Email campaigns

Newsletters and announcements to people who asked to hear from you. Build a list, write the email, send it, and see what happened.

The short version

• Everything is under Emails in the sidebar.
• Contacts go in lists; a campaign is sent to lists, your website's members, or both.
• A form can fill a list for you, going backward as well as forward.
• Set up your sending domain first, or nothing sends.
• Send yourself a test first. A campaign cannot be sent until you have.
• Unsubscribes, bounces and bad addresses are skipped for you; List Health shows them.

Lists and contacts

A list is a group of people you send to. Most businesses need one. Separate lists earn their keep when the groups genuinely want different mail, like customers and suppliers, not when you are simply organizing.

Add contacts one at a time or import a CSV file. Duplicates are handled, and anybody who has unsubscribed stays unsubscribed even if you import them again. When you type an address that looks like a slip, such as gmial.com, we ask whether you meant gmail.com before adding it. Keep it as typed if it really is right.

Filling a list from a form

A form on your site can add everyone who fills it in to a list. Open the form's settings and pick the list on the Mailing list tab, or open the list and connect the form under Kept up to date by. Both do the same thing.

Connecting a form is not only about what happens next. It also adds the people who filled the form in before you connected it. If your signup form has been live for a year, you get that year.

After that it keeps going on its own. Every new submission is added until you disconnect the form. Pausing stops new people being added. Disconnecting stops it for good. Neither one takes anybody off the list, because they are on it.

The address comes from the email field on the form, and the name from any name fields it has. A form with no email field has nothing to collect, so you cannot connect one until you add the field.

Someone who has already unsubscribed is never put back. If they fill the form in again, they stay unsubscribed.

Only send to people who asked

Importing a bought list, or everybody who ever emailed you, is the fastest way to ruin your sending reputation. Complaints get your domain's mail treated as spam everywhere, including the ordinary mail you send by hand.

This is what to weigh before connecting a form. A newsletter signup is an easy yes: joining the list is the whole reason somebody filled it in. A contact form is a judgment call, because asking you a question is not the same as asking for your newsletter. If you want to use one that way, say so on the form itself.

A small list of people who want to hear from you outperforms a large one that does not, on every measure worth having.

Writing a campaign

A campaign is a subject line, a From address, a template and who it goes to: any of your lists, and the members of any of your websites. Choose New campaign on the Campaigns page to set those.

The design itself is a template, under Templates. Start from one of the ready-made designs and change it, or describe the email you want and have it drafted. Either way you can edit every part of it afterwards.

Spend your time on the subject line. It decides whether any of the rest gets read, and it is the one part everybody sees.

Test before you send

Send yourself a test every time. Read it on your phone, because most people will. Click every link.

You have to: Send now stays locked until a test of the campaign has gone out, and editing the campaign locks it again until you test the new version.

A campaign cannot be recalled once it has gone. The test costs you thirty seconds and is the only chance you get.

What the results mean

You will see how many were delivered, how many bounced, how many were opened, and how many people unsubscribed or marked it as spam. Under Who didn't get it are the addresses that bounced, and the ones marked Not sent: addresses we left out because of a problem with the address itself (see List Health, below).

Opens are a rough number rather than a precise one, everywhere, not just here: mail apps that pre-load images count as opens, and privacy features hide real ones. Use it to compare one campaign against another, not as a headcount.

We do not track which links people click. Whether an email got opened is a useful signal; rewriting every link in your mail to find out where somebody went is a trade we did not think was worth it.

Unsubscribes, and what they stop

Every campaign carries an unsubscribe link, which is required by law and by every mail provider. Unsubscribes are recorded automatically, and they are listed under Unsubscribed in List Health.

You can resubscribe somebody from there, but only do it when they have asked you to. Emailing a person who unsubscribed is against the law in most countries, and it hurts your ability to reach everybody else.

Unsubscribing stops marketing email. It does not stop the mail your site sends because somebody did something: an order confirmation, a password reset, a form receipt. Those are part of the transaction they asked for, and they keep working.

Bounces

A bounce is an address that does not exist or refused the mail. They are suppressed automatically, so you do not have to clean your list by hand.

We also skip addresses we already know will bounce: an address that bounced recently for another sender here is marked Will bounce. We never say where it bounced. If you believe it works now, choose Try again.

A high bounce rate on a list is worth taking seriously. It usually means the list is old or was not collected from people who opted in, and continuing to send to it damages your reputation with every send.

List Health

Open Lists and choose List Health to see every address your campaigns skip and why. On one list's page, the same button shows just that list.

• Needs attention: likely typos, addresses that are not valid, throwaway inboxes that stop working, and addresses whose domain no longer receives email. Use the suggested spelling, fix it on its list, or keep sending to it anyway.
• Will bounce, Bounced, Unsubscribed and Spam complaints: addresses your campaigns no longer go to.
• Removed: addresses you took off your campaigns yourself. You can undo it.
• Shared mailboxes: addresses like info@ that reach a team rather than one person. They are still sent to; they are listed so you know.

An address with a problem also shows a warning sign next to it on its list. Mail your site sends because somebody did something, like a password reset, is not affected.

If the email add-on comes off

Your lists, contacts and templates all stay saved. Forms you have connected keep filling their lists, so you do not come back to a gap. What stops is sending.