Email marketing

Email marketing is one of the most effective channels of digital marketing. It can help promote your services or products, lead all your new prospects through the sales funnel, or stay in touch with your existing customers.

Email marketing in Kentico Xperience

Email marketing features are fully integrated into the Kentico Xperience platform. Marketers can use a low-code approach to create emails within an email builder interface.

Your contacts can easily subscribe to newsletters or marketing emails directly on the website. Marketers can use all the data they’ve collected about their contacts to personalize their messages. They can target their emails based on their customers’ website activity, previous purchases, orders, or other interactions. They can optimize their emails using integrated A/B tests. Marketers can even combine their email marketing with marketing automation and create elaborate workflows to keep their customers engaged.

Out-of-the-box, Kentico Xperience also provides detailed statistics of email performance.

Here are some business situations where you can use email marketing:

• Promote new products and services.
• Send regular newsletters to subscribers.
• Create automated email workflows for new client onboarding.
• Send email drip campaigns for new prospects.
• Conduct customer satisfaction surveys.
• Qualify your leads using targeted personalized messages.
• Promote new content and upcoming events.
• Co-market your partnerships.

How does email marketing work?

Customers and marketing teams have different requirements and needs. Marketers worldwide target different personas or recipients, and one size doesn’t always fit all. 

That’s why the Email marketing application, as well as the whole Xperience platform, are highly customizable. You can custom-tailor it to support many different integrations, company brand design systems, or marketing campaigns. Instead of providing generic pre-built widgets and email templates, the platform allows developers to create custom components and templates that fit your exact needs.

Developers create email templates and widgets and optimize them for all the different kinds of email applications used by recipients. Marketers then design their emails using a low-code approach, and drag and drop their email content in the email builder. The widgets can support any scenario, e.g., they can even pull content from the website into emails. This way, marketers can easily reuse any content that resonates with their audience.

You can select recipients for your email, decide whether you want to run an A/B test or not, and send the email. (Kentico Xperience needs an SMTP server to be able to send emails.)

Create an email within a feed

In Kentico Xperience, both newsletters and campaign emails live within something called an email feed. You can imagine the feed as a collective bucket that puts all related emails, recipients, and email stats into one place in the Email marketing application. 

Each feed can contain an unlimited number of emails. 

Marketers add content to the email using email widgets and personalize it for each customer. Every email can also have different properties, such as other subject lines or personalized preheaders. For detailed reporting, marketers can tag their emails with UTM parameters.

Add recipients to your email

There are two types of emails in Kentico Xperience: newsletters and campaign emails. While newsletter emails are delivered to one list of subscribers, each campaign email can be sent to a different group of recipients and specifically target your messaging. You can build your email contact groups dynamically for each email. For example, you can send the second email only to contacts who opened your previous email. Kentico Xperience can help you set it up dynamically with contact group conditions or marketing automation.

Mailout time

Correctly timing the sendout of emails can significantly improve your email performance and return of investment. The Send tab gives you an option to send your emails immediately or schedule the mailout for later. 

When you click the Send button, the application creates a personalized email for every recipient. It then moves the emails into a queue based on the system settings (either directly to the SMTP server or the system’s Email queue application).

Analyze your email performance

Kentico Xperience gives you detailed statistics of the email feed and individual emails. The email feed’s Report tab shows you trends between emails. The email’s Report tab shows detailed statistics on email opens, clicks, unsubscriptions, or bounced emails.

Try building an email yourself

Let’s build a new newsletter and promote the single-origin Colombia Carlos Imbachi coffee.

1. Open the Email marketing application.
2. Edit () the email feed called Newsletter.
3. Click Create new email to add a new newsletter within the Newsletter email feed.
   • Fill in the email Name field.
4. Choose the Email template (3 zones) template and click on Create button.
5. In the Email builder, add the following content to your new email using the drag-and-drop widgets:
   • Zone 1:
     • Headline – Taste the single-origin Colombia coffee
     • Text – Keeping you up to date with the latest and greatest from the wonderful world of coffee.
     • Product – Select Colombia Carlos Imbachi coffee from the products, e.g., using the search box.
   • Zone 2:
     • Headline – Find Your Local Café
     • Café – (Select any café, e.g., Boston)
   • Zone 3:
     • Latest articles
6.  Use the Preview button to check out what the final email looks like.

And that’s it. Your new newsletter could look like the following:

Conclusion

You’ve seen and tested how quickly you can build emails in Kentico Xperience. The Email marketing application also gives you the option to adjust email properties or run an A/B test. However, this is not in the scope of this tutorial. If you want to learn how to utilize the integrated email marketing feature to the fullest, take the training course for editors and marketers, or continue with the Business tutorial.

If you’ve seen all pages of the Business tutorial, see what Next steps you can take in mastering Kentico Xperience.