Email Marketing - Managing a campaign

To Create a new Email Marketing Campaign

1. In the administration end of the website, click on the Marketing tab
2. This will display the list of existing campaigns
   
3. Select the title of an existing campaign to create a duplicate of it or select the New tab
4. Enter the Title of the campaign, e.g. "Newsletter 2013"
5. Enter the Subject, e.g. "Give a duck newsletter 2013"
   
6. Select the Template you wish to use - unless you have paid for a specific template designed by our designers or developers use the "Standard" template (not Advance)
7. Select the Send Date (i.e. the date the email is to be sent) by clicking on the calendar icon . Initially you should choose a date 1 year in the future (any post-dated campaigns will automatically start sending as soon as they are saved!), just incase you don't finish your campaign and forget about it
8. Enter who the email is From, e.g. The Team at Zeald
9. Enter the Reply email address, e.g. info@zeald.com
10. IMPORTANT NOTE: Do not select your customers to email to until the very end. If you have duplicated an existing email, you should remove the customer contacts. This is to avoid accidentally sending an unfinished email to all your customers :(

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Write your email

1. Add a content component   and click your cursor into the Content box
   
2. It is a good idea to personalise your email with the customer first name. To do this, type in "Dear" or "Hi" and hit the space bar. Click on the dropdown box labeled Insert Field . Click on First Name (It will insert as #Customer.FirstName#)
3. Hit enter a couple of times
4. Type in your copy, insert text etc.
5. IMPORTANT NOTE: You must ensure that you save both the component and the email marketing campaign (scroll down the page to find the Save button). If you do not you will lose your changes. It does not hurt to keep a backup of your email content in a separate word document

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Promote a product (ecommerce)

1. If you wish the email to include details of a specific product, click on the duck  or the shopping cart icon. The Product Selector window will open
   
2. Browse for and click on the product you wish to include in the email
3. Click OK The product details will be inserted
4. Repeat to enter additional text and products as required

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Send the email

1. Click on the Select button . A new window will open that allows you to set up filters
2. Click on the Add New Button . You can select different filters from a dropdown box
3. If you set up groups and you would like to chose one or more of them select In Groups from the dropdown box
   
4. A new window will open. Select the customer group to whom you wish to send the email by clicking in the check box next to the group name
   
5. Click Save
6. If you have not set up any customer groups you can type or paste in your customer addresses (separated by commas)
7. Before you send you should preview the email, click on the Preview button - the email will open up in a new window. Close the window and make any changes as required
8. Before you send you should also send a test email to yourself
9. When you are satisfied, click the Save button at the bottom of the screen
10. The email campaign will be sent at the date and time that you specified

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Template Examples

Below are examples of the various templates available for your campaign:

Standard template:



Standard Store Template:



General Template:

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Frequently asked questions

What if I have duplicates of customers in my database with the same email address, will it send to them multiple times?

• The system will not email that address more than once when you send a campaign

NOTE : This also applies to customers that are part of multiple customer groups.

Why doesn't my email send instantly?

Firstly check the send date - it might be set to a year in advance. Please also make sure that there are customers selected to send to.

The following list explains some other reasons why the email campaign may take several hours to send:

Most major mail providers, eg google, yahoo, xtra limit the rate at which they will accept bulk mail, as a measure to mitigate spam and manage load.  This is particularly pronounced with free email services that have no SLAs or commitment to timely service. There is no way around this limitation and it means that if you send a large amount of email to one provider, it may only trickle through to their email accounts

• Generating  large amounts of complex email takes time, as each email is personalised it needs to be generated independently, and especially if you send the email at peak hours it competes with server capacity used by customers viewing your website.  Generally speaking we prioritise displaying your website over sending bulk email
• Large emails, ie those containing a lot of images, will take longer to generate and send as the images need to be attached
• A lot of email needs to be sent internationally (eg to google, yahoo) and only limited international bandwidth is available for sending it
• We prioritise real-time email (eg order notifications etc) over bulk email, so do many other providers
• Sending email on peak days (typically Monday and Friday) often involves longer delays.  Not only are many other customers likely to be sending email on the same day, all the major mail providers are likely to be receiving a lot of email and thus limiting the rate at which they will accept new email

To edit your details in the email campaign footer

These details about your company are generated from the Contact Preferences, found in your Website Manager

Learn how to create an email newsletter signup | Learn about bounced emails & blocked addresses