Creating a new, brilliant email campaign can be a daunting task. In today's competitive market, you need to make sure your content is relevant to your audience while staying on brand. Using outdated tools can make it even more challenging - and less fun all around. Digital marketing is a creative endeavor, and clunky software can stifle your creativity. At the same time, you need inspiration, and a little structure to keep your messaging consistent. That's why we built the message composer in Acoustic Campaign. We think it's a pretty great mix of structure to save you time, and freedom to unleash brilliant and inventive ideas. Here's what we mean: 

Start from scratch

The first choice you're faced with is: how to begin? You may have a general idea of how you want your email to appear, or you may have some design specs from a teammate that you're responsible for implementing in a new email campaign.

Either way, you can start from scratch to build out your email exactly the way you want it.

Build with HTML

If you already have the HTML for your email, a super easy way to build it is to import that HTML directly into the editor. You can tweak the HTML in the editor if you need to. One thing that's so great about our HTML editor is the instant preview. As you update your HTML, you see those updates in real time - even images and colors.

You can also download the HTML for any email you create in the message composer, regardless of how you created it. 

Get inspiration from templates

If you're not sure how to begin, browse our templates to get some inspiration. We've re-designed these templates to make them responsive and stylish. You can easily use these templates in tandem with our drag-and-drop editor to build out a competitive email campaign. Just make sure to change the Lorem Ipsum text.

When it comes to creating an email campaign, we're fans of all three options. Though HTML is a wonderful, powerful tool to craft your email, we think the fun of the message composer really starts when you get to the drag-and-drop editor.

I'm in the drag-and-drop editor, now what?

Any email you create with the drag-and-drop editor begins with defining a section. A section can contain a single, double, or 3-column layout. Adding a section is as easy as hovering in the drag-and-drop preview and clicking on the layout you'd like for that section. After you define the layout for your section, the fun really begins!

From the Design tab, you'll find content blocks that you can add to sections of your email. A content block determines what can be included in your sections. Content blocks range from a simple text block or an image block to the more complex button or link bar. Drag and drop these content blocks over to your email and you'll soon discover the possibilities are endless. After you drop a block, it's time to add the specific content you need.

Customize your text to match your brand's style and color palette. Upload images or browse your new content library. After you've added an image, enhance it with text overlays, filters, and more. Our built-in image editor is another chance for you to add a creative touch to your email.

Save yourself time by saving content you know you'll need to use later - like footers, headers, author bios, and addresses. Hover over the content you want to save and click Save block to make the content available for reuse across your team.

What about the technical details?

You may be accustomed to editing HTML or using more advanced tools to control your preheader and other details of your email. With the message composer, simply click the Details tab to add your preheader, select the contacts you'd like to send your email to, and personalize your email as well.

I have the perfect email, what do I do with it?

If it's perfect, you should probably save your email as a template to use as a starting point next time around. It may save you time and help spark inspiration later on. Now that you’ve created your message, you just send it out and your customers will open it, right? Not so fast.

Let’s take a look at some features to consider before, during, and after send time.

When to send

You can send an email as soon as you've completed it and you feel like it's ready to go. But, you may find it more efficient to schedule the email to be sent at a specific date and time. You can set out a schedule that works best for your marketing plans, and the emails will go out automatically.

Health check

Before your email goes out to thousands or hundreds of thousands of your customers, Campaign will verify several aspects of the email, including whether it’s likely to be delivered as spam. No one wants to see their hard work end up in a spam folder.

Test your best ideas

Even slight differences in layout, images, and text can make a big difference in how well your email is received. Do you go with the blue background or the dark gray? White or off-white text? Sometimes it’s best to let a random test group decide for you. Acoustic Campaign A/B testing allows you to compare customer preferences for up to 4 versions of your email.

You can test completely different versions of your email content or something as simple as a different subject line. You control the percentage of contacts that receive the tests and what determines the winner. During the test you can view the open and click percentages for each test version. Once you have a winner, Acoustic can send that out to the remainder of the contact list or let you do that manually.

Set up approvals

When you have multiple people involved with email content you may want a stamp of approval before it goes to customers. Set up one or more groups that must approval emails before they are sent. Once all the approvals are met, your email will go out as scheduled.

Send at the best time

Do you know what time of day your customers are most likely to open email? Acoustic does. Send time optimization (STO) means your email is delivered on the best day, at the best time for your customers. When you enable STO, Campaign collects and uses prior behavior to determine when your customers are most likely to open email. Contact sources will generally include customers in multiple time zones and STO will take those into account as it determines the best delivery time.

Manage your email

You’ve planned and tested and tested and planned. You’ve sent out your perfect email only to realize you included an old link. What’s to be done?

Campaign allows you to change both links and images, even after the email has gone out. Organize, filter, and search for existing drafts and sent copies. Take advantage of a layout that’s performed well and save it as a template to reuse in the future.