Creating and sending an email campaign

Creating a campaign step by step

In Marketing › Campaigns › Broadcasts, press "Create campaign". The editor opens in a side panel; its first field is the campaign name. Then you go through these steps:

1. Audience: under "Send to" pick one or more audiences (if you pick none, everyone who can receive it gets it) and under "Leave out" the ones that should not get it. The "Reach" card tells you how many contacts will receive it.
2. Content: the email template, the subject, the preview text and, if you want, a discount.
3. A/B test (optional): variants with another subject, another preview text or another template.
4. Review and send: the summary, the checklist and the send.

"Save draft" saves your progress at any time; "Continue" turns on once the step is complete. Audiences and templates are created beforehand, in Contacts › Audiences and in Email templates.

Testing the campaign before sending it

In the Review and send step, press "Send me a test" to get it in your inbox. The arrow next to it opens "Send to other addresses…", to send it to up to 5 addresses.

The "Before sending" list checks the campaign. Some items block the send (the template or subject is missing, nobody can receive it with that audience, the discount has expired) and others are advice: a subject over 60 characters gets cut on mobile, the preview text or the footer's postal address is missing, you send from the shared domain, or tracking is off.

Sending now, scheduling or running an A/B test

In Review and send, "Send now" asks you to confirm and tells you how many contacts it will reach; a send cannot be undone. "Schedule" lets you pick the send date and time.

With an A/B test, variant A is the campaign's content and B and C change the subject, the preview text or the template. You choose what percentage of the audience gets the test and which metric decides the winner; the winner goes to the rest. You can also keep a control group that does not get the campaign, to measure its effect.

Following, pausing or resuming a send

Marketing › Campaigns › Broadcasts lists your campaigns by status (drafts, scheduled, sending, sent, cancelled) with their recipients, "Real opens", clicks and revenue. "View report" opens a campaign's detail.

In the report of a campaign that is sending you can press "Pause"; pending emails wait until you press "Resume". A campaign can also pause itself if it piles up too many bounces or spam complaints; the reason shows in its report. In an A/B test with no winner yet, "Pick winner" ends the test and sends that variant to the rest.

"Real opens" leaves out the automatic opens some email apps (such as Apple Mail) make when they download the message, which makes it more reliable for comparing campaigns.