On the newsletter campaign overview page you can view all your newsletter campaigns.
In the first column you can see the current status of the campaign - for example, draft, scheduled or sent. This is followed by the email subject of the campaign, the date it was (or will be) sent and the number of recipients, if this information is already available.
For campaigns that have already been sent, this is followed by the most important email marketing metrics - Delivery Rate, Open Rate and Click Rate, as far as these are known. On the far right, as usual with Maildroppa, there are three dots that allow you to perform different actions on the respective campaign, depending on its status.
Drafts can be viewed or deleted. Scheduled campaigns can be unscheduled, scheduled for a new date, or used as a new draft. For sent campaigns, you have the option to view them, copy them to a new draft, or view the dispatch report with all email marketing metrics.
You can view a maximum of seven different newsletter campaigns per page. If you have more than seven campaigns, you can access other pages below the overview list via the navigation bar.
There is a search box on the left above the newsletter campaigns overview list. This allows you to run a free text search across all campaign email subject lines. On the right side, there is a "Tracking Options" button and a “Create Campaign” button.
When you click on the Tracking Options button, a popup will appear. In the pop-up you can set whether you want to use open or click tracking for your newsletter campaigns or none at all.
If the privacy of your customers is important to you, or if you want to increase the open rate of your newsletter campaigns, you have the option to disable open and click tracking of your newsletter campaigns here.
Please note that when sending a newsletter campaign, the currently selected tracking setting always applies. Depending on the current setting, we will then include open tracking pixels and tracking urls in your email, or not. This setting can't be changed after the mail has been sent.
Last but not least, please note - disabling tracking has consequences. If you have deactivated Open Tracking, you will not get any information in the newsletter overview or in the newsletter report regarding how often your campaign was opened. If you disable click tracking, you will not see how many times the links in a campaign were clicked.
Furthermore, you will not be able to use link tagging and you will not be able to adjust the link target after the campaign has been sent, if you have made a typing error.
If you have Open Tracking enabled, we add a hidden one pixel image at the beginning and end of each email. When the email is loaded, these pixels are usually also loaded, and so we can determine who has opened your emails and who has not.
However, more and more email clients are now suppressing the loading of such tracking pixels in order to better protect the privacy of your users.
Even though we do everything humanly possible to ensure that your emails all reach your subscribers, by enabling tracking you increase the likelihood that your email will be caught by spam filters.
To determine how often the links in a newsletter campaign email are clicked, we use special tracking urls. We also use the same method to tag a subscriber when they click on a link, or to subsequently adjust the target of a link in case of a typo.
As mentioned at the beginning, you aren't able to use link tagging or adjust the target of a link afterwards if you deactivate click tracking.
To create a newsletter campaign, click the “Create Campaign” button.
On this page you can create an email with subject and body text.
If you want to send the email immediately, click on "Send Now". If you want to send the email at a specific time in the future, click the small white triangle next to "Send Now" and then click "Schedule Send".
In the popup that appears, you can select a time in the future when you want the email campaign to be sent to your subscribers.
Please note that the assignment of which subscribers the email will specifically be sent to is always done at the actual send time - that is, subscribers who have unsubscribed from your newsletter in the meantime will not receive this scheduled newsletter, and subscribers who have newly subscribed or resubscribed before sending will also receive the newsletter.
You should ensure that your current subscriber plan is suitable to send the required number of emails in the future.
Alternatively, you can send a single test email. This is highly recommended to make sure that the email campaign is displayed correctly and all the links it contains are working. However, if you haven't sent a test mail and there are broken links, you can adjust the links later if click tracking has been enabled. You can read more about this feature later in this guide.
Last but not least, you can also save an email campaign as a draft for later.
In the "To" field, you can restrict whether you want to send the campaign only to a certain segment like your "High Value Customers", or to all subscribers of a certain tag.
Alternatively, you have the option to select your subscribers via an individually created filter. To do this, first click on "Filter".
In the mask that appears you can create an individual filter, similar to the permanent creation of a segment, to select the subscribers to whom you want to send your campaign.
You get a preview on how we will send your newsletter campaign via the “Sender-Name", "Sender-Email" and "Reply-To-Email" lines.
By default, we send your email with the sender email "[email protected]". This allows you to get started on Maildroppa immediately. However, for branding reasons as well as to achieve the best delivery rates, we recommend that you set up your own email address for sending newsletter campaigns with Maildroppa.
Similar to what you use in your standard email program, the campaign editor has a line for the email subject and a big text box for the email text.
If you click on the smiley face icon on the right side of the subject line or the text navigation bar, you can also add emojis to the subject line or the email body.
In the text navigation bar you will find everything you need to write your email. A font size selection, followed by font color selection, to format code, ” for a block quote, and formatting options for bold, italic, underline. Next there are two options for numbered or bullet formlists, and options for left justified, centered and right justified.
Alternatively, you can also select text and format the text to Bold, Italic or Underlined directly through the pop-up:
Last but not least, please note the last four icons:
The first icon allows you to add a link to your text. The second allows you to remove an embedded link, should you need to. The Smiley button allows you to add emoticons. We've elaborated on the Add Ascii Field button later in this guide, so keep reading if you'd like to know more.
If you currently have Click Tracking enabled and have previously created one or more tags, you can choose to tag the link directly, which will assign a tag to a subscriber when they click on the link.
There's nothing worse than sending out a new campaign to your 2,365 subscribers, only to find that one of the links is broken, thanks to a simple typo. Goodbye black friday sales!
The easiest way to prevent this is of course to send a test email and to check all links in your email program for correctness. And yet it happens to us occasionally that the error devil creeps in and we send an email with a broken or wrong link.
That's why we have found a way to fix broken links, even if it's already too late because you have already sent the email to your subscribers. However, in order to use our link editing feature, click tracking must be enabled before sending, as we use the tracking link functionality to adjust a link afterwards.
Assuming that click tracking was active when the campaign was sent and you want to adjust a link afterwards, proceed as follows. Click on "View Campaign" in the newsletter campaign overview.
Below the email you will see a list of all the links contained in the email.
If you click on "Edit", you can change the link after sending the mail, if you have click tracking set up. Since we keep getting asked - yes, this is magic!
With "Add Ascii Field" you can add a subscriber field variable that allows you to address each subscriber individually, such as by the subscriber's first name, increasing the conversion rate of your email.
If you click on the 3 dots on the far right of an already sent campaign in the newsletter campaign and then on "View Report", you can see a detailed report of the email campaign.
However, you should keep in mind that this report is generated in real time, and that the sending of all emails is staggered over several days, if necessary, in order to achieve the highest possible delivery rate for you. This means that in the first few hours, the delivery rate will be low, but will increase over time. You can read more about the email report here.
Learning how to time the sending of your emails will help you to improve the performance of your marketing campaigns. Read more about this and other important aspects of email marketing in the Maildroppa Academy.