Email Marketing - Sending

1. Use the Test Send
It's free, so there's no reason not to! This lets you send the campaign to (say) work colleagues and personal email addresses to help check for any typos, grammatical errors and the like.

Both the HTML and the Text version will be sent, so if you've not created a plain text version you'll receive a blank email along with the HTML one. (We often get asked why this happens). Obviously when you do your live send, your recipients will receive only one email.

You can also use 'Test Send' to ensure that your email arrives as you expect it to. Your email may appear differently in webmail mail clients (Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo etc). For instance, some webmail clients strip out stylesheets when users receive messages, so it's wise to carry out some 'Test Sends' to a variety of mail clients.

Basically, the Test Send allows you to see exactly what the finished product will be before sending your communication to the entire list. It will give you the confidence to create bigger and better campaigns… just remember - always check all copy for typos and make sure all your links are correct.



2. Making changes and Test Sending again
It's easy to tweak after the Test Send. Click on the blue edit pencil to go back to the Edit Campaign area, make the changes to both the HTML and the text email, then click on the "Save this Campaign" button.

From here you can repeat the process of the Test Send until you are 100% ready to send out your campaign. Remember to add your subject line and make it relevant - avoiding words that will trigger spam filters, such as 'free' and 'offer'.


3. Scheduling a campaign
wizemail will allow you to schedule a campaign to be sent at any time in the future.

After the usual process of creating and test sending, click on the green send envelope, pick the address book(s) for your recipients then use the drop down boxes to pick the day, month, year and hour that you'd like the campaign to be sent on.

Your email will move down to the sent items, but be held in the system until the specified time. This protects you from accidentally sending out the email again, earlier than planned.

Your email will be sent to all the users in your address book as it stood on the day you scheduled it to be sent.



4. Checking the size of your campaign
One important thing to monitor is the actual file size of your email. In general, the smaller the total size of the email the higher your deliverability will be - especially amongst your recipients on dial up.

The best way to reduce the size of your HTML email is to remember to optimise all the graphics, essentially reducing the file size of each image as much as possible. All image editing programs will have an option for you to do this.

Remember best practice, and only include images which actually enhance your message. Don't be tempted to put in more images just because they look good!



5. Viewing previously sent campaigns
wizemail likes to keep things tidy for you. So every month all your sent and unsent campaigns and reports will move from your main screens into the archives. Don't panic, though...

Everything is filed in chronological order. To find anything that has 'disappeared' just select the month of the campaign in the drop-down box - or click 'show all' to give you list of everything you've ever done in wizemail.