Summary
Permissions can be assigned to relevant Roles to give Users the ability to send marketing emails, configure marketing email settings, and use the Sendout model for marketing email analysis
Within the "Settings" Global Tool, you can configure your marketing email subscription categories (which recipients can refer to when setting their subscription preferences), as well as tracking options and "Email Automation Provider" settings
Who is this article for?
Planhat Users who are setting up the ability to use "marketing emails" in their organization - e.g. this could be general Planhat admins/builders (e.g. CS Ops), and/or Marketing team leads
Series
We have a series of articles on marketing emails and the Sendout model:
Marketing emails and the Sendout model - permissions and settings ⬅️ You are here
Article contents
Introduction
"Marketing emails" are a specific type of email in Planhat:
They are sent to groups of End Users (End Users being the Planhat model that represents people who are your customers, prospects and other contacts)
You send them ad-hoc / as one-offs, as opposed to linked series of emails that are sent via Workflows/Sequences
Each marketing email automatically includes links for the recipient to "Unsubscribe" and "Manage my preferences", giving them a good user experience, while you also meet your regulatory requirements
When you send a marketing email to a group of End Users, the associated data is recorded in the Sendout model, which makes it easy for you to analyze performance
Typical examples of these marketing emails are: newsletters with feature/company updates, product launches, events news, or special offers / promotions
📚 Further reading
For an introduction to Planhat marketing emails, check out our overview article here.
If you'd like to learn the technical details of how to set up this functionality within your Planhat tenant, read on.
In this article, we will focus on how to enable the email marketing features, for your organization, within your Planhat tenant. There are two main components to this:
This article focuses on these initial setup steps. You can refer to separate articles (coming soon) to learn all about how to send marketing emails, what they look like when they're received, and then how to visualize and analyze the performance of your marketing emails.
Permissions
Marketing add-on
Note that not every Planhat subscription includes access to marketing email functionality. If your plan does not currently have this included but you would like to add it, please speak with your Planhat contact (e.g. CSM).
Permissions for Planhat staff members to configure
For a Planhat tenant to have access, a Planhat staff member ("Super Admin") should activate the workflow and data model permissions described below but in the "Tenant Permissions" tab of the "Settings" Global Tool rather than Roles. As a Planhat User, you won't see the "Tenant Permissions" section and don't need to do anything here - but if you can't see the permissions for you to enable (as described in the next part of the article), then please reach out to your Planhat CSM and ask them to check this article.
📌 Important to note
Marketing emails operate via "Email Automation Provider" functionality (formerly called "Transactional Emails"), so you will also need this functionality enabled in your tenant, which is configurable by Planhat staff ("Super Admins"). Please speak to your Planhat contact if you don't have access to this currently.
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Permissions for you to configure: Role permissions
In Planhat, different access levels are customized and assigned to different Planhat Users (i.e. you and your colleagues) within your Planhat tenant via Roles, which are similar to the Profiles or Permission Sets you may be familiar with from other tools. For example, you can have a Role called "Marketing" with access levels relevant for your Marketing team, and assign that Role to your Marketing team members (i.e. Users). You can read an introduction to Roles more generally here.
📌 Important to note
The ability to configure Roles within the "Settings" Global Tool is itself controlled via permissions - the Admin Access workflow permission and the UserRole data model permission - so this part of the email marketing setup is likely to be carried out by a Planhat admin (a Planhat User with the Administrator Role).
The two main types of permissions you set within Roles are workflow permissions and data model permissions, and to give access to marketing emails, there are relevant permissions in each of these tabs.
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You should enable these for the relevant Role(s):
In the "Workflow" tab (i.e. workflow permissions):
"Planhat Marketing Emails" - Users with this permission enabled will be able to send marketing emails (it controls the "Marketing Email" toggle in the email editor/creator panel)
"Outbound Emails" - this gives access to the "Outbound Emails" part of the "Settings" Global Tool, described below - whoever will be configuring marketing email settings (e.g. determining marketing subscription categories) should have a Role with this permission enabled
In the "Data model" tab (i.e. data model permissions):
The Sendout data model is a specialist model for analyzing marketing emails - reviewing audience and performance (e.g. open rate etc.), so anyone who will be doing this (e.g. your Marketing team) should have a Role where Sendout permissions are enabled
You'll find the Sendout set of permissions within the "Business models" category at the top of this tab. As usual with data model permissions, you can give full access to this permission to a Role, or be more granular via the checkboxes if desired
Settings
The settings related to marketing emails can be found within the "Outbound Email" part of the "Settings" Global Tool.
Engagement
The main subsection you'll be looking at is "Engagement".
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At the top of the "Engagement" settings, you can confirm your "Track Opening" and "Track Links" settings - this tracking enables you to monitor and analyze the performance of your marketing emails, via the Sendout model.
(The "Engagement" settings is also where a Planhat staff member ("Super Admin") can enable/disable the tracking of email bounce rates too.)
Under "Marketing Email - Subscription Categories", you can add and manage your subscription categories, also known as marketing categories. (The screenshot below shows a couple of example categories.)
📌 Context
Categories need to be set up in your Planhat tenant before you or your colleagues go to send marketing emails, as each marketing email needs to be assigned a category before it can be sent. (You will see that the "Send" button is grayed out until a category is selected in the dropdown menu.)
From the perspective of the email recipient, these categories enable them to be more specific about which emails they are subscribed to or unsubscribed from.
To add a new marketing email subscription category, click "Add Category".
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Give your category a title and (optionally) a description - you can see in screenshots in the "Context" gray box above where these will be visible when writing and receiving a marketing email.
Within these "Outbound Email" --> "Engagement" settings you can also view the footer that will be added to the bottom of each marketing email.
Email Automation Provider
Within the "Outbound Email" section of the "Settings" Global Tool, you will also find settings for the "Email Automation Provider" functionality (formerly called "Transactional Emails"). Here you can manage settings such as the available senders when using this feature - marketing emails can only be sent via "Email Automation Provider", rather than people's personal email accounts.
Next steps and further reading
Check out the next articles in the series to learn about how to send and analyze marketing emails: