With the Mass Email functionality, you can send emails in bulk to your users directly from your LearnWorlds school. This tool simplifies the task by allowing you to apply specific filters and communicate with a substantial group of users who meet the specified criteria.
Some Use Case Scenarios include:
- Contacting inactive users. Learners who haven't logged in since a specific date or do not regularly study the material could end up dropping out of the course altogether.
- Promoting an important event that your school is hosting (either online or physically).
- Sharing a coupon (e.g. seasonal discounts such as Black Friday).
- Alerting users about any important modification that may disrupt their learning flow (e.g. reschedule of a live event).
- Following up with users who have previewed a free section of a Paid course, but did not purchase.
In this article, we will guide you through the steps of creating mass emails, exploring methods to analyze email metrics, and scheduling bulk emails for distribution to users.
Prerequisites of Mass Email Functionality
In order to use the Mass Email Functionality, you must address two essential prerequisites:
a. Whitelabel the sender email of your academy
This will ensure that the sender email for all emails from within your school matches your identity and brand. You can find more information on all the steps required to whitelabel your sender email, in this article.
b. Enable the user privacy settings
Triggering and sending out communication from within your school will also have to cover the right of your learners to unsubscribe. While creating your email, you can decide whether you want to include the option for your users to opt-out from future communications of the same category, announcements, and/or promotional material. To achieve this, you need to enable the respective learner privacy settings.
More specifically, for the mass emails functionality to be unlocked, you will have to navigate to Settings → School Settings → Privacy/GDPR and enable one of the two following data management options:
- GDPR compliance for all users, or
- Custom data privacy management, along with enabling the options for opting in for Marketing material and/or Email notifications, according to the email categories you will choose to send out to your users:
- enabling the Marketing opt-in only will enable sending out Promotional emails
- enabling the Opt in/out to receiving operational email announcements and notifications (c) option will enable sending out Announcements
This article provides more information about the email categories below and also explains how to set up the privacy settings.
Send a Mass Email
To start the process of creating and sending emails in bulk, navigate to Communication → Mass Emails and click New Email.
Step 1: Create your email
In this step, you can craft the content of the email you are about to schedule or send. You can define the email details:
1. Email Title
This is the email title you will see in the emails section, for this communication; you can use this internal title to distinguish each mass email in your communications log.
2. Sender Name
This is pre-filled with the name of your school, yet it’s editable per email while in this step of the wizard.
3. Sender Email
The sender's email address is pre-filled with the current email address in your email domain settings. You can still customize the prefix that will be used in this specific email you are creating.
4. "Reply To" email
The Reply To email is by default pre-filled with the current email address in your email domain settings, yet you can customize it according to your preferences.
5. Email Subject
This is the subject line of the email that will reach your students.
6. Email Content
This is the content of the email that will reach your students.
With the help of the AI (Artificial Intelligence) Assistant, you can generate notification emails from scratch. You can set the goal of the notification, keywords for the email notification, and the tone of voice (i.e. friendly), etc.
You can also make use of basic email formatting/editing options (incl. images and links) and include school-wide and user-related variables:
{{logo}} → school logo
{{school_name}} → school name
{{address}} → user email address
{{name}} → username
{{unsubscribe_link}} → link to unsubscribe from the mass emails
7. Test Email
You can send a test email to a valid, personal email address. This will enable you to preview and fine-tune the email content details before sending it to its intended audience.
The subject line of this test email will include a [test email] prefix, which will of course not be included in the actual mass email. Also note that when you click on an unsubscribe link from a test email, and you confirm the selection (assuming that you are logged in with the correct user and not your admin account), the privacy settings will indeed be updated.
8. Email Category (Announcements or Promotional Emails)
You can define whether the email will be an announcement for your academy or include promotional material. This option will reflect which privacy setting the user will opt out of, if they select to unsubscribe when receiving this email, as follows:
Announcements → This email category falls under the learner privacy setting about email notifications for their activity within the school. To ensure that users can receive these emails, please make sure the Opt in/out to receiving operational email announcements and notifications (c) option is enabled in your Privacy/GDPR settings.
Promotional emails → This email category falls under the learner privacy setting about marketing and promotional material. To ensure that users can receive these emails, please make sure the Opt in/out to receiving marketing communications (b) true option is enabled in your Privacy/GDPR settings.
Users who have already opted out from the respective privacy setting corresponding to the email category you have selected for a mass email, will not be included in the recipients of this communication.
Notes:
1. Users who receive the communication and click on the option to unsubscribe:
- Will be redirected to the platform where they will see a pop-up to confirm their choice of opting out from the respective email category.
- Can toggle on or off their privacy settings, which correspond to their preferences in terms of receiving email notifications, either announcements or promotional material, by navigating to their Profile Page → Edit → Privacy Settings.
2. You can choose to include or remove the {{unsubscribe_link}} variable from the content of your email, in case the option for learners to unsubscribe from communications you trigger does not apply to your business case or to a particular mass email you are creating and are about to schedule or send.
If you have already deleted it but want to reinstate it as an option, you can restore it by replacing the link in the link manager with this variable.
Step 2: Select the recipients of this email
In this step, you can define the list of recipients for this mass email, by selecting the target audience criteria from the available filters. You can narrow down your user base to the intended audience.
- In this step, you are defining the criteria that will determine the users from your user base that will be included in the recipients' list of this communication. Upon saving those criteria and before the actual email is sent, users who have already opted out from the privacy setting corresponding to the email category you have selected in the previous step, will not be included in the recipients of this communication.- When scheduling a new email, only users who meet the filter criteria at the time of creation will be shown as recipients. If new users meeting the criteria are added later, the Admin can edit the scheduled email and reapply the filter to update the recipient list. However, even if the Admin doesn't reapply the filter, the email will still be sent to all recipients who meet the filter criteria at the time of sending.
Step 3: Schedule or send
In this step, you need to select the time that the email will get fired (now or scheduled time with a specific date, time, and timezone). As soon as you select your preference, click Proceed.
- When scheduling an email, the final list of recipients will be created at that scheduled time, based on the criteria set in Step 2.Email Statistics
On your Mass Emails Page → Emails tab, you can view basic deliverability KPIs for the communication you have created and sent, such as:
- Title of the email (visible only to admins)
- Number of recipients
Recipients: All users that match the criteria set in the 2nd step of the wizard, the moment the email is actually being sent, excluding the ones who are already hard-bounced and the ones that have opted out of this email category (announcement or promotional email). - Successfully delivered emails
Delivered emails: Number of users the email was delivered to / Total number of recipients. - Number of opened emails
Opened emails: Number of users who opened the email / Number of users the email was delivered. - Number of users who clicked unsubscribe
- Number of users who marked the email as spam
- Name of the admin that initiated the Mass Email
- Τime that email was sent
- Actions such as previewing the Email template or duplicating the email configuration to resend it
You can also access the same Email Statistics by clicking on the available links under columns. The sidebar that will appear, consists of:
- Basic email information such as the title of the email, the date and time it has been sent, and the number of recipients
- A summary of all basic KPIs
- A search bar
- A drop-down filter based on the email deliverability status
- A table including:
→ The name of the user and the email of each selected recipient
→ The activity status, conveying the email deliverability status, per user with regards to this email
Moreover, you can view Hard or Soft bounced emails on your User Management Page.
Hard bounced: A hard bounce occurs when an email is permanently undeliverable due to reasons like an invalid recipient address (incorrect domain name, non-existent domain, or unknown recipient).
Soft bounced: A soft bounce occurs when the email address is confirmed as valid and the email successfully reaches the recipient's mail server. Nevertheless, it may bounce back due to typical issues such as the recipient's mailbox being full (exceeding their allotted storage), the server being offline, or the email message exceeding the recipient's inbox capacity.
Scheduled Emails
On your Mass Emails Page → Scheduled Emails tab, you can view information on when the emails are scheduled to be sent. Under actions, you can edit them if you wish, preview them, and even delete them.
The number of recipients here may change depending on the users that correspond to the user selection criteria you have determined in step 2 of the email creation process, as these criteria will be reapplied the moment the email is scheduled to be sent, respecting the users’ privacy settings at that moment too.Limits per Plan
Mass emails include a set number of credits per plan each month. For instance, if you are on the Pro Trainer yearly plan, you receive 2,000 email credits monthly, regardless of whether your subscription is yearly or monthly.
| Plan | Credits / Month |
| Trial | ❌ |
| Starter | ❌ |
| Pro trainer | 2.000 |
| Learning Center | 5.000 |
| High Volume | 10.000 |
You are able to see the remaining email credits (for each billing period) in the top right corner of the Mass Email page.
If you have used all your email credits when scheduled emails are about to be sent, then the scheduled communication will be canceled and will be depicted on the Email tab, with the respective, 'Cancelled' status.
- A best practice would be to avoid sharing too many emails with your recipients. You can give them some time to process the content of the emails and fire, for example, up to one email per week.
- Enhanced email templates in terms of design, typography, and layouts are currently unavailable. If you wish to use advanced templates or email variables, you can integrate with one of our supported email marketing tools.
- One credit is equivalent to one email. This means that if you send one email to one user you will consume one credit.
- If an instructor (who has the respective permissions) creates a mass email, then this will be delivered only to the users of the course they are assigned to.