Campaign setup is the first step of our five step campaign creation process.

The five step campaign creation process

You will now start our five step campaign creation process. Throughout this process you can see the name of the step, the name of the campaign, and what step you're on. Throughout the process you can use the « Back link to go to the previous step, and the Save & Continue button to move forward.

On the campaign setup page you can specify:

Subject line

This is the subject line of the email as it will appear in your contacts' email client. We recommend trying to get all the important information in the first 60 characters of the subject line.

You can also add emojis to your subject line. Click on the smiley face icon next to the subject line to open up the emoji picker.

There are seven categories you can choose from - 'People', 'Nature', 'Food', 'Activities', 'Travel & Places', 'Objects' and 'Symbols'. You're also able to quickly search for emojis by entering terms such as 'sun', 'car' and so on.

Emoji support can vary across email clients, devices and operating systems - so it's best to test

It's great to make use of emojis. They can increase your open rates and enhance engagement. However, a word of warning: emoji support can differ across email clients and devices. There are lots of emojis you can choose from but they may not all get rendered correctly or consistently in your recipients' inboxes. This will depend upon their email client, device and operating system configuration.

If you want to make use of emojis in subject lines, then we strongly advise testing them to see how they render. Once you've sent out a proper campaign or two, you can even base this testing upon the most popular email clients your recipients are using.

Our inbox testing partner Litmus have a  useful blog post on emoji support in email.

Friendly from name

This is the name that your email will appear to come from.

From address

As a new account you won't be able to change this; but later on you can upgrade to have a customised domain name to send from.

Optional forwarding address

If someone replies to your email campaign, the replies will be stored in our system - you can access these through the reporting section. If you enter an email address here, the replies will be forwarded to this address.

As you enter these, you'll see the image on the right update showing how this might appear in someone's email inbox.

When you're happy with the settings, click Save & Continue to start working on your email content.

More options with the campaign setup
The campaign setup page has a few more features, that you might want for future campaigns.

Split testing
You can send multiple versions of your campaign out to a small section of your mailing list, and based on open/click rates have the best version sent to the rest of your list automatically.

Dynamic subject lines and personalization
If you have data saved against your contacts, you can use this to personalize the subject line or from address; for example you can have the from name as the contact's account manager, or a different subject line for users in a particular postcode area.

Triggered campaign

If your campaign is to be sent based on a trigger (such as someone signing up to a mailing list, or clicking on a particular link), then the setup process is slightly different. Click on the Campaign settings button to change the campaign to a triggered campaign.

Encoding
If your email is to be sent out with a different character set (for example Cyrillic, or Chinese), this can also be set under Campaign settings. For most users, the optimum set to use is 'Unicode (UTF-8)'.

Text only campaign
Most campaigns have two styles of content: an HTML version and a plain text version. If you only want a plain text version, this can also be set in Campaign settings.