How to Create an Email Campaign in Eight Steps

To create an email campaign, set one goal, choose recipients who gave permission and send from your own domain. Then write the subject line and preview text, build the email, test it on a phone, schedule it and measure it by clicks.

What counts as an email campaign

An email campaign is one email, written once and sent to a chosen group of contacts at a time you pick. A newsletter issue, a sale announcement and an event invitation all count. In the UK, a one-off marketing email is also called an eshot.

An email that goes out by itself when someone acts belongs to an email automation instead. A welcome email after a sign-up is the usual example.

Some marketers also call a planned series of emails a campaign. Most email tools still build and send each one on its own.

Step 1: set one goal and one call to action

Start with the one action you want, as the made-up Cheltenham florist in this example does: its 900 online customers should reserve a Christmas door wreath. The audience, the subject and the button all follow from that action. The email therefore has a single button, "Pre-order a wreath", linking to the wreath page on the florist's website.

Give the goal a number and a date, such as 40 pre-orders by 6 December. Step 8 needs that figure.

Mistake: packing three messages into one email. A wreath offer, new opening hours and a plea for reviews compete for the same click. Move the hours to the footer and save the review request for another day.

Step 2: choose people who agreed to your emails

Use only addresses you may legally email: where each one came from decides whether it is consent or the soft opt-in.

New subscribers should join through a newsletter signup form that says what they will receive.

Mistake: importing your inbox's address book. It holds suppliers, your accountant and people who wrote once years ago, and none of them asked for offers. Old addresses also bounce, so verify any list that nobody has emailed for a year.

Step 3: put your own domain in the From line

Send from an address on a domain you own, such as hello@ on the shop's .co.uk name. Then set up the three authentication records, SPF, DKIM and DMARC, in the domain's DNS (domain name system). Together they prove to inboxes that the email is yours.

Pick a From name customers recognise, usually the shop's name. If the sending address takes no mail, set a Reply-to address so replies reach a person.

Mistake: sending from the free address customers already know. A platform sending as gmail.com or btinternet.com can't pass DMARC, the check that the From domain authorised the sender. Only Google or BT can authorise senders for those domains.

How each free provider handles such mail differs: some refuse it, some send it to spam, and Gmail returns temporary failures to bulk senders.

Step 4: write the subject line and preview text

Write the two inbox lines as a pair. The subject says what the email is about. The preview text, the grey line beside or under it in most inboxes, adds the detail that earns the open.

For the florist:

Subject: Christmas door wreaths: pre-orders are open
Preview: Collect from 12 December, or we deliver anywhere in Cheltenham

Phones cut long subjects, so lead with the product and leave the date to the preview text. How much of a subject line a phone shows depends on the device and the app.

Mistake: leaving the preview text empty. The inbox then fills the gap with the first words it finds in the email, such as "View in browser" or an image description.

Step 5: build the email around a single button

Four parts are enough for a first email campaign: a headline, a picture, two or three short paragraphs and the button they lead to. The footer carries your business name, contact details and a way to opt out. Under PECR (the UK rules on electronic marketing), regulation 23 bans marketing emails that give no valid address for opting out.

Starting from a tested email template spares you a layout that breaks in Outlook. Put the offer in the text: wreath sizes, prices and collection dates. Give every image alt text, the short description shown when it does not load.

Mistake: putting the whole offer inside one image. Classic Outlook blocks automatic picture downloads by default (Microsoft Support). Its users see an empty frame and no price.

Step 6: test it in a real inbox

Send the finished email to yourself and one other person, then open it on a phone and a computer. A second reader spots the wrong date you have read past five times.

Mistake: trusting the editor's preview. It cannot show how Gmail on Android or Outlook on a work laptop draws the email, or whether the email lands in spam.

Step 7: schedule it for when readers can act

Send when your readers can do what you ask, not when you finish writing. The florist schedules its email for a weekday morning in mid-November. Collection starts on 12 December, and a morning send lets staff answer questions the same day.

No single send time suits every list. After three or four email campaigns, your own click times show when your customers read. Scheduling a campaign works like scheduling an email in Outlook or Gmail, with one addition: you choose whose time zone the send time follows.

Mistake: sending at 11pm, straight after the last edit. By morning the email sits under the night's newsletters and the first work messages.

Step 8: judge the email campaign by clicks

Judge the result by clicks on the one button and by the goal from step 1. The click rate is button clicks divided by emails delivered. If 880 of the florist's 900 emails arrive and 53 people click "Pre-order a wreath", the click rate is 6%. Then count the pre-orders against the target of 40.

Opens are a weaker guide. Apple's Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) stops senders seeing whether an email was opened. Apple adds that the protection does not extend to links (Apple Support).

An open figure is therefore an estimate, while a click is a reader choosing to act. Opens still give context, as the notes on reading open rates after MPP explain.

Record two more figures: unsubscribes and hard bounces. A hard bounce comes from an address that does not exist or no longer works; remove it before the next send. Keep these numbers, because the second campaign is measured against the first.

Mistake: changing three things at once next time. If the subject, the send day and the offer all change, you cannot tell which one moved the clicks. An A/B test changes one thing and splits the list between the two versions.

Creating an email campaign in MailGraf

MailGraf's campaign wizard runs across the top bar in four steps. Setup takes the subject, preview text and sender, Design the email, Audience the lists, segments or tags, and Review the test and the timing (Create a campaign).

The wizard catches several mistakes from this list before anything goes out, most of them on the Review step, headed Review & send. Some checks block the send; others only warn (Understand the checks before you send).

Mistake from the steps above	Where MailGraf catches it	Does it stop the send?
Preview text left empty	Almost ready, with a Fix link to Setup	Yes
A free address such as gmail.com as the sender	Setup: "Free email providers can't be used as the sender address."	Yes
No sending domain on the account	Before you can send	Yes
No unsubscribe link in an email imported with Import HTML	Almost ready	Yes
New recipients with many dead addresses	List bounce test	Yes, if the estimated bounce rate is too high; a borderline result offers Accept the risk
Images without alt text, or no DMARC record	Deliverability checks	No, it only warns
Clicking Send campaign too soon	After you confirm, a 15-second countdown with Stop (Send now only)	Stop keeps it as a draft

Send a test on the same step covers the greeting: pick someone whose first name field is blank under Send as this contact, and the test shows the fallback.

After sending, the report shows clicks beside opens and leaves out clicks made by automated security scanners. Its Why they unsubscribed panel lists the reasons people gave, and a Never signed up answer is a cue to check where that address came from.

The wreath email above would have to clear every one of these checks before it left. Compare the monthly send allowances on the pricing page for your own campaign calendar.