Recurring emails: setting one up, and every option

A recurring email is a campaign that sends again on a schedule instead of once. Every time it fires, Leat works out who's eligible right then and sends to them, so the audience is never a list you have to keep up to date by hand. Each fire is called a run, and every run is recorded with who it reached and what happened.

Recurring emails, one-off campaigns, and automations

All three send email, and they answer different questions:

A campaign goes out once, at a moment you pick.
A recurring email goes out again and again, and re-checks who qualifies each time.
An automation reacts to something a contact does, the moment it happens.

The line between the last two is worth knowing. A recurring email checks a state: it's their birthday today, they haven't visited for 90 days, they're in the Gold tier. An automation reacts to an event: they just made a purchase, they just reached a tier. If what you want is "when this happens, email them straight away," that's an automation.

One more tool sits beside these, and it sends no marketing email at all. A recurring voucher issuance hands a voucher of one promotion out on a schedule, to all your contacts or to the lists, tiers or contacts you pick, announcing each one with a system email or with nothing. If the voucher is the point and there's no message to design, set that up on the promotion instead, under Issuances. See Issuing vouchers to a group of contacts, once or on a schedule.

Creating a recurring email

Go to Marketing → Recurring emails.
Click Add recurring email.
Pick a preset, then choose the template you want to start from.

You then land in the editor, with tabs for the content, the information, the audience, the conditions, and the schedule. Which tabs you see depends on the preset you picked.

Choosing a preset

The preset decides how much you configure yourself.

Empty email. You define everything: the audience, how often it runs, and whether a contact can get it more than once.
Celebrate birthdays. Leat reads the birthdate on each contact's profile, so there's no list to maintain. It checks every day and sends on the birthday itself, or a set number of days before it. A contact gets it at most once per calendar year.
Retention email. Reaches contacts who haven't visited for a set number of days, 90 by default. It checks every day, and a contact gets it on the day they reach that number.
Loyalty update. Sends every subscribed contact an update on their loyalty balance, every quarter. The quarterly cadence is fixed, but you choose which day in the quarter and what time.

The preset sets the type of the email, and the type can't be changed afterwards. It decides how the audience is selected, so changing it on a live campaign would quietly start mailing a different group of people under the same name and run history. If you picked the wrong one, create a new recurring email instead.

Who receives it

The Audience tab is where you decide who's in scope. Start from all contacts, or narrow down by:

Contact lists. Only active lists can be picked, because a parked dynamic list is never refreshed and would freeze the audience. A dynamic list updates as soon as something happens to a contact, such as an order, points received or a changed attribute, and is also rebuilt in full every night, so each run reaches whoever matches at that moment. See Creating a contact list for what updates a list straight away and what waits for the nightly rebuild. A contact in several of the selected lists is still only mailed once.
Tiers. Everyone currently in the tiers you choose.
A selection of contacts. A fixed set you pick by hand.

For a birthday or retention email the audience already comes from the contact's own data, and the narrowing stacks on top of it: whose birthday it is today, and who's in the Gold tier.

Two rules apply no matter which preset you use. A contact who isn't subscribed to the email's subscription type is never mailed, and a contact is only ever counted once per run.

The tab shows how many contacts match right now, and how many of those the next run would actually mail. Those two numbers differ when your resending rule is holding some of them back.

Whether a contact can get it again

On the Audience tab of an empty email there's a Resend policy card. It answers one question: a contact matched again on a later run, do they get the email again?

Every run. Always send. Right for a balance update or a seasonal reminder.
Once every X days. Skip a contact who received it within that many days.
Once per calendar month.
Once per calendar year.
Once per contact. At most once, ever.

The two calendar options are calendar-based rather than a rolling count of days on purpose. A run that fires a few hours earlier than last year's still sends, where a 365-day cooldown would suppress it.

The other presets set this for you and don't offer the choice, because there's only one sensible answer. A birthday email is once per calendar year. A retention email uses a cooldown, and that cooldown can't be shorter than the inactivity window it's watching: a contact who lapses again must have visited in between, so at least that long has passed anyway. You can stretch it further if you don't want to mail somebody on every single lapse. A loyalty update is a quarterly broadcast, so there's no later run to hold anyone back from.

When it runs

The Schedule tab sets the cadence. This is the part that differs most between presets, so it's worth being precise about.

For an empty email you choose a frequency and a time:

Daily
Weekday, so Monday to Friday only
Weekly, on a day you pick
Biweekly, on a day you pick
Monthly, on a date you pick
First day of the month
Last day of the month
Quarterly, on a date you pick
Annually, on a date and in a month you pick

Times run in your account's timezone. A date that doesn't exist in a given month is moved to that month's last day, so a schedule set to the 31st fires on 28 or 29 February rather than skipping into March.

You can't schedule a run between 00:00 and 02:00 when the audience comes from contact lists. That's when every dynamic list in the account is rebuilt, and a run firing mid-rebuild would read a half-finished list.

Birthday and retention emails don't get a frequency picker. They check every day, because a day is the smallest unit the data they read changes in, so all you pick is the time of the check. A loyalty update doesn't get one either: it's always quarterly, and you pick the day and time within the quarter.

Next to the cadence you'll see the next few moments it will fire, labelled Next run dates or, for a daily check, Next checks.

The active period

Below the schedule there's an optional Active period, with a start date and an end date. A run that falls outside it is skipped instead of sent.

Leave the start date empty to begin as soon as you activate the campaign. Leave the end date empty to keep sending until you pause it. An end date in the past leaves the campaign active while every run is skipped, so the screen warns you when that happens.

Attaching a reward

A recurring email can hand something out along with the message. On the content tab you can attach one of:

A voucher. A new one is generated for every recipient, on every run.
A gift card for a fixed amount.
Points, added to the contact's loyalty balance.
A loyalty token.

The reward is issued per recipient per run, and the review screen tells you what each run will hand out before you activate. If a reward is missing a setting it needs, such as a promotion or a shop, the run is skipped rather than sent half-finished.

What else is on the Information tab

The name and the subject.
The sender profile the email goes out from.
The subscription type it belongs to, which is what decides who counts as subscribed.
Google Analytics tracking, and the UTM campaign name to tag the links with.

The body itself is written in the email editor on the content tab, where merge tags let you personalise it per recipient. You can send yourself a test email from there at any point.

Reviewing and activating

Review and activate gathers everything into one screen before anything goes out: what gets sent, when it runs, and who receives it. Under who receives it you'll see how many contacts match the audience and how many of those would actually be mailed, with the difference explained by your resending rule.

Two things are worth knowing about that screen.

Activating doesn't send anything immediately. The first email goes out at the next scheduled moment, and the audience is counted again then, so contacts who join or leave before that will change the numbers.

A retention email's first send can't be counted in advance. It reaches the contacts whose last visit lands exactly on the window you set, and if the first run is further out than that window, those visits haven't happened yet.

If the schedule and the active period leave no moment to run in, the screen says so rather than letting you activate something that will never send.

Leat also checks the campaign is complete before letting you activate it. If something's missing, such as a sender profile, a subject, an unsubscribe link in the body, or the days-since-last-visit setting on a retention email, you'll see exactly what to fix.

Runs, and why one might send nothing

Every fire is recorded under Runs on the campaign, with how many contacts were selected, how many were sent, and how many failed. Open a run to see its recipients, the email statistics, and which links were clicked.

A run can come back as skipped, and the run always says why. The commonest reason is simply that nobody was eligible when it started. Others include:

The send date fell outside the campaign's start and end dates.
No sender profile was linked, or its email address wasn't valid.
The email had no subject, no content, or no unsubscribe link.
No contact lists were linked, or one of them wasn't active.
The birthdate contact attribute was switched off, so a birthday email couldn't select anyone.
The number of days without a visit wasn't set on a retention email.
A setting was missing on the attached reward.
Your contact data was still being rebuilt, in which case the next run picks it up.

A skipped run doesn't stop the campaign. Most of these are temporary, so it stays active and tries again at the next scheduled moment.

Running it now, pausing, and editing

Run now fires the campaign immediately, outside its schedule. It goes through the same checks as a scheduled run, so a misconfigured campaign is recorded as skipped rather than sending.

Pause stops the schedule. Nothing fires while it's paused, and activating it again arms the next run from that point.

Editing a campaign that's already running keeps it running, on the new settings, rather than quietly going dormant. Activities on the campaign keeps a log of who changed what and when.

Deleting a recurring email stops it and moves it to the bin. Deleting it from the bin removes it permanently.