Sitecore Send: Everything you need to know before getting started (Part 1)

Despite being a part of every brand’s marketing strategy since the dawn of time, email marketing is still one of the most effective ways to engage with your customers and stimulate sales. 99% of email users check their email daily, some as much as 20 times a day! And 61% of consumers prefer to be contacted by brands through email as opposed to other channels. Email is still essential to any business’s marketing and sales strategy, and having the right tool is paramount. Sitecore Send is Sitecore’s latest SaaS email tool, built for the composable world, and this product should be part of any conversation an organisation has around revamping its email capability.

But, like rolling out any new tool, there are considerations to make before you dive in. With that in mind, there are seven elements you need to know about before getting started with Sitecore Send.

• Email Lists – Who you’re sending your emails to and what data points you have on them.
• Campaigns – These are the emails themselves, how they look and feel and what info is in them.
• Forms – Getting new users into your lists and what info you want them to give you.
• Segments – How you can group your users based on common characteristics so you can create relevant Campaigns.
• Automation – Setting up automated messages based on certain Triggers and Conditions.
• Reports – Viewing how successful your Campaigns are.
• Integrations – Getting your system to share information with other tools or platforms.

Email lists 

Email Lists are where you store and manage the information you have on your recipients. Your Email Lists are generally grouped based on a particular theme; examples for your Monthly Newsletter could be one list, while recipients interested in an upcoming product launch or event could be another.

An Email List is a product of its members and the information related to these members. This information is stored in Custom Fields. Only Member Fields are out-of-the-box in Sitecore Send Name, Email, and Mobile. To add more rich member data, you must add Custom Fields that relate to your members, such as Location, Persona, and maybe even things like Purchase History and Campaign Interaction.

There are five Field Types you can choose when adding Custom Fields:

• Text
• Date
• Number
• Single Select Dropdown – for Multiple-choice options where a member should choose just one
• Checkbox – for binary Yes / No or On / Off options

There are several ways to bulk manage your member information via file (Excel, CSV, or TXT), Copy and Paste, or via Salesforce or Google Contacts plugin:

• Import Members into a List
• Archive List Members
• Unsubscribe List Members
• Delete List Members
• Copy Members from Another Email list

Tags can complement the Custom Field information you have on your members, and these can be used to create Segments too.

An example of an Email List in Sitecore Send

Campaigns in Sitecore Send

Campaigns are the actual emails that your Email List members will receive. There are four basic types of Email Campaigns that you can create in Sitecore Send:

• Regular – For basic newsletters, promotional offers, prod updates, etc.
• RSS – Connect a campaign directly to an RSS feed.
• Repeatable HTML – Automatically fetch new content from a designated resource.
• A/B test – Test two versions of the campaign version, saying subject lines, content, or senders.

Sitecore Send has its own Template Library with various email templates to use as a springboard for your Email Campaign. Alternatively, you can create a Campaign from scratch or import an HTML Campaign built outside Sitecore Send.

The Campaign Editor lets you design and edit your Email Campaign. It includes the following elements:

Top Menu

• Edit – Create and edit your campaign
• Comment – Collaborate with others
• Preview – See your campaign in Mobile, Desktop, or Tablet view
• Code – View the HTML code of your campaign
• History – View previous versions of your campaign

Left Pane

• Layout – Manage the containers that make up the campaign
• Items – Add items like images, buttons, or text into the Layout containers
• Settings – Manage formatting like width, border and colour

Right Pane

• When you click on an individual item, the right pane will be presented, which lets you edit the formatting of that particular item.

Once you have designed your Campaign, you can schedule for it to be sent at a particular time or to send it immediately.

A nice feature of Sitecore Send is that you can set your Campaign to automatically resend to members who have yet to open the email after a set amount of time. In the recent campaign, you can use a new Subject Line or Sender to encourage you to open it this time.

An example of a Campaign being created in Sitecore Send

In Part One, we’ve delved into the foundational aspects of email marketing. We’ve covered crucial topics like Email Lists and Campaigns, setting the stage for a deeper exploration. In Part Two, we’ll plunge into the advanced capabilities of Sitecore Send. Get ready to discover how Segments, Forms, Automation, Reports, and Integrations can elevate your email marketing strategy to new heights.