So, the time has come for you to send your fist campaign via SMSEdge.
Here’s a short tutorial to guide you through the process.
First, head over to the email campaigns section.
Then, click the New Campaign Button.
A pop-up will appear, asking you to name your campaign.
Our suggestion is to name the campaign in a way that will be clear and easy to understand what the content of the campaign is, what the target list is and add any other information that will be useful to easily differentiate it from other campaigns when analyzing the results afterwards.
After naming the campaign, you will be taken to the campaign settings, where you can do everything you need to in order to send your campaign.
You will see multiple fields that require your attention. Let’s cover all of them and see what each one does:
Lists - Like the name suggests, here you select which target list (or lists) you’d like to send this campaign to. All of your previously uploaded or created lists will show up, but you also have the option to upload a list at that moment also.
Settings - Under the settings field there are 3 important things for you to determine:
From name - This field enables you to set up who the email recipient will see as the sender of that email. This is your first chance to introduce yourself to the list that is receiving that campaign, and should not be taken lightly. Sender names have a great impact on open rates since they greatly influence whether or not the recipient is interested in what you have to offer to them in the email.
Our suggestion is to make it very clear who is contacting them, so just having the name of the brand as the sender name is standard best practice, but on some occasions more personalized sender names (e.g. “Jeff from Amazon”) tend to perform better, so that is something you might want to test out.
Track Opens - Basically what the name says, an option to track how many times your emails were opened. Our huge recommendation is to always keep this setting turned ON, so you could measure the performance of the campaigns (what are the open rates)
Track Clicks - Similar to Track Opens function, but this time, it’s for clicks. Same thing, we heavily suggest you always keep this turned ON, so you could track click rates.
After you’re done with setting these 3, click the Save button, and you’re ready to move to the next step.
Templates - At this stage, you can select which email template you want to use for the campaign. When you click on the Template Settings field you will see all of your previously created templates show up on the right side of the screen.
If you have already used those templates for some campaigns, you’ll be able to see their individual performance and stats next to them.
By clicking on the template, a preview pop-up will appear where you can once again check if that is the correct template that you want to use, and you will have the ability to potentially update it if you want so.
If you do not have a desired template already created, you can click on the Add Template button in the upper right corner to create a new one.
When you’ve decided which template you want to use, just make sure it is selected with the button on the furthest right of the row. If you’d like to test out different templates and then compare their performance, just select more of them and the campaign will be an A/B test of different creatives, that will be split even randomly.
Once we have our template (or templates) selected, we can move towards the next step.
Servers - This one is quite easy, just click the field and select your assigned server. Off to the next step.
Send type - Now this one is very important, since it determines how you will be sending out the campaign, will it be a “one off” campaign, or you want to set up an automated sequence. There are 2 options between you can choose, Manual and Automatic.
Manual - This is the setting you should go for when you want to send a single email (e.g offer, promo mail etc). If Manual is selected, you will see the following additional settings.
If Send now is turned on, that means that the campaign will start sending immediately after hitting the send button, with no time delay.
On the other hand, if you’d like to schedule the campaign for a later time or/and date, just turn off the Send now button, and now options for desired time and date will show up.
Use the calendar to schedule the campaign for the aimed date and time of the day, and make sure you select the timezone. We suggest using the timezone that is best suited for your targeted list.
Finally, when the time and date have been decided, whether the campaign is scheduled, or it goes out immediately, the last step for us to set the campaign up is to decide how big of a portion of the list we want to send out the emails to.
If the Finish lists button is turned on, that means that the campaign is going out to each and every person from the list. In majority of the cases, that is the setting you would like to go for.
On the other hand, if you’d like to just test out the template or anything else, you can uncheck the Finish lists button, and in the Send Size field input with the number of addresses from the list you’d like to send out the email, and those will be randomly selected.
And that would be it, for the Manual setting, for single “one off” campaigns, but let’s go back to Automatic setting, if you would like to send out a sequence of emails to your list. If you select Automatic, the settings you will have will be as follows.
Let’s go over each setting individually.
Automatic Days - This will determine which days of the week you wish recipients from your list to receive emails (Monday, Tuesday etc).
Time - This one is pretty simple, just select the time of the day you wish the campaigns to start to go out.
Timezone - Everything mentioned above for the Manual sends is the same here.
Automatic Template Sequence - Dictates at which order you would like the emails (different templates/content) to go out to recipients. If you would like to use this functionality as a flow, the suggestion is to use descending order, and rearrange the order the templates are presented using the drag and drop feature as highlighted below. Of course, make sure all of the templates you want are turned on.
Automatic Stop Activity - This setting you should use to determine what will be the trigger for the sequence to stop for the specific recipient. You have 2 options, stop after email has been opened, or stop after email has been clicked. If you leave the field blank, there will be no stopping.
Contact’s max emails - Use this field to determine how many emails from a sequence the recipient should get in their inbox. E.g. if you intended for the flow to have 4 emails in the sequence, set the limit to 4. Otherwise the emails will keep looping constantly.
And that’s it!
After you’ve set up the email campaign, you can click the Send button, and the emails will start rolling out to your recipients.
If you need any help or have any questions regarding the process, make sure to ask your Account Manager, he will be there to assist you.