Sending an Email Campaign can swiftly announce future sales, a new collection, a seasonal promotion, etc. The data you collect through segmentation can be used to customize and target your email content for specific audience groups.
Before You Begin
To create an Email Campaign, proceed to the Campaign tab → Create campaign → choose to create the Email Campaign.
Settings
During the Email Campaign settings setup, you can customize how it appears in your contacts' inboxes, including:
Subject line — the introduction your contacts will see in the mailbox, even before opening the email. You can look for recommendations in our Blog articles and use the Subject liner tester. You can also use AI to Generate a subject line for you. Be aware that it supports multiple languages.
Preheader — a short text that follows the subject line of your emails; it can help you clarify the content and capture more attention.
Sender's email address — the email address your recipients will see in the FROM field. Make sure it looks professional and represents your business; for example, you can use [email protected], [email protected], etc.
You may also check how your Email Campaign will look in your recipients' inboxes in the preview section on the right.
Enabling the Facebook auto-post option will allow you to post this newsletter and the link to its web version to your Facebook page.
We will track opens, clicks, and other metrics for this campaign and will add UTM tags for Google Analytics tracking.
The internal campaign name will affect the UTM tag "utm_campaign." So, if you're using Google Analytics, keep that in mind.
Once you finish with the General settings, scroll to the bottom of the page and click on Next Step.
Choose a Template
Choosing a suitable template is the first step in creating the campaign's visuals.
In the beginning, you can choose from numerous Templates with designs and items. But personalization doesn't stop there. The design is simply a starting point for additional customization, as you may change the color and style of each Item to create an email that stands out.
You can filter templates by their goals and design a custom template tailoring your email according to your needs.
Content
In the Content stage, you can change your newsletter design or add content using Drag & Drop functionality.
Email Settings
Under email settings, you'll find some advanced features, enabling you to change the width of the content in the template, and theme settings, including email default colors and button design.
To access the Email settings tab, click on the Email background, as shown in the screenshot below. Here, you can adjust the width, background (color or image), and buttons of your email.
⚠️ Please be aware that the width might not be supported with specific devices, and your email might look distorted; we recommend testing it before sending your campaign.
Note that Outlook email clients do not support background images, defaulting to background color.
Newsletter Content
On the left-hand sidebar, you can find different Items that, with the drag & drop functionality, can be added to the newsletter content easily.
After you add the Item to the content of the message, you can change the content and layout using the panel on the right.
Like the newsletter, every Item has two tabs — Content (i.e., Image/Discount/Text/etc. - depending on the Item you added) and Layout.
Learn more about different Items here.
Saving template
If you would like to reuse the created template for your future campaigns and automations, please go through the following steps:
Go to your draft campaign or automation email, which you want to save as a template.
Click on the arrow sign in the top right corner.
Choose to Save as a template:
Once your email is ready to be sent, click Finish editing to proceed to the next step,
Recipients
In the Recipients stage, you can send the newsletter to the whole list of contacts or selected Segments only.
Only one email will be sent if you have the same contact added to a few chosen Segments. If you don't want to send emails to contacts in a specific segment and the one you're sending to, you can do that using the 'exclude segment' option.
Note the newsletter will be sent to subscribed contacts only. Contacts with other statuses (non-subscribed or unsubscribed) will be omitted.
💬 If you are starting with Omnisend, follow the warm-up plan and start by sending your emails to the most active contacts and then gradually increasing the recipients' count.
Send
In the Send stage of the newsletter design, you can send your campaign now or schedule it for later. Your recipients' lists refresh automatically based on Segment rules. If you opt to send the newsletter to new contacts, even those added recently will receive it.
💬Learn more about newsletter scheduling in the corresponding article.
Once you hit send, your email will be sent to all selected recipients within 5 minutes. If this is your first newsletter, it will need to pass the verification process and be sent to all your contacts with the delay. You can find more information on this process here.
👉 Learn how to boost your email campaign in our guide.
Time Zone Optimization
If you have a list of subscribers in different time zones and want to schedule your message at a specific time based on where the contact is located, you can use the TZO optimization feature.
TZO identifies customers' time zones by IP address. The IP addresses can be collected only via Omnisend signup forms. So, even if you import country property for your contacts, TZO won't work in this case. If your contacts are missing IP addresses, emails will be sent based on your store time zone.
When scheduling a campaign based on a subscriber's timezone, if the subscriber's time is ahead of the scheduled time, the campaign will be sent out within 5 minutes of scheduling it, provided there are no delays due to validation.
Reviewing Results
Gmail limits the total file size of your email messages, including text, images, and any tracking codes or HTML-based components. The size increases with the number of items, text, and other components. Using many different text styles also increases the size.
If your message exceeds this limit (102KB), Gmail will “clip” the message by removing all but 50KB of its content. Your subscriber must click on “View entire message” to see the full email.
We always recommend testing your message with a real email to yourself and adjusting the copy as needed. A good rule of thumb is to keep your message below 102KB.
If you want to send a real email to your email only, you should create a segment for this email. For this, navigate to Audience→ Create segment → Pick "Email address" filter → Email address is → fill out the value with the needed email address:
Then, when creating a campaign, proceed to the Recipients stage → Choose your segment from the dropdown → send a campaign to the segment with your email only:
⚠️ Please make sure to delete the previous copy of the same email in Gmail before sending yourself another one. If multiple emails are sent with the same subject line from the same email campaign, they're grouped in one thread, and this will cause clipping, even if the email wouldn't be clipped if it was sent separately.
If you have any questions or need any help, please don't hesitate to contact our support team at [email protected].