Consolidate Workflow Email Actions - Delegates

About consolidating Delegate-based emails:

1 About Consolidate Emails
2 Planning your Consolidated Email Templates
3 Create your Consolidated Email Template
4 Update your Workflow Action
5 FAQs

Related Help Guide Pages

Related Resources

https://www.accessplanit.com/en-gb/webinars/consolidated-emails

https://www.accessplanit.com/en-gb/webinars/consolidate-emails

https://www.accessplanit.com/en-gb/webinars/consolidate-emails-qanda

This guide will show you how to set up your Delegate-based Workflows to send a single, consolidated, email about multiple Delegates.

Consolidated emails are generated when a recipient was due to receive more than one email for the same Workflow Action.

Instead of receiving multiple emails, they can instead receive a single, consolidated email, this means that you can communicate more efficiently with your customers and your team!

When a customer books several Delegates onto a Course, without Consolidated Emails, they would receive a course confirmation email for each individual Delegate that they booked. The same goes for all the follow up emails that you need to send such as course reminders, venue updates, and course completion certificates. If your customer booked 5 or more Delegates onto the Course, that is a lot of emails filling up their inbox for each update!

This is where the Consolidate Email options in your accessplanit platform come in handy! When the same email is generated for multiple Delegates, going to the same recipient email address, then these emails can be consolidated into one. Meaning that your customer will only receive one email, with the details of the multiple Delegates included within it!

consolidate email options available in the platform

Follow this page to learn more about how to consolidate emails about multiple Delegates into one email!

About Consolidate Emails

Consolidate Emails is available for each of your Delegate-based Workflow Actions.

It works by combining what would have been individual emails for each Delegate, into one email!

For example, if a booker has booked James, Jennifer, and Jaq onto a 'Safety at Heights' course which runs on 15th February, without Consolidate Emails the booker would receive three Course Confirmation emails - they would receive an email for James, another for Jennifer, and a final one for Jaq. With Consolidate Emails, they will receive one comprehensive email about all three Delegates.

When you decide to set up a Workflow Email to consolidate multiple emails together, you can decide:

How your emails will be grouped for their consolidation
For example, group all the Delegates booked onto the same Course into one email, group all the Delegates booked at the same Venue into one email
What you would like your consolidated emails to contain and look like
You can define a separate Email Template to be used when your emails are consolidated
What time frame should be used to look for emails to be consolidated together
You can choose how many minutes your platform should wait, to see if any more Delegates should be included in the email, before it sends

Planning your Consolidated Email Templates

Merge fields behave differently when they are sent for a single Delegate vs multiple Delegates. It is important for you to learn how merge fields work when emails are consolidated, so that you can choose how you would like to format them and know how your emails will look when they are delivered!

When your platform recognises that multiple emails have met the criteria to be consolidated, there will be a check on each merge field that is included in the email.

If the merge field content is the same in all of the emails that are going to be consolidated, then the merge field will only be displayed once
If the merge field content is different across the emails that are going to be consolidated, then the merge field will be displayed as a comma separated list

For example, if a Booking User has booked James, Jennifer, and Jaq onto a 'Safety at Heights' course which runs on 15th February. A consolidated email about these three Delegates would check all of the merge fields that are included in the email.

The merge field for ‘CourseOrAliasName’ will only be displayed once, whereas the merge field for the ‘DelegateForename’ is displayed multiple times (one merge field for each Delegate Name).

Example Email Template:	Example Email:

As you can see in the example above, the Booker Name, the Course Name, and the Course Dates are only listed in the email once! Whereas the merge field for the Delegate names ‘@@CandidateForename’ has been changed into a comma separated list to include each unique name.

Please note

This means that if two people called ‘John' are booked onto a Course, based on the example email above the name 'John’ will only be listed once.

Sometimes it is not appropriate to use commas to format the merge fields, for example if you want to include multiple merge fields containing Delegate information, such as their first name, last name, and their status on the Course.

In the below example, there are three Delegates that all been booked onto a Course together, they are called James Jones, Jennifer Peters, and Jaq Smith, they all have the status of ‘Booked’.

Example Email Template:

Example Email:

As you can see from the example above, by just using the default settings, the email has first listed the three forenames (James, Jennifer, Jaq), then listed the three surnames (Jones, Peters, Smith), then it included the status of ‘Booked’ just once because all three Delegates have this status and it is therefore the only unique value for status.

This isn’t ideal and could be quite confusing to the recipient!

This is where you can add extra formatting to your email template, to get your merge fields to display how you want them to.

This is the more common way to lay out your Delegate information, giving you the ability to display multiple properties together and choose how they are formatted.

Extra formatting is all managed using the symbols: @@[ ]

You then add the Delegate merge fields, any additional text, and any punctuation that you want to be included between the two square brackets.

For example:
@@[@@CandidateForename @@CandidateSurname (@@Status) ]
This would generate:
James Jones (Booked) Jennifer Peters (Booked) Jaq Smith (Booked)

If you would like to include a new line after each Delegate, make sure you press 'Shift' on your keyboard when you press 'Enter', to make a new line rather than a new paragraph.

Here are examples of how you can format your merge fields to display the details of multiple Delegates clearly within your emails.

No formatting

This example contains no formatting, and we get a list of Delegate forenames, following by a list of Delegate surnames, followed by the status of the Delegates on the Course (this is only displayed once because it is the same for all the Delegates).

The merge fields have been added to the Email Template as:

@@CandidateForename @@CandidateSurname (@@Status)

Example Email Template:	Example Email:

Display Delegate full names in a list with a comma between them

In this example we have introduced some formatting to display the Delegate forename and the Delegate surname together with a comma and a space added to the end of each Delegate.

Please note that with this approach a comma is added to the end of each Delegate name, including the last one.

The merge fields have been added to the Email Template as:

@@[@@CandidateForename @@CandidateSurname, ]

Example Email Template:	Example Email:

Display each Delegate name on a new line, and include their status in brackets

This example has both the Delegate forename and the Delegate surname displayed together, followed by the Delegate’s status on the Course in brackets, each Delegate is listed on a new line.

Please note that there has been a new line added after the (@@Status) before the square brackets are closed. New lines should be added by pressing 'Shift' on your keyboard when you press 'Enter', this makes a new line rather than a new paragraph.

The merge fields have been added to the Email Template as:

@@[@@CandidateForename @@CandidateSurname (@@Status)
]

Example Email Template:	Example Email:

Display Delegate Details in a table

This example displays a table of Delegate information, there are two columns with the first containing the Delegate forename and surname, the second containing their status on the Course.

If you choose to include tables for your consolidated merge fields, we strongly recommend only including two to three columns of information to avoid the text wrapping onto new lines when it is displayed on a small screen.

The merge fields have been added to the Email Template in the first table column as:

@@[@@CandidateForename @@CandidateSurname
]

and within the second table column as:

@@[@@Status
]

Example Email Template:	Example Email:

Once you have decided how you would like to format and display your Delegate details in your consolidated emails, you are ready to create your Email Templates!

Create your Consolidated Email Template

This section walks through creating and testing a consolidated Email Template

Consolidated Email Templates are added and edited from the same page in the platform as standard Email Templates

Open the ‘Administration’ menu from the Profile options at the top-right of your platform, click the ‘Email Templates’ menu option to access the Email Templates DataGrid.

Creating a Consolidated Email Template

We recommend using your standard Email Template as a basis for your Consolidated Email Template, that way you can be sure that when the email is consolidated there will not be any missing information that is included when the email is not consolidated, here are the steps:

Find your existing standard Email Template by applying filters and/or searching the Email Templates DataGrid
Right-click on the Email Template, and select ‘Edit’ from the context menu options
Take a note of the Module assigned to the Email Template
Highlight and copy the entire contents of the body
Close this Email Template
Click to Add a new Email Template
Provide your Email Template with a name and include the word ‘Consolidated’
Select the same module that was selected for the standard Email Template
Provide your email with a Subject
Paste your copied email body into the ‘Body'
Update the content of the email to cater for multiple Delegates being listed within it, using your choice of formatting/layout to display the Delegate merge fields
Click 'Save & Close'

Testing your Consolidated Email Template

Before you update your Workflow to send your consolidated Email Template, first test that your email displays as expected when it send.

From your Email Templates DataGrid, click to ‘Edit’ your Consolidated Email Template
Click the ‘Preview’ button at the bottom of the window
Select multiple Delegates to preview your Email Template with
Please note: If you will be ‘grouping’ your consolidated Delegate emails by Course (this is the most common choice), you should select multiple Delegates that are on the same Course when previewing your email
Review the preview to check that your merge fields all display as expected
Send a copy of the email to your inbox to check that the email displays as expected

Once you are happy with your consolidated email template, you can move onto updating your Workflow Action to send your consolidated Email Template!

Update your Workflow Action

This section explains where you can find the Consolidate Email options to send your Consolidated Email Template automatically, and what they are all for.

The Consolidate Email options can all be found when you are adding or editing a Workflow Email Action, this means that you can update any of your existing Workflow Email Actions to support Consolidating Emails!

When you set your Workflow Action to support consolidating emails, then you will be able to select which Email Template you use for standard emails (an email about a single Delegate) and you will be able to select a different Email Template for your consolidated emails (an email about multiple Delegates).

Here are the steps and available settings for consolidating emails:

Open the ‘Administration’ menu from the Profile options at the top-right of your platform
Open the ‘Workflow Templates’ menu option to access the page where you can manage your Workflows
Find the Workflow that you’d like to support consolidated emails by applying filters and/or searching the DataGrid
Right-click on the Workflow, and select ‘Actions’ from the context menu options
Click to ‘Edit’ the Workflow Action
Check the 'Consolidate multiple emails together for the same recipient' option
This option activates the consolidate email functionality for this Workflow Action
If this option is not checked, then the other Consolidate Email options will be hidden
Select a ‘Timeframe to consolidate emails’
This option is where you define how long your Workflow Email will wait to see if Delegates should be consolidated into an email together.
When a Delegate meets the rules of the Workflow and they are ready to receive their email, the Workflow will wait for the timeframe to see if any other Delegates meet the rules for this email recipient. If there are other Delegates, they will be consolidated into one email together. Otherwise the email will send after the timeframe. Any additional Delegates added after the timeframe has passed will be included on a different email.
1. We recommend using the ‘5 minutes’ option for any Delegate emails where it may take several minutes to process a large volume of Delegates, for example Course Confirmations, and Course Cancellations.
2. The ‘1 minute’ option is recommended for any Delegate emails that are triggered based on x days or hours before/after the Course, for example Course Reminders.
Select how you would like your consolidated emails to be grouped using the ‘Group consolidated emails by’ option, here are some example for how you could group:
1. If you leave this option blank, all Delegates who match your Workflow’s criteria within your chosen time period will be grouped together in one email
2. If you group by 'Course ID', the recipient will receive separate emails for each course, listing the Delegates for each course (this is the most commonly selected option)
3. If you group by 'Venue ID', the recipient will receive separate emails for each venue, listing the Delegates booked for each course at that venue.
Select the consolidated Email Template that you created earlier as the ‘Consolidated Email Template’
Click ‘Save' to confirm your changes and support consolidated emails with this Workflow Action

FAQs

How do attachments work on consolidated emails?

Documents attached to your email from your 'Files' will only attach to your consolidated emails once, for example Terms and Conditions documents
Document Template attachments would all be attached for each Delegate, for example a certificate attachment would include a certificate per Delegate on the email, please note that if the attachments would cause the email size to exceed 20MB then the email will be split to ensure each sent email is under 20MB and be able to be received by the major email clients

Please Note
When previewing a Consolidated Email within a Workflow, any File attachments will appear duplicated for each Delegate in the preview. Don’t worry, when the email is actually sent, each attachment from Files will only be included once.

How to embedded links (such as certificate links, and eLearning launch links) work in consolidated emails?
Your embedded links are specific to each Delegate, therefore they should be included within your @@[] merge field formatting.
Here is an example of a consolidated Email Template with certificate links per Delegate: