Email basics 6: Campaign send settings

Learn how to configure the sending options for your email campaign.

Overview

Having created and tested your campaign, you now need to select who to send it to, and when. This is the fourth step of the campaign creation process, Contacts.

Step 1: Choose an audience

First, you need to select which of your contacts you want to send your campaign to from your address books, segments and marketing preferences.

You also have the option to select Test address book to perform a live send of the campaign to your test contacts. This can be helpful if you want to check inbox placement, which cannot be determined using test sends.

Address books, segments, and marketing preferences

• Address books are lists of contacts.
• A segment is a dynamic list of contacts who meet particular criteria such as age, location or open/click activity on your campaigns.
• Marketing preferences are groups containing contacts who've expressed a desire to hear from you about a particular subject or area of interest.

To learn more about these different groups or lists of contacts, check out:

• Create an email address book
• Add an individual contact to an address book
• Import multiple contacts
• Segmentation overview
• Using marketing preferences

Campaigns can be sent to a combination of one or more address books, segments, and marketing preferences.

To choose which to send to:

1. Select the relevant tab from Address books, Segments or Marketing preferences.
2. Select the checkbox for the sets of contacts you want to send to.

Step 2: Choose a send time

In the next section, you have three options to choose from when deciding when your campaign should be sent. To choose an option, select the relevant radio button.

Immediately
Your campaign is sent straightaway once you complete the final step of reviewing and confirming your campaign.

Scheduled
You set a date and time in the future for your campaign to be sent.

To do this, select the date picker and choose the date of send, then expand the drop-down menus
and select the time of send.

If you’re sending to any segments, you can choose to automatically refresh those segments just before the time of send, to make sure that the segment rules are pulling in contacts based on your most recent data. To do this, select the Refresh segments before sending checkbox.

Send throttling

For an immediate or scheduled send, if the feature is active on your account, you have the option to throttle the send. This means to spread the send out over a longer period than our standard send speed. To do this, select the Spread my campaign send over at least radio button and then expand the drop-down menu to choose the length of time to spread the send over. To learn more about throttled sending, check out the article Throttle the sending of an email campaign.

Optimised
Your campaign starts sending immediately after you review and confirm it, but we optimise the time of individual sends to each contact to maximise engagement based on your contacts' historical behaviour. This times emails to reach inboxes when they're most likely to be read.

To learn more about optimised sends, check out the article Use send time optimisation.

You can choose to set an optimised send to start immediately once the campaign is confirmed, or schedule a start time in the future. To do this, select the radio button for Immediate start or Scheduled start. For a scheduled start, use the date and time picker to set the timing for your campaign send to start, and choose whether to refresh any segments you are sending to before the send begins.

Account time zone

To make sure that your scheduled campaigns send when you intend them to, you must check that your account is set to the right time zone in the Account settings section. To learn more, check out the section Managing your account settings.

Step 3: Set up ReMail

Optionally, you can also choose to ReMail your campaign. This creates a copy of the campaign and sends it a few days later to any contact who is not tracked as having either opened or clicked (depending upon your account settings) the original campaign.

To do this, for Turn on ReMail, select the Yes checkbox. Enter the number of days after the original send that you want the ReMail to be sent, and, if you want to, enter a new subject line for the ReMail campaign.

To learn more about the ReMail function, check out the article Use ReMail to resend a campaign to non-engaging subscribers.

Add an auto responder

The final option you have in this campaign step is to choose whether to set up an auto responder for the campaign. An auto responder is an email which is sent to any contact who replies to your campaign. To set up an auto responder, you need to have the campaign you want to use created as a triggered campaign.

To learn more, check out the article Create a triggered campaign.

To set up an auto responder:

1. Select ADD AN AUTO RESPONDER TO THIS CAMPAIGN.
2. Expand the drop-down menu and select the triggered campaign you want to send to any contact who replies to your campaign.
3. Select SAVE.
   

   To learn more, check out the article Triggering an automatic response when a contact replies to a specific campaign they've been sent.

Once you’re happy with your send settings, select SAVE & CONTINUE.

Next steps

• Review and send your campaign