Email Marketing Frequently Asked Questions

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Here are some common reasons that your campaign might not be running. Check them all to make sure you haven't missed any. If you still can't figure it out, please contact us.

General Reasons

• You must have prospects added to the campaign. Also, you can only send a message once to any one prospect. If you'd like to send the message again, you need to clone the message.

Specific Reasons for Newsletters

• Your campaign must be active.
• The message that you intend to send should have a status of "Ready to Send".
• Atleast one variation in each message needs to be set to "Enabled".
• For each enabled variation, you need to have both an HTML version of your message and a Text-Only version. If you don't have both, your campaign will generate an error and not send.
• You must fill out your physical business address and email address in the "My Profile > Settings" section. This is for legal anti-spam requirements. Your messages cannot be sent without this information.
• If the message has been sent already but you want to want to send it to more prospects, you can upload the new prospects and then enable the "Send most recent message to new prospects when they are added" checkbox on the newsletter edit screen. While this is enabled, new prospects will receive the most recent message in the campaign right when they are added.
• If there were no prospects in the campaign when it was sent, you can simply add your prospects and then clone the message to resend it. If it is the most recent message, you could also simply enable the "Send most recent message to new prospects when they are added" checkbox on the newsletter edit screen and then upload your prospects.

Specific Reasons for Autoresponders

• Your campaign must be running.
• The messages that you intend to send should be "running". If the message is paused, it stops the campaign at that point, waiting for you to set the status to "running" or "skip this message."
• Atleast one variation in each message needs to be set to "Enabled".
• For each enabled variation, you need to have both an HTML version of your message and a Text-Only version. If you don't have both, your campaign will generate an error and not send.
• You must fill out your physical business address and email address in the "My Profile > Settings" section. This is for legal anti-spam requirements. Your messages cannot be sent without this information.

If you are confused about any of these steps, please contact us and we will work with you to get your email campaign up and running.

There are three status options for a campaign.

Running means that messages will be sent to the prospects in this campaign if any are available to be sent.

Paused means that no messages will be sent, but regular operation can be resumed at any time by changing the status to Running.

Delete Campaign means that the campaign will be deleted upon saving the campaign.

Newsletter Message Statuses

There are four status options for a newsletter message.

Ready to Send means the message will be sent either immediately or at the scheduled date and time. After it has been sent the message will be marked as Sent and will not be able to be edited.

Not Ready to Send means the message will not send even if the scheduled time arrives. You need to set the status to "Ready to Send" when you have completed editing it and want it to be sent.

Delete Message means the message will be deleted upon saving the message.

Autoresponder Message Statuses

There are four status options for an autoresponder message.

Running means the message will be sent to the prospects when they are scheduled to receive them and then they will receive the next message in the campaign at its scheduled time.

Paused means the prospect will receive messages up to this message, and they will be paused on this message. They will not receive it, and they will not receive future messages. This is for pausing only the prospects that are scheduled to receive a certain message while you are editing it.

Skip Message means the prospects will skip over this message entirely as if it didn't exist. Use this if you no longer need this message but do not want to delete it.

Delete Message means the message will be deleted upon saving the message.

There are two status options for a variation.

Running means that the variation is available to be sent when the message is scheduled to be sent. If both variations are "Running", then 50% of the time the prospects will get variation 1 and the other 50% of the time they will receive variation 2. This is for split testing differences in your messages to improve the response analytics.

Not Running means the variation will not be available to be sent when the message is scheduled to be sent. A message's status cannot be set to "Running" without atleast one variation set to "Running".

Custom Prospect Fields are additional fields that you can use to store additional information about prospects. You can then refer to these fields when you are writing your messages. You might want to make a custom prospect field for "firstname" and then when you are writing your emails you can include the prospect's first name in the message. You can get very creative with these fields, using them for birthdays, preferred products, interests, or other custom information that is unique to each prospect.

To use the custom field in a message, you would use the syntax ${custom_field_name, default value}. The default value is optional, and if you don't include one, ${firstname}, then if 'firstname' is not defined for a particular prospect, it will be left blank.

Here is an example:

Hello ${firstname, Valued Customer},

Your favorite color is ${favorite_color}.

Sincerely,
Your Account Manager,
${account_manager, Stephen}

If you are uploading a list of prospects, you can include the custom prospect fields as columns in your file. Make sure your column fields do not have quotes surrounding the column names and that the form is in Comma Separated Values (CSV).

Here is an example:

email,firstname,lastname
jsmith@domain.com,John,Smith
jdoe@domain.com,Jane,Doe

If you are using a form to allow prospects to sign up for your campaign, you can select the fields you'd like included in your form using our form generator in the HTML Snippets section. You can find the HTML Snippets section in the campaign editing screen for that particular campaign.

Usually this means your file is not in the correct format or the file is too large. The maximum file size is 9MB. The first line of your file should be where your headers are for each column. Your headers cannot have spaces in them and do not surround them with quotes. Here is an example of a correctly formatted Comma Separated Values (.csv) file:

email,firstname,lastname
jsmith@domain.com,John,Smith
jdoe@domain.com,Jane,Doe

Notice that there are no quotes around the column titles or around the values themselves.

Also note that each prospect is on its own line in the file.

And finally, make sure that each column has a space for it, even if the value is blank for that particular prospect. Here is an example of what we mean, let's say that John Smith doesn't have a phone number:

email,firstname,lastname,phone,city
jsmith@domain.com,John,Smith,,Chicago
jdoe@domain.com,Jane,Doe,555-555-1000,Sydney

If you are still unable to upload your prospects, feel free to contact us and we will check the formatting for you and upload it!

• New prospects (based on the email address) in the file are added with the tag (if any) and opted out if checked.
• Existing prospects are retagged even if the tag is empty - that would leave the prospects "untagged". But you can easily re-tag them by uploading the file again.
• If the opt-out checkbox is checked then any prospects in the file that are not already opted out will be opted out. This means that this will not change the date on prospects that opted out some time in the past.

Tracking can be delayed up to an hour after an event occurs.

Your statistics can also change over time as more prospects open messages, click on links, convert, or opt-out of your campaign. A message might also bounce back as undeliverable due to the users mailbox being full or because that email address does not exist. These bounces can come back up to a week or more later from the original send date.

We update these stats for you as we receive them.

You can add a custom unsubscribe message by using our unsubscribe snippets. These are similar to the custom prospect data snippets. The two snippets you need to use to generate your unsubscribe links are ${unsubscribeURL} and ${businessAddress}.

Here is an example of a basic unsubscribe message:

Remove yourself from this list by clicking on this link: <a href="${unsubscribeURL}">Opt Out</a>
${businessAddress}

You can also add the ${unsubscribeURL} snippet to a link using the HTML editor or just pasting it directly as text into your message.

If you don't include these in your message somewhere, we add them to the bottom of your message for you with a default unsubscribe message. You can add the url and address snippets multiple times to your messages. Both Text and HTML versions need to have it.

When searching for emails, you can either search for the entire email address or use wildcards to search for multiple prospects. Let's pretend you are trying to search for "joe@gmail.com". You can simply enter joe@gmail.com into the email field and filter the prospects. His prospect record and only his record will show up. If that email is not in your campaign, there will be no results returned.

You can also use the wildcard % to search for email addresses. You can enter %oe@gmail.com and it will return any email address that ends with "oe@gmail.com". So it would return "joe@gmail.com" and other email addresses such as "johndoe@gmail.com" because they also end in your search phrase. You can put the wildcard at the end of the search too, like this, joe@g% and it will return all emails that begin with "joe@g", including "joe@gmail.com" and others like "joe@greatwebsite.com". And of course you can use the wildcard on both ends of the search phrase, %joe% to return all email addresses that contain "joe" anywhere in the email.

When search for tags, you must enter the tag exactly.

The date fields are inclusive. If you are searching for just one day, enter the same date into both the start and end dates.

When you edit prospects, it applies the changes to every prospect that is currently filtered. If you did not filter before you edit, it will edit ALL of the prospects in your campaign!

The "mark as opted out" and "mark as converted" checkboxes will make the prospects opted-out or converted on today's date.

Editing the tag will replace the current tag of the prospect(s).

"delete prospects" will delete all of the prospects that are currently filtered! If you did not filter before you press the delete button, ALL of your prospects for this campaign will be deleted!

A newsletter is a campaign that allows you to send one-time announcements and newsletters to the list of prospects all at the same time. An autoresponder is a series of emails that are sent out to each prospect in a sequence according to when the individual prospect was added to the list.

A newsletter is the traditional use of email marketing. The campaign has a list of prospects and when you create a new message it gets sent to your whole prospect list at once right when you schedule it to be sent.

An autoresponder is different in an important way. It is a series of messages that get sent out one after the other in timed intervals. When a prospect is added to the list, they get the first message in the series, then the second after a delay, and so on. Each prospect in the list is on their own schedule based on when they were added to the list. This is good for automated reminders for the prospect to return and use your website, or as a reminder that their trial account is running out, or any other sort of message that is intended to be customized and scheduled based on the individual prospect's join date.

This option, when enabled, automatically sends the most recently sent newsletter message to any new prospects that get added to the campaign. While this option is enabled, the prospect will receive the latest message right away when they are added to the campaign.

If the option is disabled, and prospects are added to the newsletter campaign, they will not receive any messages until your next newsletter message gets sent. If you choose to enable this option after your latest message has been sent and after some new prospects have been added to the campaign, all new prospects that have never received the latest newsletter message will receive it right when the option is enabled. And any new prospects going forward will receive the latest message immediately. You can disable this option at any time and new prospects will not receive the latest message.