Send marketing email

Marketing email in ContactRoll goes only to people who agreed to it, from your own domain, with one-click unsubscribe in every message. This article covers what to set up and what your team sees along the way. Writing and approving an email is in the article on campaigns.

On the Free plan, your organization sends up to 500 marketing emails a month to up to 500 marketing contacts. Past the month's 500, an email waits until the next month begins. An organization's first marketing email on Free goes out a week after the organization was made. Each email's footer carries one more line, "Made with ContactRoll CRM", linking to contactroll.com. Replies to customers, invitations and ContactRoll's own notices never count.

1. Set up your sending domain

Open Marketing, then Sending, at https://app.contactroll.com/marketing/sending. Under Where your marketing email comes from, fill in:

• Sending domain, Send from, Name recipients see, and a Reply-to address (optional)
• Postal address, which goes in the footer of every marketing email

ContactRoll then lists the records to publish in your domain's DNS, under Publish these records. Add them with your DNS provider, then press Check verification. It usually takes a few minutes. Once the domain shows verified, it is ready to send.

2. Check how receivers will see it

Under How a receiver will check this domain, ContactRoll shows SPF, DKIM and DMARC as three lines, each with a dot and words saying where it stands. They are read each time you press Check again, and the page says when they were last read.

3. Record consent

Marketing email goes to people with marketing consent on file. Writing to support is a different thing, so a support contact starts with none. On a contact's page, the Marketing consent panel shows where they stand. To add consent:

1. Press Record consent.
2. Under What did they do?, choose how they agreed, such as ticking a box on a form or telling somebody who wrote it down.
3. Under Evidence, say where and how: the form, what the box said, who they told.
4. Press Record it.

If a person asks you to stop, press They asked us to stop. People can also give consent through your sign-up form, which records the evidence for you.

Unsubscribes and suppression

Every marketing email carries one-click unsubscribe headers, which mail apps show as an unsubscribe button beside your name, and an unsubscribe link in its footer. The link opens a page where the reader confirms with one press, or chooses which topics they get and how often. Either way, ContactRoll records it straight away.

An address that unsubscribes, bounces permanently or marks a message as spam is suppressed for your organization, and stays suppressed even if the person is deleted and imported again. A person's own confirmed sign-up through your form lifts an earlier unsubscribe. The contact's page says why an address is suppressed.

Your new domain's warm-up

A new sending domain warms up over 28 days, starting with its first message. The Warm-up panel on the Sending page shows which day it is on, today's allowance, how much is used and left, and the full schedule:

• Days 1–2: 20 emails a day
• Days 3–4: 40
• Days 5–7: 75
• Days 8–10: 150
• Days 11–14: 300
• Days 15–17: 600
• Days 18–21: 1,200
• Days 22–24: 2,500
• Days 25–28: 5,000

From day 29 the warm-up ends. Where your organization's own daily limit is lower than the day's warm-up allowance, the panel says so, and that limit applies. From day 14, an Owner or an Administrator can end the warm-up early with a note saying why. Anything due beyond the day's room goes out as soon as there is room.

Sending health and the pause

Under How this organization's marketing email is doing, the Sending page shows the last 30 days: how many messages went, how many bounced and how many were marked as spam, each against its limit. Rates are worked out once you have sent 100 messages.

If more than 0.05% of messages are marked as spam, or more than 3% go to addresses that do not exist, marketing email pauses by itself. Every Owner and Administrator gets a task saying so, and every marketing page shows the pause. Your support email keeps working as usual: customers can still write in, cases still open and your team is still notified.

To resume, clean the list, then press Clean the list, then resume… and write what was done. Measurement then starts again from zero.

Who can do what

Owners and Administrators set up the sending domain, its warm-up and click tracking, and resume after a pause. Owners, Administrators, Supervisors, Agents and Marketers record and withdraw consent.