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. 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.
5. 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.

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.

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.

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.