In Scheduled emails, you can create and schedule emails to send to selected constituents at specific times. For example, to send each alumnus an email during the month of the individual’s birthday, you must first create a birthday email template. For information about how to create an email template, see Templates. Then you create a list based on an offline constituent query that contains constituents who are alumni and whose date of birth equals this month. For information about how to create a list, see Lists. The program merges the information in the list you selected with the merge fields in the birthday template. After you have a list and an email template, you can create a schedule for the process.
When you schedule an email, you determine how often you distribute the message. For messages that should be sent on a specific day, such as a particular holiday, you may want to schedule the email process to occur early in the morning so constituents receive the email on the same day. If you scheduled the process to run late at night, constituents may not receive the message until the following day.
Note: The time and time zone you select for the email process determine when the program sends the email job to the queue. It does not indicate when the messages will be sent. This is determined by the number of messages that have to be processed, the number of merge fields, and the number of existing email jobs that must process before your job can begin. For information about email status, see Email Delivery Status.
The email process runs on the scheduled day and time you select. If the list contains no records for the selected schedule, the program removes the scheduled job from the queue. If at any time you need to suspend a scheduled email, you can disable the schedule.