Send your first campaign
Take a campaign end to end: pick an audience, build the content, write a subject line, test it on yourself, then schedule or send.
Before you start#
This page walks one campaign from empty to sent. When you finish you will have a real email in real inboxes and a results page to read the next morning.
Prerequisites
A list with contacts in it, and a sender name and address saved in Senders. If either is missing, start with Import your contacts and Create your account.
Send it#
Create the campaign and pick the audience
Go to CampaignsNew campaign. Give it an internal name that tells you what it was later, such as 2026-09 September newsletter. Recipients never see this name.
Choose the list you are mailing. If you have a segment, use it. Sending to 800 engaged people beats sending to 8,000 strangers on almost every measure, including how much of your monthly allowance it costs.
For a first send, mail a small audience on purpose. A few hundred people is enough to prove the setup works without putting your whole list behind a mistake.
Start from a template or from blank
Pick a template if you have one. If not, start blank and build the layout you want.
Keep the first one plain. A logo, a headline, a few paragraphs, one clear link, and the footer. Elaborate designs break across email clients in ways that are tedious to debug, and none of that work matters until you know the basics land.
The email builder covers blocks, images and personalization in detail.
Write the subject line
The subject line decides whether the rest of the work gets seen.
- Say what is inside. Curiosity gaps train people to ignore you.
- Keep it short enough to survive a phone screen. Roughly 40 characters is safe.
- Write the preview text too, since it sits next to the subject in the inbox. Leaving it empty means the client shows the first line of your email, which is often a menu link.
- Do not shout. Full capitals and stacks of exclamation marks read as spam to filters and to people.
Add the unsubscribe link and check the footer
Every campaign needs a working unsubscribe link and your organization's postal address. This is a legal requirement, not a style choice.
Insert the unsubscribe link into the footer using the merge tag the builder provides, rather than typing a URL. The tag resolves per recipient, so each person gets a link that unsubscribes them specifically.
While you are in the footer, confirm the postal address is present and correct.
Send a test to yourself
Send a test before anything else. Send it to at least two addresses at different providers if you can, for example one work address and one personal one.
Then read the test on a phone, not only on your desktop. Most of your list will read it on a phone. Check that the subject is not truncated awkwardly, that images have alt text, that every link goes where you meant, and that personalization resolved into real names rather than showing a raw tag.
Schedule or send
When the test is clean, choose your send time. Scheduling is safer than sending immediately, because it gives you a window to catch something you missed.
If you are unsure about timing, pick a mid-morning weekday slot in your audience's time zone and treat it as a baseline you will test against later.
Pre-send checklist#
Run through this before you confirm the send. It takes two minutes and catches almost everything that goes wrong in practice.
- The audience is the list or segment you intended, and the recipient count looks right.
- From name and from address are correct, and the reply-to is a mailbox somebody reads.
- The subject line and preview text are both filled in.
- Every link has been clicked in the test email.
- Personalization tags resolved, with no
[FIRSTNAME]style placeholders left visible. - The unsubscribe link works from the test email.
- The postal address is in the footer.
- Images load, and the email still makes sense with images blocked.
- The send time is what you meant, in the time zone you meant.
After it sends#
Give it a few hours before drawing conclusions. Opens arrive over days, not minutes.
The campaign's results tell you four things worth acting on:
- Bounces. A small number is normal. A high rate on a first send usually means the list needed verification. Hard-bounced addresses are suppressed automatically.
- Unsubscribes. A few per send is healthy. A spike means the audience did not expect this email, which is a targeting problem rather than a copy problem.
- Opens. Directionally useful, not exact. Privacy features on some mail clients inflate them.
- Clicks. The most honest number on the page. This is the one to optimize.
If something goes wrong#
The test email never arrived. Check spam. If it is missing entirely, confirm the from address is one of your saved senders. Unauthenticated domains are filtered harder, so this is another reason to complete domain authentication.
Personalization shows the tag instead of the value. The field is empty for that contact, or the tag name does not match the field. Set a fallback value so an empty field does not leave a gap in the sentence.
The campaign will not send. Check your remaining monthly email allowance against the recipient count. See Plans and limits.
It landed in spam. Authenticate your sending domain, then look at the content: heavy image-to-text ratios, link shorteners and spam-trigger phrasing all contribute. Deliverability overview covers the diagnosis properly.
Last updated September 10, 2026