Creating an Email Campaign
Email messages are great for delivering content to the user on their terms. They are also wonderful tools to re-engage users who may have even uninstalled your app! Customized and tailored email messages will enhance the user experience and help your user get the most value out of your app.
To see examples of email campaigns, check out our Client Integration Gallery.
Step 1: Create a New Campaign
Click Create Campaign in the top right corner of the Campaigns page.
Step 2: Compose Your Email or Use a Template
Click on the appropriate tile to choose an existing email template or upload one from a file, and then draft your message.
Once you choose a template for your e-mail you’ll see an overview of your e-mail, where you can quickly jump to the fullscreen editor, change your sending info, and view warnings about deliverability or law compliance.
Step 2a: Preview and Test Your Message
After you finish composing your perfect e-mail, you need to test it before sending it out! Navigate to the test page by clicking the “Preview and Test” button at the bottom of the overview screen. Use Preview as User to make sure that your connected content and personalization calls are working as they should and to get a sense of how your message may view on desktop vs. mobile. Use Test Sends to ensure that your e-mail displays properly on a variety of devices and e-mail clients.
Step 2b: Check for E-Mail Errors
The new E-Mail Editor will call out problems with your message before you send. Here’s a list of errors that are accounted for in our editor:
- From Display Name and Header not specified together.
- Invalid From and Reply-To E-Mails.
- Duplicate Header Keys.
- Liquid Syntax Problems.
- E-Mail bodies larger than 400kb; bodies are highly recommended to be smaller than 102kb.
- E-Mails with blank Bodies or Subjects.
- E-Mails with no unsubscribe link.
- The E-Mail that you are sending from is not whitelisted, thus sends will be highly limited to ensure deliverability.
Step 3: Schedule Your Messaging Campaign
You can schedule your campaigns against three types of delivery:
- Scheduled (sending your campaign at a designated time),
- Action-Based (sending when your users perform specified actions), and
- API-Triggered (sending according to an API request).
Scheduled Delivery allows you to specify the time at which you want the message to send, either immediately or at a future time (you can also consider local time in your scheduling). You can also use Intelligent Delivery to send the message at the time the user is most likely to engaged. Braze makes this calculation based on a statistical analysis of the user’s interactions with your app.
Messages can also be configured to recur on a daily, weekly (optionally on specific days), or monthly basis.
Unless you select the option to “Message Repeatedly”, each user will only receive the contents of a campaign once, and only new users that meet the criteria will receive the campaign on subsequent deliveries.
Action-Based Delivery allows you to specify the time a message will send after a user takes a particular action (selected from the New Trigger Action drop down.)
Check out our API-Triggered section of the Developer Guide for more on API-Triggered Delivery.
Step 4: Choose Conversion Events
Braze allows you to track how often users perform specific actions (Conversion Events) after receiving a campaign. You can specify any of the following actions as a “Conversion Event”:
- Opens App
- Makes Purchase
- This can be a generic purchase or a specific item
- Performs specific custom event
- Opens Email
- Clicks Email
You have the option of allowing up to a 30 day window during which a conversion will be counted if the user takes the specified action. While Braze automatically tracks opens and clicks for your campaign, you may wish to set the conversion event to be when a user opens or clicks on an email address to take advantage of Braze’s Intelligent Selection feature.
Step 5: Choose Your Target Segment
Next, you need to choose the target segment from the dropdown menu. You’ll automatically be given a snapshot of what that segment population looks like right now, including how many users within that segment are reachable via email. Keep in mind that exact segment membership is always calculated just before the message is sent.
Optionally, you can also choose to limit delivery to a specified number of users within the segment, or allow users to receive the same message twice upon a recurrence of the campaign as well.
Step 6: Review and Deploy
The final page will give you a summary of the campaign you’ve just designed. Clicking “Start Campaign” will enable it for sending. Confirm all the relevant details and watch the data roll in!
Results Data
Braze will show you the number of emails sent, opened, clicked through, sent to spam, and bounced for each campaign you deploy. Additionally, Braze’s email analytics tool allows for the ability to see how your users’ clicks are divided across the links in an email campaign. Clicking on each variation expands/collapses information on what percentage of users clicked on which link in an email campaign.
When looking at clicks for your variant, the clicks will reflect unique clicks. When you expand each variation, the clicks for each link within the variation will reflect total clicks (not unique). Braze also gives you the ability to visualize where users are clicking within a given email campaign.
Braze will de-duplicate sends by email address. However, opens are not de-duplicated to prevent the illusion that an email opened by a user with multiple User Profiles under a single email address would only be counted towards a single User Profile.