How to send an email campaign with Zinn® Campaigns

This guide walks through sending an email campaign with Zinn® Campaigns: connecting the server it is sent from, building a list, writing the message, testing it, sending it and reading the report.

1. Connect the server your campaigns are sent from

Campaigns are sent through your own mail server or email provider (SMTP), so they come from your domain and your provider's reputation. Under Sending, add the server's host name, port, username and password, then check it. Your password is kept in our secret store and is never shown again.

Before a campaign can be sent, your sending domain must publish SPF and DMARC records at your DNS provider; Gmail and Yahoo require both for bulk mail.

To see deliveries, bounces and spam complaints reported by your provider, add a webhook in your provider's dashboard and paste its signing secret into the connection (providers that sign with Svix, such as Resend, are supported). Bounces your server refuses straight away are recorded without one.

Zinn® sending (our own sending network, included with your plan) is still warming up and will be offered when it is ready.

2. Build a list

Import your contacts with a record of how they agreed to hear from you, then add them to a list. A campaign goes to one list. Only people who agreed to email are sent anything.

3. Write the campaign

Give it a subject, an optional preview text (the line shown after the subject in the inbox), and the message in HTML or plain text. Personalise it with merge fields: {{email}} and any field you imported, such as {{first_name}}. A field a contact does not have is left empty.

Every campaign must include your postal address; it is printed in the footer. The footer also carries the unsubscribe link, and every message has a one-click unsubscribe that Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo show beside the sender. You cannot remove either.

4. Send a test

Send a test copy to yourself, or to anyone else who is a member of your account, before sending to the list. Tests are marked [TEST] and are not counted in the report.

5. Send

Before anything is sent we check that your account is in good standing, that your plan includes enough emails this month, that your server and domain pass their checks, and that someone on the list can be mailed. If something is missing, the campaign says what to fix.

• New senders start gently. On your first day you can send up to 500 emails; each

day you sent on before raises that by 1.5 times. A larger campaign is not cut short: it carries on automatically the next day.

• Accounts sending more than 50,000 emails in a month are reviewed by our team first.
• People who unsubscribed, bounced or marked an earlier campaign as spam are skipped

automatically, even if they unsubscribe while the campaign is sending.

6. Unsubscribes, bounces and spam complaints

• Unsubscribe removes the person from that list straight away. The page they land on also

lets them stop every email from you.

• A hard bounce (the address does not exist) or a spam complaint stops all future

campaigns to that address. Temporary problems, such as a full mailbox, are retried.

• To protect your sending reputation, if more than 5% of a campaign bounces or more

than 0.1% of people mark it as spam (measured once 100 emails have gone), your account's sending pauses. Our team is told and will contact you; once the list is fixed they resume it, and the campaign carries on without mailing anyone twice.

7. The report

Each campaign's report shows how many emails were sent, delivered (when your provider's webhook is connected), bounced, opened, clicked, unsubscribed and marked as spam. Opens and clicks are counted once per person. Opens are an estimate: some mail apps load images automatically and some block them.