How To Create and Send Campaigns

[00:00:00] In this video, you will learn how to create and send email campaigns in your Profit Platform CRM. So to get started, let's talk about why you would want to use campaigns. So here are some examples of what you might want to use campaigns for. First of all, you might want to use it for creating and sending newsletters. Secondly, for promo emails for affiliate offers. Thirdly, for special one time offers that you want to send out to your list. So essentially for any one off communications that you want to send to some or all of your contacts.

[00:00:33] So let's head on over to the Profit Platform CRM and learn how to create a Campaign.

[00:00:39] After you are logged into your Profit Platform CRM, then to create an email campaign, go to the marketing tab, and it automatically puts you into the "Email Campaigns" section. However, to create the email that you are going to send in your campaign, you actually want to go over to the Templates area first. So the simple way to do this is to start from your basic email template, and you can create a copy of that by using the "clone" feature right here. So for this example, I'm going to be creating an email, but you would use the same steps to create any one of the types of communications that I spoke about at the beginning of this video, or any other communication that you wanted to send to any portion of your list.

[00:01:27] So I'm just going to call this "Email #1", and then press the "clone" button to create a new copy of the template. And here it is. So now I can go ahead and edit "Email #1" And because I created it from the template, it already has this placeholder, email and body text and the footer that I had already created in the original template.

[00:01:48] So here's where I would write my message, and I would probably start out with something like "Hello" and then I would insert a custom value for the contact's first name. And then I would go ahead and write my email here, or paste it in from somewhere else, if I had some copy that I had already written.

[00:02:06] I'm not going to spend a lot of time writing anything here. I'm just going to say, "Thanks for being on my list." And then say, "here's a special offer," as if I were going to send one, and then I'll just say "All the best, Jay at Kitty Care Academy." and sign off.

[00:02:17] And so this is just an example, but you can go ahead and think about what you would do for other applications. For example, if I close this now, you can think about what you might do differently for a newsletter. Maybe that if you did want to add an image, or even some other elements into your email, you could do that. And you can experiment with these different elements over here and even layouts if you'd like. Although, personally, I like to stick to the single column layout. It just tends to render best on all different kinds of devices. All right. So then what I'll do once I'm done editing, my template is go ahead and click "Save Template." and now that it's saved, I'll go back to the list of templates.

[00:03:03] And then I want to come up here and go over to the campaigns area from the "Emails" menu. And now I want to create my new campaign. So, "Email #1" is going to be the template I'm going to use. And I could then go ahead and edit it more if there's something else I decided I want to do here. So this gives you another opportunity to edit it, but then once you're done editing, you can click "Send or Schedule." And here is where you enter all the rest of the information that you're going to need to have for your campaign.

[00:03:32] Now you can use "Send Now" to send it out immediately. You can schedule it, if there's this particular time of day that you would like to send it to your contacts. Or you could use this "Batch Scheduler" if you'd like, and basically what this does is, if you had a larger list, you might want to break up how many emails you send at a time. So then you could set this down here. You could create like, you want to send 10 emails every one hour, and you could do that. You could also schedule which day that you want to send it on. And, there's other options that you can set here as well. So the easiest ones to use would be the "Send Now" or the "Schedule" where you would simply just be picking a date and a time to send them. But the Batch Scheduler does give you some additional options if you think you might want to use those.

[00:04:19] So for either of these, you're going to see these fields here, some of which you will need to fill in. Now, the "Sender Email" is always going to be the one that is set in your email settings, as we've discussed before in a previous training, which would be the [email protected]. But you could opt to set a custom reply to address if you wanted to. Now that just means that when somebody hits reply, it's going to go to a different address. That's not typically necessary, but it is something you could do. The "Sender Name" you don't have to fill in because it will be automatically set to the one that you set up in your email configuration settings.

[00:04:59] And then you do need to include a subject line. So if you think you might want to use a custom value, such as your contact's first name in the subject line, then go ahead and insert that first. So go to contact and insert the first name. Okay. And now I'm going to write some copy in front of this.

[00:05:17] So I've just written, "Here's an example campaign," and then their first name. And the preview text is optional. You don't need to put that in. You can, if you want, or you can just leave it blank. The preview text only shows up on some email clients. When your contacts are looking at the email in their inbox, they would see just one preview line. You've probably seen that yourself on various email applications, but again, it's an optional thing, so you don't need to put it here, but you could. Sometimes it can serve as sort of a second subject line that some people are going to see if they have an email client which displays that.

[00:05:55] And lastly, you're going to choose which contacts you want to send this to. So this is only useful to send to specific contacts. And so it's probably not what you're going to be using most of the time, this "Choose Contacts" option. What you're probably going to be using instead would be the "Smart List" option. And so. In an earlier video, I created a smart list for my customers, and I can select that right here. Now, if I wanted to, I could also create another smart list that would be all of my leads, just following the same steps I used to create this customer list, and then I would be able to select that list here. So if I want to send this email just to my customers, then I would select this. And then lastly, instead of using a smart list, I could actually "Choose Contacts from Tags" and then you can see the list of tags here. So this is another way that I could send, instead of creating a list, a smart list, I could actually just use the tags "customer" or "new lead," for example, to send to either one of those sets of customers based on their tags So if I just select that, then it's going to show me down here that I've selected six contacts.

[00:07:05] So, once I've decided who I'm going to send these to, so I could use either the smart list or the tags to select groups of contacts to send it to, then I can hit the save button to save the campaign.

[00:07:20] So I'm noticing that I can't send this yet. And I realized that actually the "From Email" is required to put in here. So I've typed in my kittcareacademy.com email address. And now I could actually send this.

[00:07:33] And if I wanted to, before I did send it, I could go ahead and send a test email by clicking this button up here, and then putting in the email address to send it to. And once I've put in that email address, all I'll need to do is click "send test email" down here.

[00:07:51] And so then, once I've hit send, then because I set this to "Send Now," it will immediately schedule it and send it out to the contacts that I've selected down here. So I'm going to go ahead and click Send. And you saw it said the bulk send operation was completed successfully.

[00:08:08] And you can see now it's status is sending. That should not take very long. I can actually click this refresh button to see whether it's done. And sure enough, it's already done. And so once I've sent it, another thing I can do is look at the statistics and I can look at statistics either here from this three dot button here, or I can also look at statistics over here.

[00:08:32] So this Statistics tab applies to all campaigns that are sent during the timeframe that you select here. And what I might want to do instead is look at the statistics that are just for this particular campaign. And so I can get a snapshot of those right here, looking at it. And I can see that 100 percent of the emails were sent. So they were attempted and sent and no one was skipped. And then I can also click this "Load More Statistics" button to get a better view of the statistics. Now you can see here is that it's showing that two were delivered. That's what this is, two of them were successfully delivered and one has already been opened. And then you can see additional statistics down here. You can actually see who they were delivered to, who opened them and who clicked now some of these may or may not apply to your campaign, there wasn't anything for them to order, that wouldn't show up here. But you could see if they did reply. For example, if you asked for replies, sometimes people will. And then "hard bounce" means that that email address actually probably doesn't exist. "Soft bounce" means that the email address probably does exist, but there's something wrong, like their inbox is full. And then you can also see anyone who complained or unsubscribed. " Complain," meaning maybe they reported your email as spam. Finally, if there were any errors in sending, then they would show up over here.

[00:09:56] And that's it for how you can create and send Campaigns in your Profit Platform, CRM.