Campaigns: sending a one-off email, and every option

A campaign is an email you send once, to the contacts you choose, at a moment you pick. You write it in the email editor, decide who receives it, and then either send it straight away or schedule it for a later date.

Campaigns, recurring emails, 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.

If you find yourself duplicating the same campaign every month, what you want is a recurring email instead. A campaign is for the one-off: a newsletter, a product launch, a seasonal offer.

Creating a campaign

Go to Marketing, then Campaigns.
Click Add campaign in the top right.
Pick a template from your own library or one of the global ones, or start from scratch with an empty campaign.

You land in the editor, with four tabs across the top: Content, Information, Recipients, and Sending time. You can fill them in any order, and what you write is saved as you go. Finish later closes the editor and leaves the campaign as a draft you can pick up again from the campaigns overview.

Writing the email

The Content tab is the email editor, with a panel down the left side holding four things:

Tags are the merge tags you drop into the email to personalise it. Each one is replaced with that recipient's own value when the email goes out.
Actions is where you attach a reward. See below.
Files lists the files in your account, so you can copy a link to one into the email.
Template saves the design you are working on as a template, so your next campaign can start from it.

There is more on writing the email itself in How to create an email.

One rule is worth knowing before you get to the end: a marketing email needs an unsubscribe link in the body, and you will not be able to send it without one. The exception is an email on a functional subscription type, which is not marketing and does not need one.

Attaching a reward

A campaign can hand something out along with the message. On the Actions panel you pick one Action type:

Vouchers. A voucher from a promotion you choose.
Giftcards. A gift card for a fixed amount.
Points. Added to the contact's loyalty balance.
Loyalty token. A token the contact claims by clicking through from the email.

A campaign carries at most one of these, and it is issued per recipient when the campaign sends. The review screen shows you an estimate of what will be handed out before you confirm, under Action result (estimate). If the reward is missing something it needs, such as a promotion or a shop, the campaign will not send until you fix it.

Naming it and choosing who it comes from

The Information tab holds:

Name of your campaign, which is what you will recognise it by in the overview. Contacts never see it.
Subject, which they do see. Merge tags work here too.
Sender profile, the name and address the email goes out from. Setting one up is covered in how to connect a marketing domain and set up a sender profile.
Subscription type, which decides who counts as subscribed. For a newsletter or an offer, that is a marketing type.
Add Google Analytics tags to links, which tags every link in the email for Google Analytics. The links carry the campaign's name, or switch off Use the email’s name to give it a UTM campaign name of its own. What the tags are and where to find them in Google Analytics is in Seeing the website visits and sales from an email in Google Analytics.

The preview text, also called the preheader, isn't on this tab. That's the short line inboxes show next to the subject, and it's part of the design: on the Content tab, open Settings in the editor's right-hand panel and fill in Preview text under General. See How to create an email.

Who receives it

The Recipients tab is where you decide who is in scope. There are two choices:

All contacts sends to every subscribed contact in your account.
Narrow down sends to some of them. Pick one of Contact lists, Tiers, or Selection of contacts, then choose which ones.

Contact lists is the option to reach for when the group is defined by data rather than by name: everyone in a city, everyone above a number of points, everyone who has not visited for a while. Building one is covered in creating a contact list. Tiers reaches everyone currently in the tiers you choose, and Selection of contacts is a fixed set you pick by hand.

Two rules apply whichever you choose. A contact who is not subscribed to the campaign's subscription type is never mailed, so the subscription check sits on top of your choice rather than beside it. And a contact is only ever mailed once, even if they are in three of the lists you selected.

The banner at the top of the tab counts how many contacts that comes to right now. It is an estimate: the audience is worked out again at the moment the campaign actually sends, so contacts who subscribe, unsubscribe, or join a list before then will change the number.

Testing it before it goes out

Send a test email sends you the campaign as it stands. Enter the address you want it at, and optionally pick a contact to render it with, which fills the merge tags with that contact's real values so you can see the email a recipient would get.

Two things a test is not. Its subject is prefixed with [TEST], and it is not counted in the campaign's statistics. And it does not hand out the attached reward: no voucher, gift card, points or token are issued for a test, so that part you confirm from the estimate on the review screen.

Review and send

Review and send first checks the campaign is complete. If something is missing you will see Your email is missing some required details, with a button that takes you to the tab holding the problem. What we check:

The email has an unsubscribe link, unless its subscription type is functional.
The attached reward, if there is one, is fully configured.
The campaign has a name, a subject, and a sender profile with a valid address.
At least one subscribed contact is in the audience. Narrowing by contact lists without selecting a list fails here too.
A sending time is set.

Once it passes, the review screen gathers everything into one place: a preview of the email, the subject, the sender profile, the subscription type, whether tracking is on, the audience, the number of recipients, the sending time, and what the reward will hand out. If your plan counts tokens you will also see Tokens (estimated), which is one token per 100 recipients, plus one more per recipient when the campaign hands something out.

When it actually goes out

On the Sending time tab you choose between two options:

Send immediately sends as soon as you confirm, which in practice means 15 minutes later.
Schedule sends at a date and time you pick, in your account's timezone.

Either way there is a floor of 15 minutes. A campaign is never sent the second you press the button, and a scheduled time closer than 15 minutes away is refused. That gap is deliberate: it is the window in which you can still call the email back.

After that, scheduled campaigns are checked every minute, so one goes out at the time you set rather than at the top of the next hour.

Calling it back, and editing it afterwards

A campaign that is scheduled but has not gone out yet can still be stopped. Open it and click Edit email: we ask you to confirm, because taking it back to the editor cancels the scheduled time. Once you are done you go through Review and send again, and set the sending time again with it.

Once a campaign has been sent it cannot be edited, and it will not be sent again. To send the same email a second time, use Duplicate from the Actions menu, which gives you a fresh draft of it.

Webview in that same menu opens the email as a web page, which is the version behind the “view in browser” link in your emails.

What you can see afterwards

Open a sent campaign and the sidebar holds:

Information, the settings it went out with, including the Google Analytics tags its links carried.
Action, what it handed out, if it carried a reward.
Recipients, who it reached.
Opens and clicks, per contact.
Statistics, the totals, and which links were clicked.
Activities, a log of what happened to the campaign itself and who changed it.

Statuses, and what a failure means

In the overview each campaign carries one of these:

Draft, still being written, or taken back out of a schedule.
Scheduled, complete and waiting for its moment.
Sending, going out now. A large audience takes a while.
Sent.
Sent with errors, delivered to most of the audience, with some recipients failing.
Failed, which means the checks above did not pass when the campaign tried to send. We email the account, and whoever created or last edited the campaign, with the reason.
Bin, deleted.

Deleting a campaign moves it to the bin. Deleting it from the bin removes it for good, including its statistics and reporting, which is worth knowing before you clear out an old campaign whose numbers you still want.