Get started with email

Learn how to create, edit and send engaging marketing emails to your contacts.

Overview

Email is one of the most effective channels you have to communicate with your contacts. With Dotdigital, you can create customised, targeted, and personalised email communications that feel relevant and tailored to each of your recipients.

From the very first steps of creating and designing a campaign, through to automation, tracking and reporting, Dotdigital has all the tools you need to really make the most of email.

Let’s get started.

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Types of email campaign

You can create the following two types of email campaigns:

Standard campaign

A standard campaign is sent manually to your address books, segments, or marketing preferences, either immediately or scheduled for a later time.

Triggered campaign

A triggered campaign is sent automatically when an action or certain criteria is met, for example, an auto-responder sent when contacts reply to one of your campaigns, or an email sent through an automated program when contacts reach the relevant program node.

Where to go from here

There’s a huge range of things you can do with email, so much so that at first all of these options can be a little overwhelming. To help, we’ve picked out the key first tasks you need to complete to start getting the best out of your marketing emails.

• Email basics: Create, build and send
  Learn how to select a template, create and test your campaign and get it on its way to the contacts of your choice.
• Design a campaign with EasyEditor
  Explore the different design options offered by EasyEditor to enhance your campaigns.
• Send options for email
  Gone are the days of firing out an email to your entire marketing list at once — make sure your communications are reaching the right audience at the right time.
• Automation features
  Your time is precious and valuable — make the most of it by letting automation take care of some of that workload.
• Email reporting
  To understand what’s working and what can be improved, you need to know how your emails are performing once they reach your contacts’ inboxes.

Do more with email

In the section above, we’ve covered the fundamentals of email. Once you’re comfortable with the basics, you might want to get creative with some of our more complex features, such as:

• Email tracking options
  Explore your options for tracking contact behaviour through your emails.
• EasyEditor template markup
  Add custom HTML and CSS to your templates and campaigns.
• Personalisation options:
  • Advanced personalisation
    Use Liquid script to pull additional layers of personalised content into your emails.
    

    Advanced personalisation might be included in your account package by default. If not, you can choose to purchase it. To do this, fill out the request form. For Query type, select Account management.

  • Dynamic content
    Display personalised content for contacts depending on the information held in their contact data fields.
  • External dynamic content
    Display personalised content that's served from an external server.
• Sending email campaigns in different languages
  As well as our default character encoding of Unicode (UTF-8), which is best for Latin-based characters, we also offer character encodings that support other languages.
• Set up your BIMI logo
  Enable Brand Indicators for Message Identification for your account.