Nucleus Messages (An Overview)

Nucleus Messages harnesses the power of email and offers you the ability to create various Campaigns to meet your communication needs.

Email campaigns in Nucleus are a fantastic way to send one-off, scheduled, or automated sequences of emails to a specific audience. By using your Nucleus People database (or importing your own list of names and addresses) you can make sure no one misses an announcement or time sensitive information again.

In this guide, we'll cover the following topics. Click on any one to jump ahead.

Why Email & Not Text Messaging?

While you might think that email is an outdated form of communication, it continues to be one of the most used methods to share information and updates with your audience. Email addresses are also one of the first pieces of contact information most people are comfortable with sharing, making email one of the easiest points of contact, in contrast with a phone number.

Not only this, but more laws and regulations are regularly being put in place that make it increasingly difficult to send SMS text messages en masse through a campaign/subscription based model.

Because of this, emails continue to be the better approach when needing to send information and updates en masse, whether it be one-off, or in a scheduled or sequential manner.

Unlimited Email Campaigns

Do we really mean that? Yes, we do!

Nucleus Messages allows you to create unlimited Message Campaigns, and unlimited emails within each Campaign. So you don’t need to worry about storage or limits and having to pay additional fees if you reach/go over those limits.

That being said, it’s wise to not abuse the system or your congregation, spamming them with a million emails just because you can 😅 No one likes receiving emails they don’t need, and you certainly don’t want to rack up a high unsubscribe rate, lest people begin missing out on actual important updates and information. So as long as you’re thoughtful when creating your Campaigns and emails, you’ll be just fine.

Immediately, Scheduled, Or Evergreen Automation

Nucleus Messages provides you with three options within a Campaign:

  • Send a message immediately.
  • Schedule messages to send later at specific dates and times
  • Create an automated sequence of messages to start sending at the moment a new subscriber joins your audience, with specific minute, hour, or day delays from when they join!
Sending A Message Immediately

Sometimes you just need to send out an email to a group of people pronto, stat, right now! Perhaps there’s been a change in plans for an upcoming event and you need to let everyone attending know about it. Or maybe you want to send out a reminder email to your small group when you’re meeting next, and it’s an email you never scheduled in advance.

Whatever the case may be, Nucleus Messages is there for those immediate email needs.

Schedule A Message To Send Later

Nucleus Messages also lets you create a bunch of emails to send at specific dates (and times!). This is super helpful for when you have pieces of information to send out in bite-sized, digestible chunks; or when you need to send several reminders leading up to a certain date.

For instance, if you have an upcoming event, you might want to curate a Campaign with several emails leading up to the event. This could consist of schedules, reminders, PSA’s, FAQ’s, and other important pieces of information that will benefit all those planning on attending the event.

Or perhaps you have a one-off message you need to send to your volunteers, but so they don’t forget about (as volunteers sometimes do 😆), you want to send it close to when they’re volunteering. Scheduling a single message to send in the future is a great option.

Automated Evergreen Sequences

Have you ever entered your email address when signing up for a product or program, and then started receiving a sequence of emails, beginning with a welcome message and continuing on with emails pertaining to that specific product/program? That’s an automated evergreen sequence. This might be most recognized when you sign up for free trials of products, or perhaps with something like a workout program with a specific goal to achieve in a certain amount of time.

The same type of automated email process can be an effective tool in the church as well! Imagine having a preset number of emails to send to new visitors who fill out an I’m New Flow. They can receive a welcome email, and then a follow-up email a 3 days later, and then another email 5 days later after that, and then another, and another…well, you get the point 😆

You can use this automation to help new visitors become familiar with your church’s mission, programs and groups offered, connection and volunteer opportunities, and more! And this way, you don’t accidentally miss anyone who submits an I’m New Flow and no one slips through the cracks.

And this is just one example of how you can use automated evergreen sequences. Think of the possibilities with following up with people signing up for volunteer opportunities, or parents who sign their children up for a group/program. You can provide important information and answer FAQ’s in bite-sized emails in a timely and scheduled manner to anyone who fills out those Flows.

The best way to utilize automated evergreen sequences is pairing it with a Dynamic Audience pulling from a specific Flow. You can take a look at that below.

Create & Define Unique Audiences

No matter what kind of Campaign you’re creating, you can generate a specific audience of subscribers in three distinct ways:

  1. Manual Audience
  2. Fixed Audience
  3. Dynamic Audience

First and most simply, you can create a Manual Audience, meaning you can add in all your subscribers one at a time, or in bulk.

Or you can create a Fixed Audience. This means anyone that currently matches the rule of where to pull your audience from, will be added to your subscriber list immediately, but anyone in the future who matches that specific rule will not be added as a subscriber. This helps you limit your audience to a certain group from a certain point in time.

To make sure anyone who currently matches the rule of where you’re pulling your audience from and ALSO who matches it in the future, you’ll want to select a Dynamic Audience.

Note: You can always select a fixed or dynamic audience and then manually add subscribers (one at a time - or in bulk) later on if you need to.

When choosing a fixed or dynamic audience, you can pull subscribers from four different areas of your Nucleus:

  1. a Connection Type
  2. a People List
  3. a Flow, or 
  4. a Giving Fund

To learn more about Connection Types and custom People Lists, and how to add people to those lists, click here.

As an example, selecting a Fixed Audience associated with a particular Giving Fund, you could easily send everyone who donated to that particular fund a unique thank-you message. Perhaps it was a fund for a specific project or fundraiser. You can also use this method to notify those particular Givers about an update of how much was raised, and how those funds are making a difference in people’s lives.

As mentioned earlier, by selecting a dynamic audience associated with a particular Flow, you can send all new visitors who fill out an “I’m New Flow” an automated sequence of emails that provides them with opportunities for connection and ways to get to know your church more.

Or if you have a standard method of processing volunteer applications, you can have a preset automated sequence of emails sent to anyone who fills out your Volunteer Flow that provides them with instructions, information, and any forms that need to be filled out.

Note: You cannot change the type of Audience on a Campaign once it’s been selected, so make sure you’re confident with your selection before saving and moving on. Of course, as mentioned above, you can always manually add additional subscribers, but you cannot switch between a fixed or dynamic audience, nor can you change a manually created Audience to be fixed or dynamic from a particular list or Flow.👉 That being said, you can always duplicate a Campaign, which will require you to create a new Audience. So, if you have all your emails already created, but want to change your Audience, duplicating the Campaign is an easy way to accomplish this.

Use Messages To Prompt Profile Creation

As discussed in our How People Records (Profiles) Are Created guide, there are two types of people records:

  • Digitally created
  • Manually created

Whenever someone interacts with your Nucleus products and submits information, they create a digital person record. This helps to populate your people database without the need to manually create people records.

Manually creating records should only be used for those people you know won’t ever interact with your digital Next Steps platform, Nucleus. (You know who they are 😉) This helps to ensure that you don’t end up with duplicate records, one manually created and then one digitally created.

A great way to help build and update your people database, is to use Nucleus Messages to send an email Campaign to your church, notifying them what Nucleus is and how your church is adopting a new Next Steps platform on your website. In doing so, you can instruct people to fill out a Flow that uses Smart Contact or even request to access your church’s Prayer Wall. This will help ensure your people database is filled with digitally created records tied to real people in your church, rather than a bunch of manually created records.

We’ve put together a template email Campaign in our Nucleus Rollout Guide. We’d highly recommend checking that out if you’re just getting started with your Nucleus people database.

GDPR & Unsubscribe Options

While we are a non-European company whose primary market is Canada and the United States (meaning that GDPR does not directly apply to us), we understand privacy of information is of the utmost importance. As such, we do follow best information privacy practices, which you can always review by visiting our policies here. 

Moreover, when it comes to sending emails en masse and creating Campaigns with an audience of subscribers, it’s vital to ensure that an Unsubscribe from this list option is always available at the bottom of each email sent. Thankfully, this is always taken care of automatically by Nucleus, so you never need to worry about someone being unable to remove themselves from an Audience you’ve created.

Though, the hope is that you’ve curated an Audience where the majority of people want to be subscribed to the emails you’re sending. 

So as stated earlier in this guide, just be mindful when creating your Audience to ensure a low rate of unsubscribe clicks. Click here to learn more about managing Audiences & subscribers.

What Next?

Nucleus Messages is directly tied to your people database. If you’re unfamiliar with Nucleus People, how people records are created, and how to manage and organize people into lists, click below to view some helpful guides:

If you’re all set on how the Nucleus People database works, click below to learn how to create your Message Campaigns:

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