What are Email Campaigns?

An email campaign is a coordinated set of email messages sent to a specific list of recipients over a period of time, with a particular goal in mind. It’s not just sending one email; it often involves a series of emails designed to guide recipients through a specific journey, whether it’s nurturing a lead, promoting a product, or building a relationship.

Think of it as a strategic conversation with your audience, delivered directly to their inbox. Each email within a campaign has a purpose, a call to action, and is usually tailored to the specific segment of your audience it’s targeting.

Why Use Email Campaigns?

Email campaigns are a versatile, cost-effective, and highly measurable way to connect with your audience, build lasting relationships, and drive tangible business results.

Email campaigns remain a cornerstone of effective marketing strategies for a multitude of reasons.

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High Return on Investment (ROI): Email marketing consistently delivers one of the highest ROIs compared to other marketing channels. For every dollar spent, many businesses see a significant return, often much higher than social media or paid advertising. This makes it incredibly cost-effective.
Direct Communication Channel: Unlike social media or search engines where you're at the mercy of algorithms, email allows you to communicate directly with your audience in their personal inbox. This creates a more intimate and less cluttered environment for your message.
Personalization and Segmentation: Email campaigns excel at personalization. You can segment your audience based on demographics, interests, past behavior, purchase history, and more. This allows you to send highly relevant and targeted content, making recipients feel understood and increasing engagement. Personalized emails are far more effective than generic ones.
Building Relationships and Loyalty: Regular, valuable communication through email helps build trust and credibility with your audience. By providing useful content, exclusive offers, and staying top-of-mind, you can foster stronger relationships, leading to increased customer loyalty and retention.
Driving Traffic and Sales: Email campaigns are a powerful tool for driving traffic to your website, landing pages, or online store. With clear calls to action (CTAs), you can encourage recipients to make purchases, sign up for events, download resources, or engage with your brand in other meaningful ways, directly impacting sales.
Measurable Results: Email marketing platforms provide robust analytics. You can easily track key metrics like open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, bounce rates, and unsubscribes. This data provides invaluable insights into what's working and what isn't, allowing you to continually optimize your campaigns for better performance.
>Automation: Many email campaigns can be automated based on specific triggers (e.g., a welcome email after signup, an abandoned cart reminder, a birthday discount). This saves time and ensures timely, relevant communication without manual intervention.
Brand Awareness: Consistent branding, messaging, and valuable content in your emails help reinforce your brand's image and keep it top-of-mind with your audience.
Customer Retention: Email is excellent for nurturing existing customers, keeping them engaged, and encouraging repeat business through loyalty programs, exclusive offers, and personalized recommendations.

Use Case Example

Lets say you own a car dealership. You currently have an inventory overflow of older tires in stock. To boost sales and move the older inventory (purpose), you create a personalized email campaign to let specific customers know about your big tire sale. You are able to personalize the email because you used the personalization tags feature to capture relevant customer records such as each customer’s name, email address, and information specific to their vehicle(s).

To reach the right customers, you identify which customers your campaign targets using the segmentation feature. For example, your segment criteria might include only those customer’s with specific tire sizes, car makes and models.

As an added customer loyalty bonus, your email campaign includes a link to a sign-up for service form (a campaign “call to action”). If the customer completes the form, they receive a coupon code to use to waive the tire installation charge at the time of service.

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Email Campaigns and Activities

Email campaigns may include multiple emails. Each email campaign contains a unique name and campaign identifier, and has a list of associated email campaign activities.

Email campaign activities are different types of email interactions you can have with your contacts. For example, sending a initial email to contacts uses the primary_email activity. The primary_email activity can be used to create an A/B email subject line test. In addition, resending an email to non-openers creates a resend activity. Constant Contact also provides you with a permalink activity that contains a permanent link to a web accessible version of your email. Email campaign activities include content such as the email subject line, email headers, and custom HTML.

For example, if you are using the email reporting unique opens method to track performance, a resend email campaign activity will return data on a resend to non-openers email. If you want to get data on your initial send, you can use the primary_email email campaign activity. Both of these separate activities are associated with the same email campaign.

Email Campaign Types

Constant Contact uses format types to support their different email editor versions and API email formats. You use the V3 API to create custom code emails (format type 5). Custom code emails support more features including using personalized content in emails and sending emails to segments. You can still retrieve, update, and schedule the other email format types, but you cannot use the V3 API to create them.

For information on using personalization tags to use contact, custom field, or account information in an email, see Designing HTML for Custom Code Emails.

Schema

>CLICK to see example email campaign schema...

The following newsletter email campaign schema shows that it has three associated email campaign activities and is scheduled to send.

{
    "type": "NEWSLETTER",
    "name": "Huge Tire Sale!",
    "campaign_id": "f5ea685c-5fc8-47ab-9576-dbc21fea8198",
    "current_status": "SCHEDULED",
    "updated_at": "2024-10-25T17:20:39.000Z",
    "created_at": "2024-09-11T17:21:21.000Z",
    "campaign_activities": [
        {
            "role": "primary_email",
            "campaign_activity_id": "4a07b9b5-c69e-4079-855e-8c4959c18885"
        },
        {
            "role": "resend",
            "campaign_activity_id": "fff33557-a792-4a36-b0f5-dc94851de79b"
        },
        {
            "role": "permalink",
            "campaign_activity_id": "b7144593-831c-4e13-a95a-7ae5ddce9d86"
        }
    ]
}

CLICK to see example email campaign activity schema...

{
	"format_type": 5,
	"from_email": "jdodge@example.com",
	"reply_to_email": "jdodge@example.com",
	"from_name": "JD Car Sales and Services ",
	"subject": "Your Huge Tire Discount Has Arrived!",
	"current_status": "SCHEDULED",
	"html_content": "<html><body>[[trackingImage]]<a href=\"http://www.constantcontact.com\">Visit ConstantContact.com!</a></body></html>",
	"preheader": "Get your tire discount now...",
	"physical_address_in_footer": {
		"address_line1": "123 Maple Street",
		"address_line2": "Main Lot",
		"address_optional": "Near Boston Fire Station",
		"city": "Boston",
		"country_code": "US",
		"country_name": "United States",
		"organization_name": "Jake Dodge's Pet Supplies",
		"postal_code": "02451",
		"state_code": "MA"
	}
}

Email Campaign Endpoints and Methods

Use V3 API endpoints and methods to create, update, and retrieve details about your email campaigns.

GET a Collection of V2 and V3 API Email Campaign Identifiers

GET /emails/campaign_id_xrefs

Use this method to migrate your local V2 API email data to the V3 API format. For each v2_email_campaign_id value that you provide, this method returns the corresponding V3 campaign_id and V3 campaign_activity_id UUID value.

Learn More about migrating your V2 API email data.

Email Campaign Overview

What are Email Campaigns?

Why Use Email Campaigns?

Use Case Example

Email Campaigns and Activities

Email Campaign Types

Schema

Email Campaign Endpoints and Methods

GET a Collection of V2 and V3 API Email Campaign Identifiers

POST (Create) a New Email Campaign

GET a Collection of Email Campaigns

GET Email Campaign Details by Campaign ID

DELETE a Single Email Campaign

GET Email Campaign Activity by Activity ID

PUT (update) an Email Campaign Activity

PATCH (rename) an Existing Email Campaign

GET Send History Details for Email Campaign Activities

POST Schedule an Email Campaign Activity

GET Schedule Information for an Email Campaign Activity

POST Test Send an Email Campaign Activity

DELETE an Email Campaign

GET an HTML Preview of an Email Campaign Activity

POST Resend to Non-openers for an Email Campaign Activity

GET Resend to Non-openers Details for an Email Campaign Activity

DELETE a Resend to Non-openers for an Email Campaign Activity

GET A/B Test Details for an Email Campaign Activity