Email Campaigns: Newsletters and Promotions

Overview

Marketing → Campaigns sends one email, a newsletter or a promotion, to the customers you choose: everyone who agreed to receive marketing email from your store, or the agreeing members of one of your segments. You can send it straight away or schedule it. Customers who have not agreed are never sent a campaign, whatever else you know about them.

Campaigns are part of the Growth plan and above. Sending a campaign needs the owner, admin or manager role.

Before your first campaign

• Your business address. Every campaign email shows your store's postal address, and BestWebby refuses to send without one. It uses the billing address on your account, or, when there is none, your shipping origin address (Orders → Shipping, Origin tab).
• Your own email address (recommended). With your store's email domain set up under Settings → Email, campaigns go out from your own address. Without it they are sent from BestWebby's sending address under your store's name. Replies go to your store's public contact email, when you have set one.
• Customers who agreed. A customer agrees when they ask for your emails at checkout or through a sign-up form on your store and confirm from the email they are sent, or when you record their agreement yourself (see Customers).

Send a campaign

1. Go to Marketing → Campaigns and click New campaign.
2. Enter the Subject line.
3. Write the Email body. HTML is supported, so you can paste a designed email.
4. Optionally, tick A/B test the subject line and write a second subject (see A/B test the subject line below).
5. Under Audience, choose Everyone who agreed to marketing email or one of your segments (see Segments and flows). The window then says how many customers the campaign will go to, and how many in that audience have not agreed and will not receive it.
6. Click Send now. Or tick Schedule for later, pick a date and time (in your own time zone), and click Schedule.

Save draft keeps the campaign in the list without sending it. Drafts keep their subject and body, not an audience: you choose the audience each time you send.

Send test to me emails the campaign as it stands to your own sign-in address before any customer gets it. To send the test to others, type up to five addresses, separated by commas, in Send test to; the button then reads Send test. Each one must be yours or belong to an active member of your team (Settings → Team): a test is never sent to anyone else. The test has [Test] at the start of its subject and a TEST banner at the top, and carries the footer your customers will see, except that its unsubscribe link does nothing. With an A/B test switched on, each address gets both subject lines. A test is not a send: it is not counted on the campaign, its links are not tracked, and nobody's consent or unsubscribe status changes. An address that has unsubscribed from your store's marketing email is skipped, and the page names it. Each team member can send ten tests an hour, and the store twenty.

When you click Send now, you see how many customers it is going to. The campaign shows as Sending while the emails go out, then Sent, and its Recipients then shows how many were actually sent. An address whose mail server kept refusing the email after several tries is counted as failed next to the status (for example "Sent · 3 failed"); everyone else still gets the campaign. A campaign whose last emails never report back is closed as sent, with those counted as failed, within about half a day.

A large campaign is handed to the mail queue 1,000 customers at a time, so a send to tens of thousands of customers starts within seconds. If it is interrupted part-way (for example while BestWebby is being updated), it carries on from where it stopped within about ten minutes, and nobody it had already reached is emailed twice. If it is interrupted before its list of customers was saved, nothing is sent: the campaign goes back to a draft, the store's audit log records it, and you can send it again. Two customers who share an email address get one copy.

A/B test the subject line

Tick A/B test the subject line in the compose window and write Subject line B. Then choose:

• Test group: how much of the audience takes part in the test, from 10% to 50% (20% unless you change it). The test group is split evenly: half gets subject A, half gets subject B. Who goes in which half is picked at random, not by how long they have been customers.
• Pick the winner after: how long the test runs, from 1 to 24 hours (4 unless you change it).

When the wait is over, the subject that did better goes to everyone else in the audience. "Better" means a larger share of its readers clicked a link in the email. Opens are only used to break a tie, or when nobody clicked at all, because some mail apps (Apple Mail is the best-known) open every image themselves, so an open does not always mean a person read it. When there are no clicks and no opens to go on, subject A is sent.

Nobody gets both subjects, and nobody gets the email twice. The same rules apply as for every campaign: only customers who agreed are sent it, and agreement is checked again as each email goes out, including the rest of the audience hours later.

An A/B test needs at least 10 customers in the audience. Like the audience, it is chosen for each send: a draft does not keep it. You can schedule an A/B test; the wait starts at the scheduled time.

While the test runs, the campaign shows as Sending, with "A/B test · winner picked" and the time. Once it is picked, the row says which subject won.

Campaign report

Click a sent (or sending) campaign in the list to open its report: how many it was sent to, and how many people opened it and clicked a link in it. Each person is counted once, however many times they opened or clicked. For an A/B test, the report shows each test group and the rest of the audience, with its subject, how many it was sent to, and its opens and clicks, and says which subject won and why.

Drafts

Click a draft in the list to open it. You can change the subject and body and click Save changes, send it, schedule it, or Delete draft. A draft is sent as itself, with your latest changes, so the list does not grow a second copy.

Scheduled campaigns

A scheduled campaign shows as Scheduled, with the time it is due in the Sent column. Who it goes to is worked out when you schedule it, and agreement is checked again as each email goes out, so a customer who unsubscribes in the meantime is not mailed.

To stop it, click Cancel send on its row. The campaign is archived and nothing is sent. A scheduled campaign cannot be edited: cancel it and compose it again.

What every campaign email includes

• Your store's name and postal address.
• An unsubscribe link, and the one-click unsubscribe that mail apps such as Gmail and Yahoo offer.
• Tracked links and an open marker, so opens and clicks appear on each customer's timeline and on Marketing → Deliverability (see Deliverability).
• Links tagged with the campaign (utm_campaign, plus utm_medium=email and utm_source=newsletter when the link has none of its own), so an order placed after a click is counted as that campaign's revenue on Deliverability. A link that already carries your own utm_campaign keeps it, and its orders are counted under your value instead.

Who is left out

• Customers who have not agreed to marketing email.
• Customers who signed up on your store but have not yet pressed the link in their confirmation email. They are included once they do.
• Addresses on your do-not-email list: people who unsubscribed, addresses that bounced, and people who reported your email as spam.

Agreement is checked again as each email is sent, so someone who unsubscribed after you clicked Send now or Schedule is not mailed.

What this page does not do

• Pick customers one by one. Choose a segment instead; build one under Customers → Segments.
• Remember a draft's audience. Choose it again each time you send or schedule.
• Edit a scheduled campaign. Cancel it and compose it again.
• Stop an A/B test half way. Once the test groups have been sent, the rest of the audience gets the winner when the wait is over.
• Test the email body. An A/B test compares subject lines only.
• Fill in names. A campaign is sent exactly as written; text such as {{first_name}} is not replaced.

Common questions

Why will my campaign not send? The most common reason is a missing business address: the page says "Marketing email has to show your business postal address." Add your address and send again.

Why did fewer customers get it than the window said? Between your click and the send, some customers unsubscribed, bounced earlier or were added to your do-not-email list. Each is skipped, and Recipients shows the number actually sent.

Can I send to customers who have not agreed? No. Marketing email goes only to customers who agreed to it from your store.

Why does Send now stay greyed out? Choose an audience first. A campaign never falls back to everyone on its own.

Why was my test not sent to a colleague? Tests go only to you and active members of your team. Add them under Settings → Team first.

Why did subject A win when B had more opens? The winner is picked on clicks first. Opens only decide when nobody clicked, because some mail apps open every email themselves.