WSBN - Creating and Maintaining a Lyris E-list for E-newsletters

Review Options and Create a New Lyris E-list

Adapted from CIT page: Create an E-list: 2. Configuration Options | IT@Cornell

How to video: https://app.screencast.com/rN46KKdPaSCoj

E-list request form fields:

• E-list name should begin with "cce-" and include association name, if association specific
  • ex. cce-chautauquagardening-l
• Purpose: Cornell Cooperative Extension
• Unit: CCE [Assocation Name] County Extension 
  • ex. CCE Chautauqua County Extension
• Primary owner field will be auto filled with the person filling out request form
• E-mail address of secondary: Add at least one other staff person as admin for backup, either another association staff person and/or IT staff person. 
  • For multiple secondary admins, enter each e-mail separated by space
  • Group e-mail accounts can be added as a secondary admin
    • Ex. jar97@cornell.edu wsbnit@cornell.edu
• Who may subscribe:  Two recommendations for this type of e-list:
  • CLOSED - Only admins will be able to manually add new recipients. 
  • PRIVATE – Option would allow people to request to be added. Lyris will send all join requests to the list's administrators, for approval or rejection.
• Who may post: 
  • Announcements - Only admins can send out e-mails to list.
• Moderation:
  • NO – allows admins to send an e-mail without going through review process.
  • YES - each e-mail will need to be reviewed and approved before it sends out
    • Review more information about how moderation works:
      • E-list Configuration: Are Posts Moderated? (Lyris) | IT@Cornell
      • Moderate E-list Posts (Lyris) | IT@Cornell
• Where replies go: Sender
• Resource requirements: Standard E-list (less than 10,000 recipients)

For more information:  Overview of E-list Configuration Options (Lyris) | IT@Cornell

Set up Lyris administrator account(s)

Each administrator will have his or her own password. There is no unified password for the list. Do NOT share your password with anyone, including other administrators. 
Do NOT use your NetID password.

• Once the e-list has been approved, each administrator listed on the request form will receive an e-mail notification.
• Follow the e-mail instructions to reset your password and confirm your e-mail address.  (Once you start this process, it becomes time-sensitive – be sure you have time to go through it before clicking the link.)

Helpful Tip: Once your account is set up, save the Lyris management website to your browser favorites:   https://www.list.cornell.edu/
Please Note: Your login 'User Name' is your full e-mail address.

More information for Lyris administrators:

• Add, Change, or Remove E-List Admins (Lyris) | IT@Cornell
  • How to video:  Review and Edit Administrators
• About E-list Administrative Passwords (Lyris) | IT@Cornell
• Log In or Log Out of Lyris Web Interface (E-lists) | IT@Cornell
• Reset Your E-list Password (Lyris) | IT@Cornell
• All articles for Listserv Admins: Service KBAs | IT@Cornell

Manually Add A Few Trusted Members

(Skip this step if already familiar with using an e-list)

Before importing all members into the e-list, add only a few e-mails so that you can test sending out an e-mail first (to become more comfortable with the process).  Be sure to let these members know that you plan to send out a test message with your new e-list.  Ask for their assistance in confirming receipt of the e‑mail by sending a reply back.

• How to video:  Lyris - Manually add new members
• More info: Add One E-list Member to a Lyris List | IT@Cornell

Send A Test E-mail

Send Messages to an E-list (Lyris) | IT@Cornell

1. Verify the sender e-mail in Outlook
   • If you plan to send out your e-news from a group e-mail account, click on the From button to select it from the drop-down menu.
2. Add a Subject line
3. Add Content to the body of the message
   (see E-news Tips and Size Limitations sections below)
4. Review all content carefully
   (treat this test as a true e-mail going to your many recipients)
5. Put the e-list address in the To field.
   • Be sure to include the hyphen and the letter L at the end of the list name.
     ex. cce-chautauquagardening-l@cornell.edu
   • Strongly recommend creating the habit of adding e-list e-mail last to the message.  (Helps prevent accidentally sending a message before it’s ready to go!)

Review the E-news Tips and Lyris e-mail size limitation sections below for more information.

Add or import all members (recipients)

Members can be manually added within Lyris or there is an option to import members from an existing Excel/csv file. The field names will need to be adjusted to match Lyris fields.

Only e-mail address field is required, but Full Name field is strongly recommended.

• Add Members by Importing (Lyris) | IT@Cornell

Managing membership - E-List settings

Adapted from Maintain Your E-list's Membership (Lyris) | IT@Cornell

One of your responsibilities as a list administrator is to keep your membership roster accurate and up-to-date. Lyris will help you by keeping track of the addresses that have problems (like not accepting mail delivery). There are two parts to this.

• Configure: Tell Lyris what criteria should put an address on "hold" status. Do this once (and update as you see fit).
• Review: Decide what to do with the addresses that have been put on hold. Do this regularly!

Configure List Settings for holding and purging members

You need to decide how many problems an address is allowed before the member is put on hold; Lyris will not send messages to a member on hold. You also need to decide what happens after a member's status is changed to "held."

1. Click Utilities and hover over List Settings
2. Click Automatic Maintenance
   • Bounce limit defaults to 5.  
     Lyris keeps track of consecutive delivery problems for each member address. So, with the default setting, if five messages in a row can't be delivered to a particular address, that address will be put on hold.
   • If you would like Lyris to put a hold on a member after one failed attempt, set this to 1.
     Strongly recommended that you do not change any other settings on this tab.
      
3. Click on Purging Inactive Members tab
   Utilities > List Settings > Automatic Maintenance
   • The first setting here (Purge held) controls how long a member can be on hold before Lyris automatically removes that address from the list.
   • If administrators want to retain full control of removing members manually, set all to ‘never purge’. 

Set up Subscription and/or Delivery Reports to be automatically e-mailed to administrators

Utilities > List Settings > Basic Information – Reports Tab

Note: You can hold down the Control key to make multiple selections

E-mailed reports will contain useful links for administrators to review any delivery problems (bouncebacks, invalid e-mails, etc.)

Allow only certain administrator e-mails to send out a message

This option can be set in the administrator’s member record.

Example: All e-news should go out via the wsbnit@cornell.edu group e-mail but jar97@cornell.edu and cns64@cornell.edu are administrators that maintain the list of members.

• For each administrator, go to Edit Member > Settings tab
  • For administrator e-mail account(s) allowed to send e-mails to the e-list
    Set “# of approvals required” to “no approval needed”
        
  • Administrators not allowed to send e-mails from own e-mail address.  Please note: In this example, Jenn and Christi both have access to the wsbnit@cornell.edu e-mail and can send out the e-news still through this group e-mail account.  This setting is only set up to prevent them from accidentally sending out the e-news from their own e-mail address.
    
    Set “# of approvals required” to “no approval needed”
    If the administrator accidentally tries to send out the e-news from their own e-mail, there will be a pending approval notification.  Any e-list administrator can go to Mailings > Approval > Need Approval and delete the accidental mailing.

Search Members List

1. Click Members
2. Under Members, click View members
3. Click Find Members
4. To search by e-mail address, click the Email Address tab
   To search by name, click the Name tab
5. Enter all or part of the members’ e-mail address or name (depending on what tab you selected).
6. Next to Look for, select contains (unless you want to search exact match)
7. Next to Search in, select all your lists
8. Click Go. You'll be returned to the member list dialog box, but only the members who met your search criterion will be shown.

Adapted from Find a Member's Lists (Lyris) | IT@Cornell

Delete Member

• How to video:  Delete members

Review “Held” Members (indicates an issue with the e-mail address)

You should review members' status regularly and decide what to do with the ones who have been changed to "held."

If, when configuring your list's settings, you told Lyris to automatically remove "held" addresses, there's nothing for you to do here. But if you set it to never purge, you should review members' status and decide whether, for each held address, to remove it from the list, update it with new information or restore it to normal membership

• Click on Members
• Click on View Members
• In the drop-down field, select “Show: held (bad email addresses)”
  You will only see the members who Status is held.

• You can try to contact each member by phone or other means before deciding whether to keep or delete each address.
• You can delete addresses you're sure are bad by clicking delete on each address's line.
• You can delete all held addresses by clicking delete all in this view.
• You can reset an address's status to normal (if you think the problem that caused the "held" status was a temporary one) by following the steps below.
  1. Click on the address.
  2. Click the gray Settings tab.
  3. From the Membership status drop-down, select normal member.
  4. Click save.

Review Mailing and Delivery Reports

1. Click on Reports in left menu and then Mailing Overview
2. Click on the [Mailing/Campaign Name] in the drop-down menu
   (if e-mail sent out via Outlook it will be date and time of message)
   • Please note: You will see an Adobe Flash error message, click OK
3. Review Delivery Results
   Source: Mailing Statistics (lyris.com)
   • Successful Sends - The number of emails that were successfully received by recipients.
   • Soft bounces - Email that has bounced back to the sender undelivered after it has been accepted by the recipient's mail server.
     • Soft bounces can occur when the recipient’s mailbox is full; the receiving server is down or swamped with messages; the recipient’s settings don’t allow for an email from the sender; suspicious or spammy content has been detected; and many more reasons.
   • Technical failures - Technical failures are failures of the delivery of email due to problems on the receiving equipment or infrastructure, such as DNS resolution issues, connection timeouts, greylisting, or server errors due to non-user specific disk space problems.
   • Uncategorized failures - A failure that doesn't easily fit into one of the other categories.
   • Invalid Users - For some reason, the email addresses are not legitimate ones (this is often caused by spelling errors).
     • Verify the spelling of the e-mail address, particularly in the domain name portion of the e-mail address.
       ex. joesmith@gmial.com should be joesmith@gmail.com
   • Content Blocks - Content blocks are responses that indicate that the message is rejected for issues detected by a content filter. The filter may conclude that your message contains spam-like content, non-RFC compliant content, blacklisted URLs in the content, etc
   • MailStream blocks - You can learn more about MailStream blocks here.
   • End User complaints - Spam complaints made about the mailing.
   • Recipients remaining - The number of recipients for a mailing that are current pending in the Active Recipients queue. These users may not have been attempted yet, could be in retry due to transient delivery failures, or could be inactive due to a block by the destination ISP.

Export Delivery reports to Excel

1. Click on Reports in left menu and then Mailing Overview
2. Click on the Mailing/Campaign Name in the drop-down menu
   (if e-mail sent out via Outlook it will be date and time of message)
   • Please note: You will see an Adobe Flash error message, click OK
3. Click on the desired result error type (ex. Invalid Users)
4. Click on the Excel icon in the upper right corner.
5. Click the Save button to download the Excel file.

Note: On this Mailing Recipients page, you can easily download other reports by selecting the desired type from the drop-down menu.

Lyris e-mail size limitation and options

Please note:  The maximum e-mail size cannot exceed 700 KB.
Send Large Files with E-list Messages | IT@Cornell

How to check size of an e-mail message in Outlook before sending:
https://app.screencast.com/XOpLsf2Vl3yoM (no sound in this video)
 

Suggested Options for reducing size of e-mail:

1. Add content directly into body of the e-mail and only add a couple lower resolution photos. 
   • Options to resize photos:
     • Windows built-in photo app
       • How to video: https://app.screencast.com/pib801X5JV2Pv
         (no sound in this video)
     • Free Image Resizer: Resize Photos Online | Adobe Express
   • Please note: For press releases that may go to print, upload higher resolution photos to a departmental group Box folder and link to them in the e-mail.  (see option 2 below)
      
2. Upload the attachments to a departmental group Box folder and create a shareable link (anyone with link can access) and link to the attachment within e-mail.
   • How to video: https://www.screencast.com/t/K4pChIkq
   • 
   • 
      
3. Upload the attachments to webpage and link to the page and/or attachment within the e-mail message.
   • Examples:  
     • Cornell Cooperative Extension | 4-H NEWS
     • Cornell Cooperative Extension | Gardening
     • Password protected PDFs (for membership only news):  
       Cornell Cooperative Extension | FARM & HOMESTEAD NEWS
       
        

CCE Web Accessibility Resources:

• Article - Digital Accessibility at CCE (cornell.edu)
• https://staff.cce.cornell.edu/digital-accessibility

Create and Apply an Unsubscribe Link

ALWAYS offer a way to unsubscribe from the e-list in every e-mail sent.  This will help prevent your e-mail from being marked as spam.

1. Click on Utilities
2. Hover over Web Forms and click “New Unsubscribe Form”
3. Form fields:
   • Email Notification – Yes
   • Confirm – Yes
   • Optional URL – Add if you want to redirect the person to an association or program webpage after they unsubscribe
   • Append unsubscribe information – Yes
   • Showing confirming web page – Yes
4. Click the refresh button to ensure URL is ready to copy and paste
5. Copy the full URL found in the “Your unsubscribe URL” field
6. Click Done
7. In left menu, click on Utilities
8. Hover over List Settings and click Email Submitted Content
9. Scroll down to “Append to end of every message (HTML message footer):” and add in the text to automatically include at the bottom of every e-mail message.
   • Example:  If you no longer wish to receive this e-newsletter, click here to unsubscribe.   You can also reply to this e-mail to let us know or call us at [Add Office Phone Number]. 
10. Highlight the text “click here to unsubscribe”
11. Click the link icon in the menu (looks like an image of the world with a little car)
12. Paste the URL link that you copied from step 5.
13. Click OK
14. Click Save

Please note: 

• You MUST add the footer unsubscribe information within Lyris as outlined above. Unfortunately, you cannot paste this unsubscribe link into an Outlook e-mail.  The link will not work correctly.
• If you have moderation turned on, the unsubscribe link will NOT work in the “moderated message” e‑mail.  The mail merge doesn’t occur until the message is actually sent out to recipients.

How to video: https://app.screencast.com/5wVIlvYxML1Hw (no sound)

CCE E-mail Signatures

You can download the official CCE e-mail signature template from the CCE Staff Site: 

• Templates and Brand Resources | Cornell Cooperative Extension | Staff Site

Example:

Create an e-mail template in Outlook

To assist with consistency of each e-news message, create a template in Outlook using Outlook’s “Quick Parts” feature.  

Email Templates with Outlook Quick Parts - YouTube (2 minutes)

Personalize a message

If the e-list is set up with the full name of each member, you can personalize the outgoing message with a mail merge function.

• Merge field text to use:  %%merge members_.FullName_%%

How to video: Personalize e-list message with Full Name

Cornell’s Annual E-list Renewal Process

Each year, the owner of an e-list will receive an automated e-mail message from Cornell List Manager <listmgr@cornell.edu>. 

Do NOT ignore this e-mail.  The owner MUST confirm renewal of the e-list.  Otherwise, the e-list will be shut down.

How to video:  Renewal Process

Transfer Ownership of an E-list

For more information and the helpdesk form to request change of ownership:
Transfer Ownership of an E-list (Lyris) | IT@Cornell

Review and Update Who Can Send A Message

E-list Configuration: Who Can Post to the List? (Lyris) | IT@Cornell

• Restricted: The list will accept postings only from members and list administrators. This option is recommended to help prevent unwanted postings to your list.​​​​​​
• Announcement: The list will accept postings only from the list administrators, and no one else. Use this option when the purpose of the list is to post periodic announcements rather than to serve as a vehicle for interaction.
• Open: Anyone with an email address, even non-members, can post a message by sending it to the list address. This option is generally not recommended, since your list can become a target of unwanted postings such as spam.

Review and Update How People Can Join the E-List

During the creation of your e-list, you choose how someone could become a member of your e-list (Open, Private or Closed). 

See Create an E-list: 2. Configuration Options | IT@Cornell for descriptions of each.

If you would like to review and/or change this setting:

1. Click on Utilities
2. Hover over List Settings and click New Subscriber Policy
3. Under the Security tab, review current setting under Security field.
4. To change, select a new option in the drop-down menu.
5. Click Save, if making changes.