Onyx also includes a facility to allow you to send Mail Shots to your customers with such things as promotions and reminders.  You can access Mail Shots through the Customer Contact screen.

Once you've selected the customers and pressed 'Mail Shot' (on the customer contact screen), you'll see the following

Mail Shots

The system also uses the report engine to create mail shots.  Instead of running one report, the system first shows you a list of all clients from which you can select which ones to send the mail shot to.  Click on the ‘Client Mailshots’ link (see above) and you will be taken to the ‘Client List’ screen:

Select Mail shot Screen

In this screen we select the required mail shot from the drop down list.  We can edit it or even create a new one by pressing the little plus sign.

We can add or remove from this text and we have a number of ways to format the text.  If you are familiar with HTML tags then this will be a breeze:

Press ‘Ok’ when you are happy with the text and you will be prompted to save changes (if you made any) to which you must answer ‘Yes’ otherwise your changes will be lost.

The above text will result in text as shown below being generated by the report generator:

Mailshots can also be created from the invoice list screen.

Once you've selected the Mail Shot that you wish to send, you'll want to check that the merge data that you'll use is compatible (after all, there's little point creating a mail shot for someone where you don't know their address), to do this press 'Check Merge Data'

For this topic we've selected 3 customers to send a mail shot to, but when we check the merge data we receive this following

This is telling us that there's a missing bit of data for one of the records, to fix (temporarily) press Yes

We can see that the problem is that Mrs Berlin's Address1 and City data are missing. Ideally we should fix this by returning to Mrs Berlin's account and entering the data, but we can temporarily fix this by entering the data in the screen.  Once you've entered the data close the screen and then press 'Merge'

You'll then see the final Mail Shots that you can print out and post.