Creating an email campaign
To create a new e-mail campaign, go to the 'E-mail campaigns' module (Hub > E-mail campaigns > E-mail campaigns).
Click on the + Create a new campaign button.
Choosing the campaign type
Next, you will have to choose the type of campaign that you want to create.
There are 4 different types of campaigns:
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One shot: This type of campaign is sent at given time to a great number of profiles all at once.
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Scenarized: This type of campaign can be triggered automatically via Scenarios or via API.
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A/B Testing: This option enables you to test several versions of your e-mails and to easily find out which version is the best performing.
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Transactional: This option enables you to set up continuous campaigns routed without any filter towards the destination address. It is only available if the licence is set up to allow this kind of campaign.
This is also at this step that you will have to choose the creation mode of the e-mail.
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From blank: by choosing this mode, you will have to define the e-mail from A to Z. You will have the choice between basing the content on a template, or code it in HTML.
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From a saved campaign template: only templates for the chosen type of campaign will be displayed.
You can easily find the right campaign template by filtering by entity or by looking up its name in the search bar.
Modifying the campaign type
If you chose the wrong campaign type, or if, for instance, you want to copy an existing one shot campaign to use in a scenario, it is possible to modify the campaign type.
After every step of the campaign creation, a button in the top right corner will:
- remind you of the current campaign type
- give you the possibility to switch to another campaign type
Please note that some parameters are not compatible with other types. For example, there is no Targeting step or unsubscribe link in a Transactional e-mail, and personalizations provided via API are only available for Scenarized and Transactional e-mails.
A warning screen will detail the parameters that will be lost in the switch. You will be required to acknowledge them before going forward. Please note that reverting to the original campaign type afterward would not restore these parameters (if your original type is 'A/B testing', you will be able to choose which version you want to keep).
Step 1: General data
At this step, you will be able to define the base data of your e-mail campaign as well as some advanced parameters.
General Data
- Campaign name: Specify the technical that your sending will take in Actito. This will have no impact on the text that the recipients will see.
We advise you to use a naming convention clear to every team (for example: dateCampaignName).
- Campaign languages: Choose the language(s) of your campaign.
Actito allows you to prepare a single campaign and to translate it in several languages, as long as your licence is set-up for multi-lingual use. Please note that modifying language parameters while editing your message can affect already created content.
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Database: Specify on which profile database you want to send the e-mail campaign. If you have several databases, you will be able to choose from a dropdown menu. Each campaign can only be sent to a single database
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Entity: specify the entity on which the campaign must be stored.
Please note that after validating the entity and the database, they cannot be modified anymore.
Message headers
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Sender: Specify the name which will appear in the inbox of the recipient of your e-mail (the 'from')
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Subject: Enter the object of your e-mail campaign. You can choose to create you own subject or get inspired by suggestions from AIO.
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Pre-header: The pre-header is used to complement the information in the object. This element is not mandatory but its influence on opening rates should not be underestimated. It will appear in the inbox of your contact.
It is possible to add personalizations in the message headers by clicking on the blue button next to each field.
This will allow you to personalize the text by using a profile value for each of your profiles.
In the headers, personalization is only possible on profile attributes and on technical values.
The information you define for your header is also visible in a banner above your e-mail preview in step 3 of campaign creation. This banner allows you to edit the subject and preheader defined in step 2.
Advanced parameters
It is possible to define additional parameters regarding the campaign technical configuration. Display the list of advanced parameters by checking the option.
E-mail reply
Allows you to track replies, set a specific "reply-to address", and a subject prefix.
- Reply-to address: is the address where you will receive all the replies to your campaign. It's important to verify that this kind of emails are allowed by your webmail, so that they are not filtered.
If no reply-to address is specified, you will not receive any replies from your contacts.
There are two options regarding e-mail replies:
- If tracking replies is ticked ON: when someone replies to your campaign, they won't see your reply-to address, but a unique address for the interaction (made of your license name and a string of characters). Indeed, the reply will transit through an Actito server, which will enable Actito to update the profile interactions and indicate that they replied to the campaign. Following that, the Actito postmaster server will transfer the e-mail reply to your selected reply-to address.
In this example, the reply will be sent to "support@actito.com", although, when writing the reply, the user will see the unique interaction address, in this case "sales_training_rsctw-sht@campaign.actito.email":
- If tracking replies is ticked OFF: Actito will not track replies, meaning that the information whether a profile replied to the campaign will not appear in their interaction. However, the address that will appear when someone replies to your e-mail campaign will be directly your reply-to address, without intermediary. Additionally, when replies are not tracked, it is possible to use a personalization, for example to directly transfer the reply to the appropriate customer representative.
In this example, the user will see the value of the personalization (it must be a valid e-mail address) and the reply will be sent directly to this address:
- Subject prefix: It's the prefix that will appear on the reply email subject.
If your campaign's subject is "Season essentials" and your reply prefix is your "Enquiry", the subject of the reply that you receive will be 'Enquiry - Season essentials'.
Sender e-mail address
You can specify a sending domain and an address prefix for your campaign.
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Sending domain: You can choose among the sending domains available in your licence.
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Address prefix: When a fixed "from" is in place for your license, this option allows you to replace the sending prefix (which is the part of the e-mail address before the @) by a specific value chosen for this campaign
Please note that special characters are not allowed and that a maximum of 20 characters is allowed.
If you would like to have a default fixed "from" configured for your license, don't hesitate to contact Actito support.
Links
You can select the domain of the links of your e-mail among the domains available in your licence.
Impact on commercial pressure
If you have commercial pressure rules in your licence, you can specify the weight of your campaign.
By default, the e-mail is recorded normally, but it is possible not to record it (such as for transactional e-mails) or to record them double if it is a high impact e-mail.
Campaign groups
You can add this campaign to an existing campaign group.
Grouping similar campaigns together allows you to analyze the results of this campaign group as a whole.
Goals
You can choose to enable goal tracking or not for the campaign. If goals are enabled, goal query parameters will be added to the URL of each link of your e-mail, to interact with the goal script. By default, goals are enabled.
Step 2: Target population
This step allows you to choose with whom you want to communicate.
Subscription and languages
As aspects related to subscriptions are paramount, it is mandatory to specify them.
Choosing a subscription in your campaign enables to generate reports, to follow the number of openings of the campaign, the clicks, the unsubscriptions... They also enable to monitor cross-campaigns on a month-by-month basis.
Moreoever, subscriptions are useful to follow your reputation and your performances in terms of deliverability.
Next, you will be able to choose which unsubscribe scenario is used.
E-mails will only be sent to profiles whose language (defined by the 'motherLanguage' attribute) was chosen for the campaign at step 1, unless you uncheck the 'Language' box.
In this case, you can select a default language. This will allow you to contact profiles whose language is not included in the languages of your campaign.
You must ensure to always have the authorization of your contacts to send them communications. You must therefore specify the subscription taken into account for this campaign.
As a result, only profiles subscribed to this subscription will receive this campaign. If a contact unsubscribes following this campaign, only the subscription related to it will be impacted.
Additional filter on target population
You can define additional filters to limit the target population. To do so, click on the Define a filter button.
The targeting module will open in a pop-up window, allowing you to define your target population.
Number of profiles in the targeting
After setting your filters, you can estimate the number of targeted profiles.
By clicking on the "Calculate" button, you will start a calculation of the target and obtain the number of people who meet your criteria at time T.
Filters applied at sending
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If there are commercial pressure rules in your licence. The filter of commercial pressure, which you defined at the previous step, is not applied by default. If you want to take into account your commercial pressure rules, it is necessary to check the relevant box.
Please note that the commercial pressure filter will not be applied in the target estimation -
If the e-mail address is not a unique attribute in your database. It means that several profiles can have the same e-mail address. Check the box "Send only one e-mail by e-mail address" to avoid sending the same e-mail twice. The profile (and therefore the personalizations applied to the message) will be selected randomly.
Step 3: Message
This step allows you to first choose how you want to create your new email campaign and then define its content.
The available options are:
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Create from template: Allows you to choose a template from an Actito template library. This is the simplest option, which does not require any knowledge of HTML coding.
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Import HTML allows you to import either:
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An HTML file, which contains images in absolute (hosted on a third party server)
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A ZIP file, containing one or more HTML files according to the number of languages in the campaign. It is advised to use one HTML file and one image file per language. The maximum size of the ZIP is 12 MB to allow importing all versions of a multilingual/AB test campaign at once, but one single version should not exceed 4 MB. We advise that each image should not weigh over 200 kb.
Make sure your HTML file follows the good practices!
- Code your own HTML: if you choose to code your own HTML, the basis of the code will be provided. This will predefine the encoding and the style of your email.
Even if you choose to import or code your HTML, it is still possible to use personalization in Actito. You only need to use the appropriate ${} tag.
Personalizing the message
Actito lets you personalize your e-mails in order to display text elements specific to each of your contacts. This can call on attributes of the Profile table, but also on various other data.
To insert a personalization, type the $ tag followed by the name of your personalization between curly brackets (for example, ${firstName}) where you want your personalization to appear in your message. When the recipient will receive the e-mail, this tag will be replaced by the corresponding value for their profile.
It is not allowed to use special characters or spaces in the technical name of personalizations. For instance, ${firstname} must be used instead of ${first name}.
Check links
After writing your message and defining personalizations, it is necessary to go to the link checking step.
To do so, click on the "Check links" button in the message preview screen.
You will reach a new page which will contain the list of every link found in your e-mail.
This list includes:
- The link of the text
- The URL of the link or the personalization towards which it directs (in the case of a form or an unsubscribe link)
- The name of the link: this is the name which will appear in the reporting
- The status of the link: an icon to the left tells you
- Green icon: the link is working properly
- Red icon: the link directs to a page that cannot be reached
- Grey icon: This is a technical value that cannot be tested (for example, an Actito URL of a form, the webversion or the unsubscribe link)
A red status does not necessarily indicate an error. Other reasons are possible, for example if authentication is needed to reach the page, a pop-up blocks access to the page or if the url has special characters but was not percent encoded.
It should be understood as a warning to double-check this link in your test e-mails.
Hover each link in the list to the left to highlight its location in the e-mail.
Click on each link to define their name. This technical name is different from the title of the link. It is used in reporting. It will help you differentiate each of these links in order to easily find them in statistics related to each campaign. If you leave the name of the link empty, the full url will be displayed in the sending report.
You do not need to click on the small "pen" icon to edit this link. Clicking on the tab of each link is enough the technical name settings.
To facilitate the analysis of clicks in your e-mails, each link should have a different name. However, if there similar links between campaigns, it is better to keep the same name in order to be able to carry out a global analysis (for example: pre-header, facebook, …).
After checking all your links, click on the X in the top right corner to leave the link checking screen.
Links parameters (UTM...)
After the creation of your message, you will be able to set up the additional url parameters.
They allow you to define generic parameters of web traffic analysis tools, such as Google Analytics, which will be added to each link of your campaign. Thanks to this information, you will be able to measure the efficiency of your marketing strategy and to compare the result of your communications.
It is of course possible to use any other traffic analysis tool, by manually entering the tags used by these other solutions.
To set them up, click on the "Links parameters (UTM, ...)Links parameters (UTM, ...)".
Next, you will be able to enter the additional parameters:
Click on the "Add google analytics" button to prefill the 'UTM' parameters, used with the most popular tool, namely Google Analytics:
- utm_source: allows to identify the source of the publication which generates traffic towards this link
- utm_medium: allows to identify the marketing channel (in this case: e-mail)
- utm_campaign: allows to identify the name of a campaign
The two other existing parameters (utm_content and utm_term) are optional.
It is possible to add personalizations to the URL parameters by using the blue buttons or the ${variable} format. By default, a personalization corresponding to the campaign name will be used for utm_campaign.
A maximum of 8 parameters can use personalizations with this feature. Remember that it adds the parameters to all links of the e-mail: if you need to push profile attributes to pre-fill a form on your website, for instance, more parameters can be added to the individual link.
Export the content
Once your message is complete, you can export your campaign content.
To do so, click on the "More" button and then on "Export".
You will receive a compressed HTML file in zip format.
You can then import this file to create other email campaigns.
AI Generate based on content
A powerful e-mail subject is a good way to maximize your campaigns.
Actito helps you define a compelling subject thanks OpenAI services.
The artificial intelligence implemented in Actito will suggest different subjects for your campaigns based on the content you've written. You can then choose one of these subjects for your campaign.
To do so, in the banner, click on the 'Generate' button next to the subject.
A side panel will open with 3 proposition of subject for your e-mail based on the content you wrote in your e-mail.
To choose the options you like the most, check the boxe of the option and then click on "Validate".
The subject proposed by OpenAI are editable: you can change the text, insert emojis, add personalization…
To do so click on the pencil icon next to the subject.
Actito offers artificial intelligence services. The marketer is responsible for the information provided and the final message of their campaign. No personal data stored in profile tables or custom tables is used.
This feature is enabled as standard in your license. You can deactivate it by going to your license configuration menu.
Step 4: Check and Test
At this stage, you will be able to check the rendition of your e-mail campaign depending on the personalizations and conditions you included.
If your internal validation processes for e-mail campaigns require sending various versions to several witness persons, you will be able to do it there.
Choose the testing group that you want to use to carry out your tests.
After choosing the relevant testing group, you will be able to select test profiles then to specify a "Test e-mail address". The emails will be only sent to the given address instead of every selected profile, while applying personalizations specific to them. It is possible to specify more than one redirection addresses.
If the message must be validated by different people, we advise you to send it to them at this stage, rather than forwarding the very same test message to everyone. Forwarding test emails may affect the email's layout and images.
With the button "View latest test Interaction", you can directly check the status of your test e-mail for each profile of your testing group, without having to use the "Profiles" module.
Avoid clicking on unsubscribe links during this step unless you want to test this feature. Unsubscribing in a test email will be really taken into account for each test profile.
Checking the size of the e-mail
When sending a test email, Actito will the display the size of this e-mail. This is an important parameter, as some webmails (especially Gmail) will clip your message if it is over the 102 KB limit.
It is bad user experience and a risk that the recipient doesn't view the entire message. It is therefore important not to go over this limit.
The 102 KB limit enforced by Gmail is only related to the code if your e-mail, so the HTML content without images.
It is a different limit than the 4 MB one, which is related to the entirety of the e-mail, with images, and which exists to optimize the loading time of your email.
To check the size of your email, click on the double arrow in the spam column. This will show you a color-coded rating.
Depending on the size of the test e-mail, a green, orange or red color code will inform you whether your message risks being clipped:
- Green: below 97 KB, there is no risk of the message being clipped.
- Orange: if the e-mail is just below the limit (between 97 and 102 KB), the test e-mail will be displayed entirely but we consider there is a risk of the message being clipped for some profiles. Why? The limit is related to the e-mail content, after the calculation of personalizations, the link encryption, etc. If the e-mail contains a lot of personalizations, the content of some profiles could be longer than that of the test e-mail. One should therefore pay attention if close to the limit.
- Red: above 102 KB, the e-mail will be clipped and you can expect that all the targeted profiles won't see the entirety of the message.
Speaking of link encryption, we know that the redirection URL of your links (used to track clicks) can sometimes be very long, especially when it contains lots of additional parameters (UTM, goals...). It contributes to the content size.
This is why Actito has developed an encryption method of tracking URLs. They are shorter (especially when the link contains many URL parameters), while keeping the same level of security as before.
The new shorter encryption method can be activated on demand (by e-mail to support@actito.com).
Step 5: Sending
If the content of your e-mail campaign does not contain any mistake, you will reach the Sending screen.
If everything is not correctly defined in your campaign, Actito will not let you validate the sending, in order to prevent you from sending a campaign which contains errors. Instead, an error message will be displayed. It will detail problems encountered with your campaign, in order to let you correct them.
A summary of every information specific to the campaign will be displayed. You will be invited to check:
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The general data, including the message headers and the general parameters
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The target group (subscription, language and targeting criteria)
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The message warnings: if you did not check some elements, or if there are incorrect or non-standard elements, a warning will be displayed under the "Message" section. Comments in yellow (i.e. not-checked links, ignored HTML rule) are non-blocking. Comments in red (i.e. missing personalization) are blocking.
If all elements are correct, you will be able to send the campaign.
Marketing E-mail
Advanced parameters
In mass campaigns (One-shot and A/B test emails), you are able to toggle some advanced parameters.
Control group
You can set up a control group by selecting either a percentage or an absolute number of profiles.
A control group is a population sample to which the campaign will not be sent, in order to compare its efficiency with the behavior of profiles who did not receive it.
It is possible to find the list of profiles filtered in the control group by using the "E-mail" targeting module.
Seed list
Allows you to select one of your seed lists.
As a reminder, a seed list is a list of contacts who should not appear as profiles in the database and who will receive a copy of the campaign when it is sent to the target audience.
You can also add email addresses that are not included in the seed list. These addresses will also receive a copy of the campaign when it is sent to the target audience.
Sending speed
By default, the sending speed is set to normal, but it is possible to use the "(very) slow" mode, to avoid generating too much traffic at once on your website, or the "fast" mode, to pre-generate the campaign.
Fast and (very) slow sending speeds are specific right that must be activated in your licence.
Report email notification
If you need to share the results of your campaign with analysts or executives who do not have have access to Actito, you can choose to automatically send them an e-mail notification with a link to the report.
The report will be exactly the same as the report found in the user interface, except it is hosted outside of your Actito licence.
Just like the standard report, it will be dynamic, meaning that actions from your recipients will update the report. For this reason, you may want not to send the report right after the campaign is finished. You have the option to send the report after 0 (right when all e-mails have been sent), 1, 2, 3 or 7 days.
Sending
If you created a Marketing e-mail (mass campaign), you will have the choice between:
- Send now: Send immediately, without delay, as soon as you click on the button.
- Schedule later: You can define the date and hour when your campaign will be sent. By scheduling the campaign at a later date, you make sure that your campaign will be effectively sent, without having to do anything later.
You can also choose to send your campaign when your profiles are most likely to open or click on it, thanks to the AIO - Best sending moment.
If you did not perform the calculation of the targeted profiles at the second step of the creation of your campaign since the last modification, you will see the following warning when clicking on "Send now" or "Schedule later":
If you want to calculate the targeted profiles before sending or scheduling the campaign, click on "Cancel", go to the second step of the creation of your campaign called "Target group" and click on "Calculate".
Timezone management
By default when you plan a campaign, the sending time will be calculated according to the timezone of your internet browser (displayed under the date picker). If you need to plan a campaign on another timezone, click on the "World" icon.
You will be able to convert any timezone into your local time.
Scenarized and Transactional E-mails
If you decided to create a continuous campaign (scenarized or transactional), you will be able to choose the "Activate sending" option. The e-mail will therefore be available for sending automation, such as planning scenarios.
Save as template
During this step, it is possible to save a campaign template. It is advised to use them should you want to facilitate the set-up of similar campaigns.
To do so, click on the button at the very bottom of the page: "Save as template"
