Summary
Marketing emails are a type of ad-hoc/manual emails (i.e. they are not part of Workflows/Sequences)
To make an email a "marketing email", simply enable the "Marketing Email" toggle switch in the top left of the email editor panel
You'll need to assign your email a marketing email category (e.g. "Product Newsletters") before you can send it
Recipients of a marketing email can click on links in the email footer to either unsubscribe from all marketing emails or choose which marketing subscription categories to be subscribed to
Who is this article for?
Planhat Users sending marketing emails
Series
We have a series of articles on marketing emails and the Sendout model:
Sending and receiving marketing emails ⬅️ You are here
Article contents
Introduction
"Marketing emails" are a specific type of email you can send via Planhat. In short:
You make an email a "marketing email" by enabling the relevant toggle switch when configuring it - super quick and simple!
This adds options to unsubscribe at the bottom of the email - this means you comply with regulations, as well as improving the experience of email recipients
When you send marketing emails, the associated data (e.g. open rate and click rate) is saved in Planhat via the Sendout model, enabling you to have deep insights into the performance of your marketing communication, so you can fine-tune your emails to improve their efficacy.
Marketing email functionality is perfect for sending emails to groups of End Users (your contacts: customers and prospects etc.), such as product updates, event announcements, newsletters and so on. (It is not compatible with automated series of emails in Workflows/Sequences.)
In this article, we'll look specifically at the process of how to send a marketing email to a group of End Users, and show you what the email looks like from the perspective of an End User and how they can interact with it.
📚 Further reading
For an overview of marketing email functionality, check out our introductory article here.
The ability to send a marketing email is controlled by permissions and settings, which you can read about here.
How to send a marketing email
Marketing emails are sent via the standard email creation/editor panel (also called "email dialog" or "composer"):
Assuming that you will be sending each of your marketing emails to a group of End Users, the easiest way to do this is by:
Creating a list of your target audience by filtering End Users in a suitable Page (e.g. a Data Table) or in the Data Explorer,
using the checkbox in the top left to select all,
and pressing "Send Email" at the bottom to open up the email editor panel
🚀 Tip
If you want to send a marketing email to a small number of recipients - for example, if you just want to do some initial testing - then you can bring up the email editor panel by using the simple keyboard shortcut "c", and then you can manually specify who you would like to send the email to.
Once you've opened up the email editor, click on the "Marketing Email" toggle switch in the top left to convert your email into a marketing email.
You will notice several things:
The sender options are now your "Email Automation Provider" senders - you configure these in the "Settings" Global Tool, as described in our email marketing settings article here
The "Select a marketing category" dropdown menu in the top right is now enabled. You will need to select a marketing category (also called a subscription category) before you can send your marketing email; these are custom to your tenant, and you can learn how to set up your categories in the "Settings" Global Tool in our article here
The option to send as "Each, as multiple emails" is the only one available - you can't select "All, as single email" if it's a marketing email
Copy options (Cc and Bcc) are not available if it's a marketing email
All of these points are related to the specific characteristics of "marketing emails" in Planhat - they are emails sent in bulk to individual recipients (i.e. you send copies of the email to lots of End Users at once), who can each choose to unsubscribe from such emails if desired.
The rest of writing the email is the same as any other in Planhat - e.g. you can write from scratch or select an Email Template, you can use Merge Tags, and so on. A particularly relevant aspect is email engagement tracking, which you will want to ensure is turned on so you can track and analyze the performance of your marketing emails.
🚀 Tip
When you're including a link in your email that you'd like to track, make sure it has definitely registered as a link in the email editor panel before you send it, so that the "URL clicks" tracking works. You can check this by when you mouse over it in the email editor, an underline appears. If you paste in a URL, ensure you type a space or return afterwards to ensure it registers as a clickable link.
Once you've finished configuring your marketing email, you can simply click on "Send" in the bottom right (or click the clock icon to schedule to send it at a later date/time), just like any other ad-hoc email.
🚀 Tip
Remember that you need to select a marketing subscription category to activate the "Send" button.
When you click "Send", you will see a pop-up modal like the one below, informing you how many End Users in your selection will be emailed, and how many will be excluded (because they have either unsubscribed from all marketing emails or the specific category of marketing emails that your email belongs to).
You then simply click "Confirm sendout" to send your marketing email.
Receiving a marketing email
So what are marketing emails from an End User's perspective?
As we have mentioned previously, a key distinguishing feature of marketing emails from the perspective of recipients is the links "Unsubscribe" and "Manage my preferences" at the bottom of the email.
Click the image to view it enlarged
If an email recipient clicks on "Unsubscribe", they will see a message similar to this:
If the recipient clicks on "Manage my preferences", they will see a menu similar to this:
The marketing subscription category checkboxes shown in the screenshot above, so the recipient can choose to subscribe to or unsubscribe from different types of marketing emails, are configured by you within the "Settings" Global Tool, as we discuss in our marketing email settings article here.
Further reading
Once you have sent a marketing email, you can analyze its performance via the Sendout model, which we discuss in a separate article here.