Using the Email Marketing App

Email Marketing sends broadcast campaigns from your own domain, straight out of ContactDrive. There's no separate platform and no exporting a CSV and re-importing the results, and engagement lands back on contact timelines where the rest of your history lives.

Installing and setting up

Add Email Marketing from the Apps marketplace. Before you can send, your sending domain has to be verified and your from-addresses saved. Our support team helps with the domain side, since it involves DNS records.

Then check your compliance details: the company name and mailing address that print at the bottom of every email. Both setup steps live under App Settings in Email Marketing, on the Sender Identity and Compliance tabs.

Senders: who your email comes from

A sender is the name recipients see in their inbox and the address it comes from, for example Kat Merrill at kat@yourdomain.com. Senders live on the Sender Identity tab, under each verified sending domain, and you pick one when you build a campaign or a sequence.

One address can have several senders with different names, for example two related organizations sharing a support mailbox.

1. In Email Marketing, click App Settings, then the Sender Identity tab.
2. Under an Active sending domain, click Add sender.
3. Enter the Friendly (From) name and the Address. The address must be on that domain, or on its parent domain when you send from a subdomain.
4. Click Save. You'll see Sender added.

To change a sender's name, click its Edit sender button. The address can't be changed; to use a different address, add a new sender. Remove sender deletes it.

A sender with its own footer details

If a sender is a different legal entity from your workspace, tick Use different footer details for this sender and fill in its Company name, mailing address and Personal-layout opt-out line. Every email from that sender prints those details in its footer instead of your workspace's Compliance settings. In the senders list, a sender with its own footer details shows Footer: and its company name; the others show Workspace footer.

A few things worth knowing:

• Campaigns keep a copy of their sender. A campaign or sequence saves the sender's name and footer details when you save it, so editing or removing a sender later doesn't change campaigns already set up with it.
• Removing the last sender on an address stops campaigns and sequences that use that address from sending, until you add a sender with that address again. ContactDrive warns you before it happens.
• Who can change senders. Admins, and anyone whose role can manage workspace settings, can add, edit and remove senders.

Compliance: your company name and mailing address

Every campaign and sequence email carries your company name and a postal mailing address in its footer, which anti-spam law requires. You set them once on the Compliance tab and every footer uses them, unless the email's sender has its own footer details (see above).

1. In Email Marketing, click App Settings, then the Compliance tab.
2. Under Sender, enter your Company name: your legal business name, as recipients should see it.
3. Under Mailing address, pick the Country first, then fill in the street, an optional second street line, the city, the region and the postal code. For the United States and Canada the region is a dropdown of states or provinces; for other countries you type it.
4. Check the Personal-layout opt-out line. Emails using the Plain (personal email) layout show this line instead of an unsubscribe link. It starts out as "Reply STOP anytime and I'll take you off my list."
5. Click Save. You'll see Compliance settings saved.

A few things worth knowing:

• Required fields are marked with an asterisk. Company name, street, city and postal code are always required, except that a country with no postal codes doesn't need one. A Canadian address needs a province, and a US ZIP must be 5 digits or ZIP+4.
• Changing the country clears the region and postal code, because they belong to the old country. Fill them in again for the new one.
• It may already be filled in. ContactDrive pre-filled the tab once from your workspace name and billing address. Check it's what you want recipients to see, especially the company name.
• A warning shows while it's incomplete. Until a complete company name and mailing address are saved, the tab says so, and footers show only your workspace name.
• Who can change it. Admins, and anyone whose role has the Email Marketing manage permission, can save changes. Everyone else sees the same details read-only.

Templates and wrappers

A wrapper is a reusable shell (your header, footer, branding, and legal block) with one region in the middle where each campaign's own message goes.

That's the model worth understanding: you build the wrapper once, and then each campaign writes only its actual message, without anybody re-pasting a footer. Change the wrapper and every campaign you create from then on starts from the new version.

You can also send with no wrapper at all, in a plain personal shell, which is often the right choice for a message that should read like it came from a person rather than a mailing list.

Templates are a starting point

When you save a campaign or a sequence email step, ContactDrive copies the template into it. From then on the campaign or step has its own copy: editing the template, changing its message region, or deleting it has no effect on campaigns and steps already created from it. To change an existing campaign or step, edit it directly.

If ContactDrive won't let you delete a template and asks you to open and save a campaign or sequence first, that campaign or sequence was saved before this change and still uses the template directly. Open it and save it once to give it its own copy, then delete the template.

Duplicating a template

To start a new template from one you already have, open the Templates tab and click the Duplicate icon on that template's row. ContactDrive saves a copy named "Copy of" plus the original's name, which you can rename and change without touching the original. The Edit, Duplicate and Delete icons appear only for people who can manage templates.

The Compliance footer block

By default, ContactDrive adds a plain footer to the bottom of every email with your company name, mailing address and an unsubscribe link. If you'd rather that footer match your design, place it yourself with the Compliance footer block, which is in the block palette of both the template builder and the campaign builder.

1. Click Compliance footer in the palette. The block shows your company name, mailing address and an Unsubscribe link, taken from the Compliance tab.
2. Drag it where you want it, usually at the very bottom.
3. Style it with Align (left, center or right), Text color, and Font size (11, 12, 13, 14 or 16px).

• One per design. Once a design has a Compliance footer, its palette entry is greyed out, and the block has no Duplicate action.
• No double footers. When a design includes the block, ContactDrive doesn't add its automatic footer as well.
• Plain (personal email) layout. An email sent in the personal layout doesn't show the block at all. It uses the personal footer instead, which carries your company name and address with your personal-layout opt-out line in place of an unsubscribe link, so it still reads like a note from a person.
• To change the words, change the Compliance tab. The block only controls how the footer looks. The company name and address come from Compliance settings (or from the sender's own footer details, when it has them), so update them there and every footer follows.

The four starter templates (Newsletter, Announcement, Plain update and Event invite) now end with a Compliance footer block. Templates you've already saved aren't changed; add the block to them yourself if you'd like to style the footer.

Building a campaign

1. Create a campaign and give it a name and a subject line.
2. Pick your from identity, one of your verified addresses.
3. Choose a wrapper, or none.
4. Write the message. With a wrapper, write it in the empty message block where the wrapper's message region was. You can't send, test-send or schedule the campaign while that block is still empty; write your message in it, or delete the block if this email doesn't need one.
5. Pick your audience.

Formatting text

Each text block has a formatting toolbar above it. Alongside bold, italic, links, color, font and size, it has Align left, Align center and Align right, which apply to the whole paragraph and carry through to the preview and the sent email. There is no justify option, because email apps display justified text unevenly.

The Font and Size dropdowns show the font and size of the text you've selected, so you can see at a glance what's applied. If your selection mixes fonts or sizes, the dropdown shows its placeholder instead. A font or size that isn't one of the listed options shows with "(custom)" after it.

When every word in a paragraph is set to a smaller size, the paragraph's line spacing shrinks with it, so small print such as a footer disclaimer sits close together instead of looking double-spaced. The editing box in the builder still shows the default spacing; the preview and the sent email show the real result, so check the preview. Templates and campaigns you built earlier pick this up automatically.

Choosing an audience

Three sources:

• A Manual List from the Lists app
• A contact tag
• A Saved View from the contacts grid

Whichever you pick, you'll see eligible vs. suppressed counts before you send. That second number is people who have unsubscribed, bounced, or complained, and they're excluded automatically. See Suppressed Contacts for what's in there and why.

Check both numbers before sending. A large suppressed count relative to eligible is telling you something about the list.

Sending

Two modes:

• Bulk: the whole audience at once.
• Guided: one at a time, so you can review and personalize each. Slower, and much better for a small, high-value audience.

You can also schedule a campaign rather than sending it immediately.

What happens when you hit send

The moment sending starts, the campaign is frozen: the subject, the sender, the wrapper, and your message content are all snapshotted. Editing the wrapper or the message afterward will not change what later recipients receive, and won't rewrite the historical record of what you actually sent.

This matters practically: if you spot a typo mid-send, editing won't fix the rest of the send. Cancel, fix, and start a new campaign.

Campaigns can be cancelled while they're still in draft or scheduled. Once sending begins, it runs.

Tracking engagement

Every recipient's activity flows back: sent, delivered, opened, clicked, bounced, spam complaint, unsubscribed. These appear on each contact's timeline as activities, and in aggregate on the campaign's report.

Because they're real activities, you can filter and segment on them like anything else. "Everyone who opened the March appeal but hasn't given" is a saved view, not a data export.

Sequences

A sequence is a drip: a series of steps that are either a wait ("3 days") or an email.

Unlike campaigns, sequences render live rather than frozen. Because a sequence can run for weeks, editing a later step's content is intended to affect people who haven't reached it yet. That's what you want for evergreen automation, and a real difference from campaign behavior.

That applies to the step itself, not to the template it started from. Each email step gets its own copy of its template when you save it, so editing the template later doesn't change the sequence; edit the step instead. As with campaigns, a sequence with an email step whose message block is still empty can't be activated until you write that message or delete the block.

FAQ

A message to one of my contacts failed. Are they now marked Do Not Email?

Not for every kind of failure. If the recipient's email provider blocked the message, or it expired after repeated delivery attempts, the failure is recorded on the contact's timeline and in the campaign report, but the contact isn't marked Do Not Email, so they'll be included next time. A hard bounce, where the address itself doesn't work, still suppresses the contact.

Contacts who were suppressed by those softer failures before this change aren't restored automatically. Review them on Suppressed Contacts and re-activate anyone who should be back on your list.

I renamed a sender, but my draft campaign still shows the old name

A campaign keeps the copy of its sender it was saved with, so renaming a sender doesn't change campaigns that already use it. To use the new name, choose the sender again in the campaign and save it.