How Do I Get Started?

To run a successful email marketing campaign, there are two main goals:

• Find your audience

• Make them an offer they can't refuse

This system will provide tools to gather subscriber email addresses, but forming effective and targeted recipient groups is up to you. Likewise, the system will provide tools to schedule and send consecutive email messages as part of a structured campaign, but the content of those messages will be yours to create.

So, let's get started! First, let's get a subscriber list. There are three ways to get email addresses into the system:

• If you are importing your own list of subscribers from another application, click here for instructions.

• If you are going to gather email addresses from your website, click here for instructions on how to create web forms that will feed your subscriber list.

• If you are going to add your first few subscribers manually, and work from there, click here for instructions on adding a subscriber to the system manually.

Once you have defined your recipients, you can create your campaign. There are three steps to creating a campaign:

1. Specify the campaign name and recipients in the Create Campaign screen.

2. Add the first message on the campaign.

3. Schedule the message to be sent on a specific date or schedule it to be sent when a subscriber signs up.

4. Choose the template you want for the message.

5. Fill in the components of the message with your text.

6. Preview your message and mark it Completed.

3. Add additional messages.

4. Schedule the message to be sent on a specific date, or schedule it to be sent when a subscriber signs up, or schedule it to be sent a certain span of time after the previous message on this campaign.

5. Choose the Template you want for the message.

6. Fill in the components of the message with your text.

7. Preview your message and mark it Completed.

4. When you are done adding messages, your campaign is complete.

The messages are the key to your success. No matter if they are newsletters, promotions, or other communications, each message should:

• Have an Introduction that tells the recipient who you (the sender) are, why he/she is being contacted by you, and the purpose of the message.

• Be designed for quick download. Because many of your recipients may still connect with a dial-up modem, make sure that the graphics in the message are not more than 20 KB.

• Avoid long paragraphs and large blocks of text. Chunk your message into small "bites" that can be read quickly.

• Link to a website where the recipient can follow your call to action, whether that be to purchase a product, check on progress, get more information, or take a survey. Make sure that the link takes him/her to a location that matches the message.

After you are finished with your first campaign, you can create additional campaigns for the same recipient groups, or you can create new groups based on the responses you receive from the first campaign. For more information on creating groups, click here.