Frequently Asked Questions

Scenario: Suppose we run a jeans shop that offers three different fashion newsletters: one for women, one for men and one for children's fashion. The shop already has lists of email addresses for the respective groups.

What is the best way to import these email lists into Mail Designer Campaigns in order to send newsletters to them?

1. Add new email contacts

Add contacts in Mail Designer Campaigns: https://my.maildesigner365.com/team/deliveries/contacts/add

Email addresses can be added via copy and paste or via CSV file.

Add contacts via copy and paste

Insert your email addresses into the field separated by a comma or return. To start with, we are only using the newsletter addresses for the “Women” newsletter.

Then select below: "Add placeholder"

Now you can assign a placeholder name.
What are placeholders? Placeholders are used so that we can later filter contacts according to their characteristics – for example, if we want to identify all contacts who are interested in women's fashion. Placeholders can be understood like columns in an Excel table.

In this example, we will call the placeholder “Newsletter Type”. The new placeholder is then created by clicking on “New placeholder: + Newsletter Type”.

We can now assign a placeholder value: “Women”:

Finally, click on “+ Add Contacts” to import all contacts and assign them the placeholder value “Women”. This way, we can later see that these contacts are interested in women's fashion.

Add more contacts

We can now repeat the entire process for the “Men” and “Children” newsletters. Use the “Newsletter Type” placeholder we created in the previous step, but this time use the placeholder values “Men” and “Children”.

Important information:

• If an email address already exists in your saved contacts, it will not be re-imported, but the placeholder and its value will still be added. This means you can safely add email addresses again and again without ending up with duplicates in your list.
• A placeholder can have multiple placeholder values.
  Example: Grace Müller with the email address mueller@example.com is interested in both women's and children's fashion and therefore appears on both lists. If you import the contact once with the placeholder "Newsletter Type" and the value "Women" and then again with the placeholder "Newsletter Type" and the value "Children", both placeholder values will appear in your search results:
  

We have now finished importing our contacts and can proceed to create target groups in the next step.

2. Create target groups

Once you've added contacts and assigned placeholders to them, you can create your first audiences. These are the email lists (or target groups) your newsletters will later be sent to.

Audiences can be created at: https://my.maildesigner365.com/team/deliveries/contacts/targetgroups

Creating a new audience

We will start off with the newsletter for women's fashion. Create a new audience and give it a name (i.e. "Women".)

Now, select the placeholder (i.e. “Newsletter Type”) that you created during the contact import from the menu.

Next, select the corresponding value (e.g. "Women"):

Now all contacts with the placeholder value "Newsletter Type = Women" will be displayed below. Click to save your new audience.

Create additional audiences

These steps can also be carried out for the “Men” and “Children” lists by selecting the appropriate placeholder values.

Good to know:

• Mail Designer audiences are dynamic. This means that if you add new contacts later on, they will automatically be added to the appropriate audience, provided the same placeholder value was assigned during import.

3. Sending newsletters

We refer to each sent newsletter as an individual campaign. This means that there is one campaign per target group.

Have you created your email template for the women's fashion campaign on your Mac in Mail Designer 365? Excellent! Click Start Campaign to get started.

Plan a campaign

When you prepare a new campaign, the subject line and sender address fields are automatically filled out for you. Assuming you don't want to change anything here, you can immediately go to "Who?" and select your audience.

Here you can choose the audience (i.e. “women”) that we created in the last step:

Choose a time for delivery or click on "Now" to send the email right away. Afterwards, you can check over your email one last time by selecting "Queue this email for delivery".

You are now ready to send!

Ready for the next one? Repeat these steps for any additional newsletters and their respective email lists.