Name and Start Point
Under Marketing > Campaigns, click Create Campaign. Give it a name that you will recognize in the list later, such as “October newsletter”; recipients never see it. Under Start From, start from scratch or from a copy of one of your campaign templates. To send a campaign again, for example next month’s edition, duplicate an existing campaign instead. The copy is a new draft with the same sender, recipients, subject and design.Sender and Reply-To
The sender is a name and an address on one of your verified sending domains, for exampleYour Company <news@yourdomain.com>. The domain must have valid DNS records and must not be paused. Any verified domain can send a campaign, whatever its sending type: campaigns always go out over the marketing infrastructure.
Set a reply-to address that someone reads. Replies to a newsletter are often the most useful feedback you get.
Recipients
Click Manage Recipients. Under Send to, choose one or more lists and segments. Under Don’t send to, choose the lists and segments whose contacts must not get the campaign: a contact on an excluded list, whatever their status there, or in an excluded segment, does not get the email, even when a chosen list or segment includes them. A list or segment can be on one side only. The campaign page shows how many contacts the campaign will reach. From a list, it counts the subscribed, enabled contacts that have not unsubscribed from everything and whose address was not found invalid. From a segment, it counts the reachable members. A contact in more than one of the chosen lists and segments counts once and gets the email once. When the exact count takes too long, the page shows an upper bound marked “up to”. To send to part of a list, create a segment with a rule such as Is a confirmed member of that list, or filter the list with advanced search and Save as new list.Subject and Preview Text
The subject is what the inbox shows first. The preview text is the line most inboxes show after the subject; without one, the inbox shows the first words of the email instead, often the view-in-browser link. Both are required before the campaign can be sent, and both can use personalization.Design
A campaign started from scratch gets its design on the campaign page: choose the Simple Editor, the Advanced Editor, or Custom HTML to upload your own HTML. The design is the campaign’s own copy, so changes here never affect the template it came from. See the two editors for what each one does, and for importing MJML or HTML.Personalization
Write a contact field between double braces and each recipient sees their own value:email, first_name and last_name; your custom fields are available under their key, shown as the template variable under Marketing > Contact fields. Give a default for contacts where the field is empty:
text_broken.
The Unsubscribe Link
Every campaign must have an unsubscribe link in its HTML. New Simple Editor designs start with one in the footer. In the Advanced Editor, add it from the link dialog under Automatic Links, or write{{ unsubscribe_url }}:
List-Unsubscribe headers that Gmail and Yahoo expect from bulk senders. A recipient who unsubscribes is unsubscribed from the list the campaign went to. A recipient that the campaign reached through a segment has no list to leave, and is unsubscribed from all of your marketing email. See unsubscribes from a segment campaign. A campaign without the link has the issue unsubscribe_link_missing and cannot be sent; a test can still go out, so you can test a design before the footer is done.
Clicking the unsubscribe link in a test send unsubscribes nobody.
This section is about campaigns. For the unsubscribe link and headers of mail you send through the API or SMTP, see unsubscribe links and one-click headers.