🎥 Emails: using Light Blue to send them

Introduction

Light Blue makes it easy to email your clients. Subscribers to our online services can send emails via Light Blue, and there’s also an option to create emails in Mail (on a Mac) or Outlook (on Windows).

Sending emails from a shoot

You can send an email from a number of places in Light Blue.

From a shoot record, you can use the “Linked Records” panel to email any of the contacts linked to this shoot. You can do that by right-clicking on any linked contact that has an email address, or by selecting the client and using the options menu to create an email.

The email dialog allows you to write your email, add formatting & links, and add attachments.

When you’re ready to send your email, click the ‘Send’ button. A copy of any email that you send via Light Blue is automatically saved in the “Activity” panel for this shoot, so you can refer back to it in future.

Sending emails unrelated to a shoot

You can also send emails from a contact record. To do that, go to a contact that has an email address and use the options menu that appears when you hover your cursor over it.

If you want to send a quote, invoice or receipt to a customer, you can email a PDF to them from the relevant record. You can either click the Print/Send button from the toolbar and choose to email as PDF, or click on the cog icon next to their contact details. That’ll ask you if you want to attach a PDF to the email.

Customising your emails

Let’s have a quick look at some of the preferences that you can use to customise the way that you can send emails from Light Blue. You’ll find these in the “Email” section of the Preferences window.

The first option is whether you want to send emails via Light Blue, or create them in a separate email app. Emails can be sent via the Microsoft Outlook email application, or the Mail application on a Mac. You follow a very similar process to the steps I’ve already shown you, however the email will open in your mail program instead, and you can then click send from there. Emails sent via your email application aren’t automatically linked to the relevant record within Light Blue, and you can’t use Light Blue’s email scheduling, formatting, or tracking features. We recommend that you use Light Blue’s built-in emailing feature instead of these options.

The “Default Email Server” option allows you to choose whether you want to send emails via Light Blue’s email servers or your own email account. Sending emails via Light Blue’s servers means that you don’t need to do any setup, but you might prefer to use your own email account if you want your emails to come from your own email address. The “Adding your own outgoing email server to your Light Blue account” explains how to do this.

The “Default Branding”, and “Default Signature” options options that are covered in the knowledgebase articles about email branding and email signatures.

The “Automatically CC Client Portal Emails To Yourself” option copies you into all of the emails that are sent to your clients when they’re using features like our online contract signing service, or paying an online invoice.

The “BCC All Emails To” option is there for anyone who wants to send a copy of every email sent from Light Blue to their own email address. This might be because you want to make sure you’ve got a copy of all of the emails you’ve sent in your email account, as well as in Light Blue.