When you send an email to a group or a recipient list, some of the people on that list may live at the same address or belong to the same organisation, for example parents in the same family, or several staff members at the same company. One email per household reduces the recipient list down to a single email per household or organisation, instead of sending a separate copy to every member.
Role Permissions
- Contact people by email: needed to compose and send an email, including using the One email per household option.
For an explanation of this and other role permissions, see People Permissions.
Step 1: Build your recipient list
Click or hover on Contact on the main menu on the left, then click Email, then New email. Under Include the following, choose how you want to find the people to include (an individual, a group, a filtered group, or a saved report) and add them to the list.
Step 2: Turn on One email per household
Tick One email per household.
Turn on Recipient List to see the effect straight away. The details table adds Combined Address Name and Combined Name columns, and the household members who would otherwise have received their own copy drop out of the list, folded into a single row for their household.
If your site uses the Organisation view for a contact instead of Household, the same option groups that contact together with the people who belong to it. The checkbox always says "household", but it covers both.
What determines who receives the email
- A household member flagged "Primary for the household" is used first. If one or more people in the household have an email address flagged with this purpose, infoodle sends to those flagged addresses, even when the household also has an organisation contact record. If more than one person is flagged this way, each of them gets their own copy of the email, so the send is no longer a single email for that household.
- An organisation contact is used next. If nobody in the household is flagged "Primary for the household", but the household has a contact record for the organisation itself (for example, a company or a funeral home) alongside its individual members, the email goes to the organisation's own contact record rather than to one of the individuals.
- Otherwise, the first person added to the household receives it. infoodle uses that person's email address, and the other members' individual addresses are not sent to.
To choose who this is for a specific household, open the relevant person's profile, find the Contact Details section, and click Email Purpose. This opens a list of the household's email addresses where you can add the Primary for the household purpose to the one address (or addresses) that should represent the household for email. Remove the purpose the same way if you want that address to stop receiving the household's mail.
None of the other household members are shown as excluded or flagged as duplicates in the recipient list. They are simply folded into the one row that is sent, so the count of unique contacts and email addresses goes down. Their names are not lost though: use personalisation tags such as {combined name}, {combined address name}, or {all names} in your email content so the email still reads correctly for everyone it reaches, for example addressing a couple jointly or listing every staff member covered by one company email.
Common questions
Does this remove people from my recipient list permanently?
No. One email per household only changes how the current email is grouped for sending. It does not remove anyone from the underlying group, report, or list you built the recipient list from, and has no effect on any other email you send.
Can I still exclude one person from a household after grouping them?
Yes. Use the Exclude tick in the recipient list details table to remove a specific person from the send before you turn on One email per household, or exclude them from the underlying group or list first.
Why did the salutation change when I turned this on?
When people are grouped by household, infoodle uses the household's combined salutation and combined name instead of each person's individual name, since the email is now addressed to the household as a whole rather than to one person.
Does One email per household work with the Recipient List toggle off?
Yes. The Recipient List toggle only controls whether you see the details table on screen. One email per household still applies to how the email is actually sent, whether or not you have opened the table to check it.
Next steps
Once your recipient list looks right, choose Basic, Designer, Mailchimp, or Template under Create from to start writing the email content.