sent to.
4. Click on the green Show button alongside Bulk operations (if it is not already expanded).
   1. In the top dropdown choose your template.
   2. In the bottom dropdown choose a tag.
   3. Click the green Execute button to send.
5. This will respect your global and template specific settings to decide whether to send immediately or to queue the messages.