Email marketing
Email marketing can be one of the most effective ways to promote your business and products or keep in touch with existing contacts. In Kentico, you can create, manage and send out marketing emails via the Email marketing application.
Kentico enables you to perform the email marketing actions such as sending regular newsletters, running marketing campaigns promoted by emails, and automating the sending of email series. All emails that you send as part of your marketing actions are organized into email feeds.
Kentico supports two types of email feeds:
- Email campaigns – allow you to target and re-target every marketing email based on the impact of the previous email communication. This enables you, for example, to promote a marketing campaign by sending different marketing emails to different recipients. You can create marketing emails that are based on predefined templates.
- Newsletters – allow you to send marketing emails in an email feed to recipients who subscribed to newsletters on your live sites. This enables you to, for example, periodically update the newsletter’s recipients about promotions, upcoming events, and various other happenings concerning your website. You can create marketing emails that are based on predefined templates.
Working with email feeds
Email feeds allow you to send out marketing emails to contacts with an email address. The system stores a directory of all contacts, which you can monitor and manage.
After your administrator has prepared email templates and email widgets, and ensured that recipients can subscribe to newsletters and unsubscribe from email feeds, you can do the following:
- Create newsletters
- Create email campaigns
- Write marketing emails
- Send marketing emails
- Manage recipients
- Track and monitor marketing emails
- View the email report insights
Marketing emails vs. transactional emails
The advantage of marketing emails over transactional emails is that you can give all the emails in an email feed a unified appearance. You can use templates with shared design elements, such as a company logo or a footer with general information regarding your business. Marketing emails can also contain macros that personalize the message inside according to the data you have gathered in the system about individual contacts.
Transactional emails, such as email notifications and confirmations, can be sent and managed in the Marketing automation application. Transactional emails are not affected by email marketing subscriptions or opt-outs done by visitors.
You can also ask your administrator to help you enable double opt-in for individual newsletters before sending them out, and troubleshoot marketing emails if your contacts are not receiving the emails correctly.
License limitations for email feeds
Kentico websites have a maximum limit on the number of created email feeds. The limit depends on the License Edition under which the site is running:
- Kentico CMS Base: 5 newsletters, email campaigns not supported
- Kentico CMS Ultimate: 10 newsletters, email campaigns not supported
- Kentico EMS: unlimited newsletters and email campaigns
You can see the email feeds created for your website in the Email marketing application on the Email feeds tab.
How the system sends emails
When the system sends out an email, it creates a personalized email for every individual recipient. The emails are placed into a queue. A system scheduled task processes the queue for an email feed and sends the emails either directly to the SMTP server or to the system’s email queue (depending on the configuration of the given email feed). The Send marketing email scheduled task afterwards automatically resends all emails lost due to errors.
Using the email queue is recommended for marketing emails with large numbers of recipients to ensure that all emails are delivered correctly.