BlueLena Guide: Campaigns in ActiveCampaign will help you deliver content, newsletters or marketing blasts to a list or sub-group of contacts.

What are Campaigns?

Campaigns are targeted emails sent out to a specific list or sub-group of contacts. These can be either recurring or one-off sends.

Why would I use Campaigns?

  • Campaigns can be used to send targeted emails to a list or sub-group of contacts, but there are a few notes to keep in mind:
    • Campaigns will only send to active contacts, so you may send a campaign to a list and notice that it sends to a lower number of contacts than the list size itself.
    • When pasting content into ActiveCampaign from an external source, paste as plain or unformatted text to avoid cached formatting issues.

Most common use cases:

  • Sending newsletter campaigns to contacts based on their newsletter preferences:
    • For example, a publication may send out a newsletter on Sunday every week for contacts signed up for their “Weekend Review” newsletter.
  • Sending marketing blasts to contacts who  have signed up for marketing/sponsored emails.
    • Some publications will offer marketing emails as its own newsletter, but others may offer it as a separate opt-in. They can target the contacts signed up or opted-in and send them the marketing blasts.
  • Sending RSS-based campaigns:
    • For example, if a client wants to pull content from a feed on a recurring basis rather than drafting the new content within a template, these can be used to set up recurring sends that pull from a live page’s content.
  • Sending holiday/seasonal campaigns:
    • These are useful to send campaigns specific to the season or time of year, such as an end-of-year campaign or Black History Month.
  • Sending major announcements to registrants and/or subscribers:
    • These are used when there is a big announcement from your publication such as a new editor or CEO.

Comparison of email campaigns vs. automation campaigns:

  • An email campaign is an email that is scheduled to be sent out on a given day or recurring time period. You can segment a group of contacts that meet a set of conditions at any given point and send an email to all of them at the same time.
  • An automation campaign is an email or series of emails sent in response to user behavior. Campaigns within the automation will be sent on dates specific to the contact. For example, if you have a new registrant series that sends an email on Day 3, it will be the third day from when each contact enters the automation.

Overview of campaign types:

You can review documentation on the six different types of campaigns here.  Below are use case examples for each campaign type:

  • Standard: Emails that are one-off or need to be edited on a recurring basis. A publication may choose to send out a one-time marketing email or newsletters with content specific to that day.
  • Automated: Recurring campaigns such as a weekly news calendar that updates using RSS content blocks.
  • Auto-Responder: A campaign that sends immediately after a contact has subscribed to a list in your account. Most capabilities for this type of campaign can be found in a New Registration Series automation.
  • Split Testing: Use when testing different elements of your email, such as subject lines.
  • RSS-Triggered: An email that pulls in content from a feed. For example, a daily headline newsletter that shows the same articles as the main page or a category on the publication website.
  • Date-Based: A publication may choose to send an email 30 days before a subscriber’s membership ends letting them know about their upcoming expiration date.

How do I create a new campaign?

  • ***It’s important to note that you should always use a saved template when creating a new campaign as compared to using a duplicated version of a previous campaign.
    • When you duplicate previous campaigns, over time small pieces of code snippets get added in the backend and can cause sporadic formatting issues with text, images, and other components your campaign.
  • For a general overview of the Active Campaign Email Designer process, find resources here.
    • Be sure to read the section on the email designer content menu options.
  • For specifics on creating an RSS-based campaign, find documentation here.
    • Make sure to read over the section on how to create an RSS-triggered campaign in the Email Designer (not the Classic Designer).

How do I use saved modules?

  • To learn more about using saved modules, find documentation here.
    • Make sure to review the section on saved modules within the Email Designer, specifically the sub-section of creating a saved module.
  • BlueLena standard use cases and naming conventions for saved modules:
    • Some of the standard saved modules that we see used most often are:
      • A donate button or a call-to-action (CTA) button
      • An opt-out footer
        • These can be saved for each specific list/newsletter, or you may elect to use a standard newsletter form across all campaigns.
      • Social links (EX: Acme Times – Social Links)
      • An ad spot (EX: Acme Times – Ad Spot)
    • Standard naming conventions for saved modules is the publication name, newsletter name (if applicable) and the type of module, e.g.:
      • Acme Times – EOY – Footer
      • Acme Times – Social Links
      • Acme Times – CTA Churned – Button
      • Acme Times – Donate – Button

What are personalization tags and how do I use them?

Personalization tags can be used to insert conditional content blocks into your campaigns, allowing you to customize messages specific to each subscriber. Some commonly used examples of this are adding first names in salutations, adding payment tier for welcome emails or renewal emails, and last payment amount for direct acknowledgement of a donation. You can learn more about personalization tags and how to insert them into your campaigns here.

***Note that any personalization tag data used within conditional content MUST be case-sensitive if using a “contains”, “is”, or “is not” function. This does not apply to “blank” and “not blank” functions.

  • For example, if you have a payment tier called Blue wave, you couldn’t segment for payment tier contains Blue Wave or it would not pull any results
  • If you’re unsure about the case-sensitivity of your data, find a recent subscriber in your monetization platform and then search that email address on your ActiveCampaign account. Open the profile and review the case-sensitivity of the data point you’re looking to segment and then make sure your conditional content matches this.
    • If however you’re still unsure if you’ve got this setup correctly, please reach out to support@bluelena.io to help review your conditional content blocks.

How do I design mobile-friendly emails? How do I enable/disable mobile responsiveness in a campaign?

You can learn more about making emails mobile-friendly and using mobile responsiveness here. Make sure to review the take note section up top of this article, specifically the note on “Email designer launched in 2022.”

Why is my formatting copying incorrectly into ActiveCampaign? Why does my format appear normal in the designer but incorrect when sent to contacts?

Here are some reasons and recommendations for when formatting appears different in the email designer vs the actual email sends. The main takeaways here are to ensure that when copying text from external sources into AC you should always paste without formatting or use a plain text editor, and to make sure you’re creating these campaigns from saved templates (rather than duplicating previous campaigns)

Why are my emails getting clipped in Gmail?

If you send an email that exceeds 102 KB, you risk Gmail “clipping” your email. Here is more information on clipping, and a breakdown on how to prevent it from happening.

Why have my open rates gone down since moving to ActiveCampaign? How can I improve my account deliverability?

  • Open rates are expected to differ when migrating to any new ESP, but this article explains why this occurs and tips for improving deliverability.
    • Be sure to review the section on warming up your sending.
  • It’s important to remember that when you move to a new system, the most critical setup to implement is getting your DKIM and SPF records setup for email authentication. This will ensure that your domain is verified and help email platforms recognize and verify the sender, and subsequently improve deliverability. Documentation for setting up email authentication can be found here.
    • Be sure to review all authentication sections once you’ve set these up for your domains to ensure all is correct.

Why did my campaign fail to send?

  • There are several reasons why a campaign may fail. Here are a few examples:
    • Delays: Click here for further information on what can cause delays in campaign sending.
    • No segment selected: If a campaign shows as sending to 0 contacts, it’s likely that there is no list/segment selected, or that the previously used segment was deleted from your list.
    • Failed to fetch RSS feed/content: You can check your RSS feed to ensure that it’s valid using this tool. Additionally, please remember that articles must be published by the time that the RSS campaign is scheduled to send. For example, if an RSS campaign is scheduled for 6:30 am ET but sends out at 7:00 am ET, articles will still need to have been published by the original 6:30 am send time to ensure they are included in the campaign.
    • ActiveCampaign Backend issues: If the delay lasts longer than 1 hour, a list/segment is confirmed to have been selected and your RSS feed is valid (if applicable), then the reason for the failed send is likely a backend ActiveCampaign issue.
      • To manually try a workaround, you can stop the campaign and then duplicate to create a copy. Documentation on stopping a campaign send can be found here.
      • On this copied campaign, set up the sending details the same as the original failed campaign and send yourself a test email first to ensure that everything looks correct. Documentation on duplicating a campaign can be found here.
      • If so, then you can re-send using this manual workaround, but if there are still issues after sending the duplicated test email then you should file a ticket with our support team, support@bluelena.freshdesk.com.