How to create outbound email campaigns 
Category:  User Guide 
Group:  Campaign Studio 
Product:  All versions

You can manage outbound email campaigns in the Campaign Studio. Note that not all versions support this feature. Contact you system administrator, if you feel that you are missing this functionality.

An outbound email campaign consists of the following elements:

• A message: this is the email subject and body text
• A mailing list: these are recipients who receive this message
• A campaign to track metrics and generate business intelligence for marketing

Creating the message

You can create the message in the “Templates” tab. Add a new template and complete the fields as needed. The email design is defined by the “header”, the “Subject”, the “HTML body” and the “Plain text body”. The header lets you design the HTML layout. It should only include a style sheet. The subject line represents the headline of the email. The HTML body will be the text shown, if the recipients receives HTML emails. The Plain text body will be the text shown, if the recipient receives plain text emails.

The template can be used for multiple campaigns. You can associate the template to the campaign in the ‘Scheduling’ section of the system, as explained below.

Creating a mailing list

The mailing list is a database table, which contains a list of recipients from the CRM Studio. You can manage the lists and contacts in the List Management section of the Campaign Studio.

Scheduling an email campaign

All pieces of this function come together in this section. The scheduler allows you to combine a campaign, a mailing list, and a template, and schedule the outbound email campaign. You can send a test email to an email of your choice. This will help in quality control. The actual emails will be sent when you execute the email schedule. Note that you can execute the same campaign multiple times to the same mailing list using the same template. This saves time, as no set up is required using the same parameters.

While common email systems maintain static mailing lists, which require a lot of manual maintenance to keep the up-to-date, this system keeps mailing lists up-to-date automatically. You can achieve this by using the marketing automation features in the Marketing Studio. Simply create tasks, in which contacts are added or removed from mailing lists based on defined rules. Thus you maintain a mailing lists that always contains relevant contacts for this message and campaign. This optimized drip marketing campaigns.

The system sends out all emails in queue on an hourly basis. You can track responses, and even review details of each contact in the Campaign editor.

Opt out lists and Spam report lists

If a recipient opts out, or reports the email as spam, this information is stored in the centralized database. Contacts in this database will not be receiving emails, if you use this system. Please ensure that you maintain a clean database. If you use other email systems, ensure that you export this list, and add it to your opt out list.
 

(Publish Dt) 02/18/2011
Buzz: email campaign,email,emails,drip campaign