Announcing something new
Outline
It’s important to keep your clients involved with what’s new and ongoing at your business. Involve them and you’ll create a community of loyal customers. This is where campaigns from the Marketing Suite become useful.
Campaigns are one-time marketing newsletters you can use to promote upcoming events, specials, or sales—or to simply keep clients up to date on what's happening at your business. Starting with our pre-made templates, you'll customize and design your own emails, then send them out to the clients of your choice. You can even create your emails in advance and schedule them to go out at a specific time.
In this article we’ll cover:
The steps to create a new campaign.
Provide some examples of different types of announcements campaigns are well suited for.
How to monitor a campaign’s success with reporting.
Creating a campaign to make an announcement
Watch the video first to view how to start the announcement, then follow along with the written steps below.
Go to the Marketing tab and choose to manage Campaigns.
Click the Create Campaign button.
Select a template to start—don't worry, you'll get to customize it with your own images and text in the steps that follow. (You can also select Code your own HTML to create your own template from scratch.)
Enter a subject line for your email.
On the Design screen, adjust the layout of your email by adding, removing, and repositioning content blocks. Just hover your mouse over a section you'd like to edit and some new options will appear in gray boxes:
- At the top and bottom, click the + sign to add a new content block to your template.
- On the left side, click the UP or DOWN arrows to move the selected block up and down.
- On the right side, click the x to remove the block.
- On the right side, click the copy icon to duplicate the block.
6. When adding a new content block, you can choose from the following options:
- Text
- Images
- Video
- Combined text and images
- A button link (e.g., Buy Now! or Click here!)
- A social media link
- A horizontal line to divide content
- A blank space
- An offer
7. Once you're happy with the email layout, click on any image to replace it with one of your own: Upload image > from your computer/internet/stock images
8. Now click on any block of text to replace it with some words of your own . You can use the provided text formatting, or customize it using the options listed in the gray bar. Here's what each icon in the bar does, listed from left to right:
- Font size
- Font style
- Bold
- Italicize
- Underline
- Bullet points/Numbered list
- Change font color
- Hyperlink (for embedding URLs)
- Remove formatting
- Insert a merge tag (these function much like replace phrases)
- Align text
- Edit background color
(Optional) Click Offer if you'd like to add a pricing option into your email. Click here to learn more about how this works.
When you're satisfied with the format, click Preview and Test on the right side to see what your email will look like when it lands in a client's inbox. When everything looks right, click Next to advance to the final screen.
On the Schedule screen, you'll choose your audience for this email and specify when it should be sent; make sure to click the Schedule button when you're done.
- Audience: Choose "Contact lists" to send your campaigns to a specific list, or send it to everyone eligible by selecting "All Marketing Subscribed Contacts."
- Campaign name: This isn't shown to clients, but you'll want to name it something descriptive—you may want to copy or reuse this campaign in the future.
- Email Subject Line: This is what clients will see when the email is delivered. Choose something that entices them to open it!
- Time: This is the time of day when the campaign will go out.
- Date: This is the day when the email will be sent.
Example of when to use an announcement
A partnership with another business or a new location
New products in your merchandise
You’re using Branded mobile apps to have a branded experience while booking
You’d like to introduce a new employee
New access to services (I.e., virtual class offerings- click here for a video example)
Reporting on an announcement's success
Before we sign off today, let’s fast forward in time a bit. You have this announcement tuned in and turned on, and you’re curious how it’s going. You might be wondering if it’s effective and if you need to make any edits to the content. To view the stats for the success of this campaign, we can view the performance board. To find it, go to the campain’s menu and find the name of the announcement we created. Across and to the right, you’ll see the stats for performance.
This gives an overview of how the campaign is doing. We can see how many people have received the emails, what percent of those people were intrigued enough to open the email, or how many people went one step further and interacted with the call to action button.
If the email isn’t being sent out to a lot of people, you might look to see how many new clients you’ve prospected recently or take a look at the filters of the smart lists to make sure you’re not leaving anyone out. If a lot of people have opened the email, but not a lot have clicked, that’s a sign that the email needs to be updated and made more engaging.