Create & Send Emails (In 3 Distinct Ways)

Once you’ve created a Campaign, you can begin writing your emails to send within your Campaign.

Nucleus Messages provides 3 distinct ways of sending and managing your emails (including one-off emails), giving you all the scheduling tools you need to establish a successful communication Campaign to a targeted audience in your church. 

Let’s explore what each of these 3 ways are (as well as a bonus fourth type of message 👀)

To begin, go to your Messages in Nucleus People, and then select Campaigns. Click here for a quick link. Next, click to View the Campaign you want to add emails to. This will bring you to your Emails (as noted in the left sidebar). 

Note: If you haven’t yet defined your audience you’ll be prompted to do that first

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

One-Off Emails (Immediate & Scheduled)

The first two types of emails are managed in the same tab: Send & Schedule.

Here, you can create emails and choose to send them immediately or schedule them to send at a future date and time.

1. Scheduling Emails To Send In The Future

This is a helpful option to ensure people receive emails at times they are most likely to check their inbox and read their emails. For instance, you could schedule an email to send early in the morning so your audience sees it at the top of their inbox when they first wake up. That could help you increase the number of people who view your email (when compared to sending it, say, in the middle of a workday or on a weekend evening).

Or perhaps you have a newsletter that sends out on the same day each week or month. Scheduling this in advance to send on that specific day can be helpful to ensure you don’t need to be behind the screen crafting the newsletter on the day it needs to be sent out.

2. Sending An Immediate Email

And then, of course, there are moments when you need to send an email right now as soon as you’re done writing it. You know, the way we all used to have to do email.

Maybe an emergency has come up or there’s inclement weather, and you need to cancel a ministry gathering on a particular night of the week. Sending an email immediately could be helpful to notify everyone involved in that ministry that it’s been canceled. (By the way – This example would work super well hand-in-hand with creating a Banner on your website to also announce the cancellation there. Click here to learn more about Banners.)

Time Delayed Emails

3. Evergreen, Automated Sequences

This third type of email is managed in the Automated Sequence tab.

Here, you can create a series of messages that you can schedule to send on a time delay. This is most helpful when paired with a Dynamic Audience. As each new person is added to the Audience, they are sent the first email scheduled in the sequence, and then every email after that sent on according to the delays you set up.

Automated sequences - sometimes referred to as evergreen campaigns - ensure that everyone who joins your Campaign, receives all the same messages, in the same order, with the same amount of time delay between each message. If instead you just created a number of scheduled emails to send out on specific dates and times and some emails had  already been sent out before a new Subscriber was added to that campaign, that new subscriber wouldn’t receive any of the previously sent messages. Automated (Evergreen) Sequences eliminates that problem so everyone gets all the messages you created.

Here’s a great example of how automated sequences can be helpful in your church: create a Dynamic Audience, sourced from those who fill out an “I’m New” Flow. Visitors who submit that Flow can receive a welcome email (more on that below) 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! 

This eases the burden on staff and pastors, so you don’t accidentally miss anyone who submits an I’m New Flow, and no one slips through the cracks without at least some acknowledgement and additional info.

Pro Tip: If you set up an automated sequence to welcome and orient new visitors to your church, make sure a staff member or volunteer gets alerted about their Flow submission so they can personally connect as well.

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.

And again, it’s important with all emails (but especially automated sequences) to think of the person on the receiving end. Imagine if you would be pleased receiving the number of emails and amount of information you’re planning to send, in your inbox. Turns out, following the golden rule applies to email campaigns as well, and keeps your communications from being perceived as annoying, too frequent, or spammy (which makes people unsubscribe anyways, so it’s not good for you or them if they no longer want to hear from you because it’s a bit too much).

Campaign Welcome Emails

4. An Introductory Message To New Subscribers

The fourth (bonus!) type of email is managed in the Welcome Email tab.

While in the other tabs, you can write as many emails as you’d like, here, you can only write one welcome email.

Welcome emails are a fantastic, super quick way to help introduce new Subscribers to the type of content they will be receiving in the future from the Campaign.

Alternatively, you can use the welcome email to help explain to new Subscribers why they are receiving this email (and future emails). For instance, if your Campaign is set to a Dynamic Audience pulling from a Flow to receive Newsletters, you can set the welcome email to explain to them that, based on their submission, that person is now subscribed to receive future newsletters. You could also include that if they don’t want any more about that topic, they can use the unsubscribe link in the footer. It might seem counterintuitive, but letting people know from the start what their options are makes for much healthier and engaged email lists.

Not all Campaigns will benefit from sending a welcome email, so by default, it’s toggled to not send. To enable a welcome email, click on Welcome Email tab and then toggle the “Yes” switch.

With the Welcome Message toggled on, anyone added to the Audience of a Campaign should receive the Welcome Message within 30 minutes (though typically much less time).

Then, write your email (see below for specific instructions on how to write an email in Nucleus Messages) and save your changes. 

Create An Email

Creating an email in Nucleus Messages is as easy as, well, writing an email in your normal email inbox 😄

You can create an email in any one of the tabs in your Campaign Emails.

To start, click the + Add New button, add a name to your message and then Save Changes. 

Note: This is for admin purposes only. This is not the subject line of your email.

Now it's time to edit your message. The first thing you will want to do is add a sender name & reply-to email. This defaults to what is found in your Settings in the sidebar of your Campaign; however, if you want to change it for just this one email, simply type in a custom sender +/or reply-to email below.

Now it's time to enter a subject line and fill in the email body. The Nucleus email editor allows you to bold, italicize, or underline text, as well as enter hyperlinks, images, or emojis so that you can craft the email you want your audience to receive. It also offers the ability to enter Smart Data, which will pull from available information for your subscriber (such as their first name) to make your email more personalized. To enter a Smart Data option click the {..} button and follow the prompts.

Send & Schedule

When creating emails in the Send & Schedule tab, you’ll see the following sending and scheduling options below the body text of your email:

  • Don't Send Yet
  • Choose A Date & Time 
  • Send Right Now

Note: if the only available option is to save as a draft, this is because you must start your Campaign before sending any emails.

Selecting Don't Send Yet saves it as a draft and allows you to return to it a a later time.

Selecting Choose A Date & Time allows you to send your message to anyone who is a Subscriber in your Audience on a specific date, at a specific time in the future. Simply type in a date or use the date picker. Then type in a time and save your changes to schedule and send.

Note: It’s then saved as a draft. This is because you must start your Campaign before sending any email.

Selecting Send Right Now immediately sends your message to everyone who is currently a Subscriber in your Audience. This option is only available once you’ve started your Campaign. Read below to learn more about that.

To start your Campaign, click OK and then Start Campaign. (But only if you really want to send this out to your audience. If it’s just a test email, you might want to keep it saved as a draft 😉)
Automated Sequence

When creating emails in the Automated Sequence tab, you’ll see the following sending options below the body text of your email:

  • Don't Activate Yet 
  • Choose Delay 

Selecting Don't Activate Yet saves the email as a draft that you can return to later.

Selecting Choose Delay allows you to select how many days, hours, and minutes for this particular message to delay in sending at the moment someone new joins your Audience.

Send A Test Email

To see your email in context - to see exactly what a Subscriber would see when they receive your email in their inbox - you can send yourself a test email. (This also helps with catching any mistakes before setting your message live.)

To do this, after you’re finished writing your email, click the Send me a test email button beside the body of your email text. This will send a test version of the email you just wrote to the primary email address on your profile (typically the email address you use to login to your Nucleus account).

The email will have [TEST] in front of the Subject Line to help you quickly locate it in your inbox.

Start Your Campaign

If you’d rather create several emails and make sure all your content is ready to go live before you set your Campaign live, you can! Or, if you’d prefer to set your Campaign live right away before you create any emails, that’s also possible.

To start your Campaign, click the Start Campaign button in the top right corner. Then, select the Yes! Start Now button. As mentioned above, any emails scheduled to send from that moment onward will be sent, including your Welcome Email which will be sent to all current and future Subscribers.

So just be certain you actually want to start your Campaign if you have multiple emails set up and created 😁

What Next?

Now that you’ve established your Campaign, you can begin creating your emails. There are three different types of sending methods you can use, so be sure you select the correct type before writing your emails. Click below to learn more:

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