Now that you have looked at how you will transfer contact data in and out of Emarsys, we’d like to turn your attention to the types of campaigns you will be sending. Setting up your first campaigns in the Emarsys application is easy, so make sure you know exactly what your strategy is and you can be sure to get off to a flying start.
And of course Emarsys Support will be on hand to make sure you don’t make any mistakes that could cost you time or money.
Contents:
Email Campaigns
Before we can start to send any email campaigns for you, we need to rebuild your sender reputation. Click the link below to read more about our IP warm-up program.
While you are working on this, we can prepare your first proper campaigns. Emarsys can send everything from large, batch campaigns to individually-targeted customer lifecycle messages and transactional emails. We also offer a host of email features, some of which are out-of-the-box and some which require implementation on our part or on yours. The type of campaigns you want to send will determine how you proceed with the next steps.
For this it helps us to know a bit more about your email marketing strategy. Below are the most important things to consider.
What kind of email campaigns will you send?
Email campaigns can be generally categorized into two types:
Batch campaigns
A batch campaign sends the same message to many recipients at the same time. Within this message, content can be targeted at different segments within the launch list using a number of personalization options.
Transactional emails
Transactional messages, or real-time messages, go out to a single recipient and are triggered by a specific event. Some events can be selected in the Emarsys application interface. These events can include:
- Registration through Emarsys forms
- Submitting other forms such as Contact Us or Change Profile
- Specific dates (e.g. birthdays)
You can also trigger events via the Emarsys API or external integrations.
How will you build your launch lists?
Campaigns can be launched to one of three launch lists.
- Individual contacts – Read up on our different methods for sending time-critical and other transactional messages.
- Segments – Dynamic segments, refreshed at the moment of sending, are the most common way to group contacts for batch campaigns. Segments can be created based on a variety of criteria, from contact properties, email response behavior or even geo-location data. If you are using Smart Insight, you can also use Smart Insight segments as launch lists. All segments can be further refined with other criteria and also combined.
- Contact lists – You can also create static contact lists if you do not want your launch list to change.
Excluding contacts
After you have defined your launch list, you can then choose to exclude contacts in a different segment from the campaign (for example, if they have already received a similar campaign). You can also set a frequency cap for contacts so that they do not receive too many messages within a given time frame.
What content will you send them?
Emarsys comes with an easy-to-use, intuitive Visual Content Editor which lets you create great emails with little effort, based on the email templates.
One of the main advantages of using Emarsys template is that you can predefine as much of the content as you like. The remainder can be added manually, or imported automatically via the API. You can also create sections that are displayed only to those recipients who have certain interests, or to a certain segment.
Custom HTML emails
If you prefer to create your own emails, you can enter the content manually in the editor, or use the API Email endpoints method to send content automatically. Custom HTML emails do not have sections, but you can define blocks of content to send to specific recipient groups using the conditional text feature.
In addition, we have a number of other features to help you manage your content:
- Personalization options – Whichever email type you use, content such as greeting, first name, last name, etc. can be personalized using the contact database fields. You can also define entire sections to be shown to different segments within the launch list.
- The Media Database – Images can be hosted by you and linked directly in the text, or hosted by Emarsys in the Emarsys Media Database and added directly to the email.
- Transaction- and product-specific content – You can also pull content from an external database, such as a web shop or product catalog, and add it to an email via the API.
When will you send it?
The Emarsys Email Campaign Manager has a simple interface for launching emails manually or scheduling them to launch in the future. You can set them up to launch after a specific event, and create recurring emails where the content is automatically added via RSS.
Customer lifecycle emails
In the Automation Center, you can create multi-step customer lifecycle campaigns where emails are launched according to the behavior or properties of the contacts as they progress along their customer journey.
External integrations
And of course you can use the Emarsys API to launch emails from an external application.
What are your success metrics?
Emarsys provides a comprehensive set of tools for displaying the responses to your email campaigns.
These include:
- A full breakdown of the launch statistics, including planned number of recipients, those excluded by blacklists, poor email syntax, frequency cap, etc.
- Deliverability statistics, showing delivered emails and soft, hard and block bounces.
- Email responses, including clicks, opens and shares on social media.
Additionally, you can identify trends in response activity over time, break the responses down by time of day and days of the week, and see how many contacts are opening on mobile devices.
We also provide a detailed explanation of how we attribute revenue to our various channels.
Exporting responses
The total figues for each email can be exported, as well as a complete breakdown of activity by contact, either over time or per email category.
Mobile Campaigns
As well as providing mobile-responsive email templates by default, Emarsys offers a number of options for mobile messaging.
Both of these channels can be used on their own for batch messages, or as part of an omnichannel approach if you include them in Automation Center programs.
Ad campaigns
Our ads channel lets you engage your customers on social networks via targeted ads campaigns, and find new leads based on your highest-spending customers.