Overview
When you send a newsletter in Emma, you must specify its recipients (people the newsletter will be emailed to). Emma allows you to select recipients in several ways, and this guide focuses on our recommended option: groups.
Groups are mailing lists made up of individual contacts. For most Dornsife departments and units, a single group is enough to hold all the contacts who will receive your newsletter, but you can create as many groups as you need.
Logging in to Emma
- Go to https://home.e2ma.net and log in with the following credentials:
- Username: Your @usc.edu email address
- Password: The password you created during setup, which may not be the same as your USC NetID passphrase
- You may be asked to enter a verification code, which Emma sends to your email.
- Click the Audience tab. In the left menu, click Groups.
Creating a group
For most Dornsife departments and units, a single group is enough to hold all the contacts who will receive your newsletter. If you find that you need more precise control over who receives certain newsletters, you can create additional groups. Here are some examples of groups you could create:
- (recommended) A single group containing all your contacts
- For departments sending a high volume of newsletters (multiple newsletters weekly):
- Different groups based on who the contact is (e.g., faculty and staff list, student list, alumni list)
- Different groups based on newsletter content types or topics (e.g., news list, events list)
Groups are empty until you begin adding contacts to them, and you can add the same contact to more than one group.
Quick guide
- Make sure you're in the Audience tab. In the left menu, click Groups.
- Click Create a group.
- Type a name and click Create.
- The group is created and added to the list. You can select this group when adding new contacts, or add existing contacts to the group.
Detailed guide (with screenshots)
- Make sure you're in the Audience tab. In the left menu, click Groups.
- Click Create a group.
- Type a name and click Create.
- The group is created and added to the list. You can select this group when adding new contacts, or add existing contacts to the group.
Editing a group
View a group
Make sure you are in the Audience tab, and select Groups in the left menu. To view a group, select its name in the list.
The group details page appears. The group name appears at the top, and the list of contacts appears underneath.
Add contacts to or remove contacts from a group
You can add new contacts to a group during a spreadsheet import or manual adding process:
You can also add existing contacts to, or remove existing contacts from a group:
Rename or archive a group
Click the Actions 
icon to the right of the group. Then, make a selection:
-
Rename: Rename the group.
-
Archive: Hide the group from view (does not delete the group or archive individual contacts).
Export a group
Emma restricts most accounts from downloading files containing contact information. If you do not see the Export option when you click the Actions icon, you will need to contact ts@dornsife.usc.edu to obtain an exported spreadsheet for the group.
Using a test group
When you create a group, you may notice an option to select This is a test group:
Test groups appear in the Test group tab rather than the Regular group tab. Test groups are optional but are useful for sending a test newsletter.
For the most part, test groups can be created and edited the same way as regular groups. There are two differences:
- You can send test emails to test groups but not to regular groups.
- You can have a maximum of 10 contacts in a test group, whereas there is no maximum for a regular group.
Advanced options: subscriptions and segments
For most Dornsife departments and units, you can set up a single group of all your contacts, and send newsletters to this one comprehensive group.
However, if you send a high volume of newsletters (think multiple emails a week on average), you may start getting feedback that people want to only receive certain types of newsletters rather than all of them. If this is your situation, it may make sense to select your recipients more precisely using an advanced option such as a subscription or segment.
Subscriptions
This advanced feature in Emma lets you designate newsletter content types, and contacts can opt in or out of receiving each type based on their interests. This gives people more control over which newsletters they want to receive from you. Otherwise, the default option in Emma is that people can only opt to receive all newsletters or none at all.
You'll need to be very careful not to mix up subscriptions and groups. For more information about subscriptions, refer to our guide, Working with subscriptions in Emma (advanced).
Segments
A segment is a list of contacts created based on rules that you set up and which the contacts do not see or control. You can create a segment based on, for example:
- Contact activity within a group (e.g., contacts who opened any newsletters from you in the last three months)
- Information in the contact record (e.g., contacts who are faculty members)
This allows you to send a newsletter to that specific segment instead of to an entire group or groups. For more information about segments, refer to our guide, Working with segments in Emma (advanced).