Campaigns

A campaign is one email sent to an audience you choose: once, at a time you pick, or on a repeating schedule. Campaigns live under Emails → Campaigns.

The list shows each campaign’s Status, Audience, Recipients, and the Opened and Clicked rates. The pills along the top filter it: All, Recurring, Drafts, Scheduled, Sending (which includes paused campaigns) and Sent (which includes cancelled ones). While anything is sending or scheduled, the list refreshes itself every ten seconds.

Create a campaign

1. Click New campaign.
2. Click the title in the header (Untitled campaign) and give it a name. Only you see the name; recipients see the subject.
3. Fill in the email details and write the email, as described below.

There is no Save button. Your changes are saved a few seconds after you stop typing, and the header shows Saving… or Unsaved changes while that happens. If you leave the page with unsaved changes, they are saved on the way out.

Email details

Click Email details in the editor bar to open the rows above the email. A red dot means something is still missing. A new campaign with no subject opens them by itself.

From

The campaign is sent from the name and address in Settings → Email defaults. To use a different sender for this campaign only, open the From row and tick Use a different sender for this campaign, then set the From name, From address, Reply-to name and Reply-to address. Your mailer has to be set up to send from that address, or the message bounces.

If the address is on a free mailbox such as Gmail or Yahoo, the row shows Free mailbox · Fix. Those providers often junk bulk mail sent as their address from another server, so send from an address on your own domain.

To: lists, tags, segments or everyone

Open the To row and choose any mix of lists, tags and segments. A contact in any one of them gets the email once. To send to all your subscribers, turn on Everyone subscribed; the count beside it is how many contacts are subscribed.

To leave people out, click + Except and choose lists, tags or segments. Anyone in any of those is left out, even if they are also in the audience.

The number at the end of the To row is how many people can be emailed. Contacts who are not subscribed, or whose address is on the suppression list, are not counted and do not receive the campaign. Hover over the number to see how many were left out for that reason.

Note

An empty To row sends to nobody. Marker CRM never treats “nothing chosen” as “everyone”.

Subject and preview text

Write the Subject. The counter under it says whether it is a good length or may be cut off; most inboxes show about sixty characters, and phones fewer. Click + Preview text to add the line inboxes show after the subject. Without it, inboxes show the first line of the email.

You can put merge tags in both, such as {{contact.first_name}}.

A/B testing the subject

Click A/B beside the subject to test up to four subject lines (and, if you use preview text, a preview text for each).

• Split sets how the test group is shared between the versions. Split evenly puts them back to equal shares.
• Test on chooses how much of the audience is in the test: 10% to 50%, or Everyone (compare only).
• Winner by picks the winner on Opens or Clicks.
• Decide after sets how many hours the test runs before the winner is chosen. The winning version then goes to everyone who was not in the test. With Everyone (compare only) the setting reads Compare after, and nobody is left to send a winner to.

Open or click tracking has to be on in Settings → Email defaults for the test to pick a winner.

UTM

Open the UTM row and turn on Add UTM parameters to links to tag every link with Campaign source, Campaign medium and Campaign name (required), and optionally Campaign term and Campaign content. Analytics tools such as Google Analytics read these to tell which visits came from this campaign. The unsubscribe and preference links never get UTM parameters.

Write the email

The email is written in the email editor, below the details. You can start from a template, insert patterns, and show blocks to some contacts only.

To see the email as it will go out, click Preview (the eye icon). The preview fills merge tags with the first contact in the audience. If nobody is in the audience yet, merge tags show their fallbacks.

Send a test

Click Test email, enter an address in Send to, and click Send. The test is what is on screen now, sent as the campaign would be. It is not counted in the campaign’s report, and its links are left untracked so you can follow them.

Review and send

Click Review. The panel shows how many people will receive the email, when, from which address and how many were left out, followed by a list of checks.

Red items block sending. They include:

• Add a subject line and Write the email.
• Set a From address.
• Choose who gets this, or Nobody in this audience can be emailed.
• Complete the UTM parameters, when UTM tagging is on.
• Pick a date and time to schedule, or That send time has already passed.
• A link has no address.
• For A/B tests: Give every version a subject, or tracking is off so the test cannot pick a winner.

Other items are warnings. You can send anyway, but read them: no postal address in the footer, no preview text, a free mailbox as the sender, No test sent yet, a subject that will be cut off, reads as shouting or uses a merge tag without a fallback, nothing to click, insecure http:// links, or an A/B test with too few people to pick a reliable winner.

Each item has a button that takes you to the field to fix. When nothing red is left, drag Slide to send (or Slide to schedule, or Slide to start repeating) to the end.

Schedule it

The When row chooses when the campaign goes out:

• Send now — goes out as soon as you slide to send.
• Schedule — pick a date and time in Send at. Tick Deliver gradually and choose a window in Over (30 minutes to 24 hours): each person is given their own time inside that window, so a large list does not arrive in one burst.
• Recurring — sends again Daily, Weekly (pick Which day) or Monthly (pick a Day of the month), at What time. Months too short for the chosen day send on their last day. With Send each one automatically off, each run waits as a draft for you to check and send.

A scheduled campaign cannot be edited. Click Unschedule to edit to turn it back into a draft. To end a recurring campaign, choose Stop repeating; runs already sent keep their reports.

While it sends

Sending happens in the background, in batches, through Marker CRM’s queue. The pace follows Emails per second and Emails per hour in Settings → Email defaults, so a large campaign takes a while. The list shows a progress bar, and the report shows how many have gone and roughly when it will finish.

A message that fails for a temporary reason is tried again later, up to three times in all.

From the list’s row menu, or the report, you can:

• Pause — nobody else receives it until you Resume.
• Cancel sending — what has already gone cannot be recalled; the rest is not sent.

Caution

The queue is run by WordPress cron, which only fires when someone visits your site. On a quiet site, sends can start late. See Settings → Tools to set up a server cron.

After sending

Once a campaign has started, its name opens the report instead of the editor. The report has the totals at the top (Sent, Opened, Clicked, Unsubscribed, Failed) and these tabs:

• Overview — what was sent, when people first opened it, and which links were clicked.
• Recipients — everyone it went to, filtered by All, Opened, Clicked, Did not open, Unsubscribed, Failed and Not sent yet. Tag these people adds or removes tags for the whole group. On Did not open and Failed, Resend to these sends the email again to that group.
• A/B test — how each version did, which won and whether the result can be trusted.
• Links & UTM — every link in the email with its clicks, and the UTM parameters used.
• Runs — for a recurring campaign, each run and its numbers.
• Email — the email as it was sent.

Opens are approximate: some mail apps open every email automatically. See Email reports for what the numbers mean.

Note

Past the Email history period in Settings → Privacy and data (two years by default), who opened and clicked is deleted. The campaign keeps its totals, links and opens over time.

Duplicate a campaign

Choose Duplicate from the row menu, or from the ⋮ menu in the editor. The copy is a new draft named “(copy)” with the same audience, content and settings, and none of the original’s numbers.

Delete a campaign

Choose Delete from the row menu, or Delete campaign from the editor’s ⋮ menu. To delete several, tick them in the list and use the bar that appears. The campaign and its report are removed; the emails each contact received stay on their record. A campaign that is sending cannot be deleted: pause or cancel it first.