Managing email campaigns from Webtools

Question

Hi Experts
Does anyone have a useful document for using the Marketing > Campaigns email function within webtools?  I would like to be able to create an HTML mailshot which will be sent to approx 2000 subscribers but am having trouble both building the mailshot and sending test email. 
Thanks
Jon

Answer 1

I have not had very good experience with mailing campaigns. There are many options out there that are inexpensive and offer much more capabilities and better reporting, but if you're truly interested in pursuing the Web Tools avenue, I would do two things:
1. Test to make sure your email is working - This is easy enough to test, as there is a simple "Forgot Password" function at the login screen. The difficult part may come if you find this doesn't work. There are other threads that deal with dealing with SMTP issues, but I guarantee you that if this doesn't work, neither will your campaigns.
2. Investigate the Admin->Marketing menu - Where the magic takes place, you can create new campaigns & lists from the Campaigns  and Contact Lists sections appropriately. I don't know too much about this, but to get started you'll need to create a contact list and populate it. Once done, you'll have to create a campaign and then tell it to use the newly created list.
One of the big caveats that I would like to point out with the Web Tools campaign system is that if you wanted to have users sign up for newsletters/mailing lists, the out-of-box functionality allows them to sign up any email address, not just their own. This can get tricky if they decide to put in someone else's email, who upon receiving your emails could in turn file a complaint that you are not following CAN-SPAM laws, potentially resulting in a blacklisting of your mail server. While the frequency of this happening is pretty darned small, the severity of the damage could be quite thorough. Of course, if you're going to manage the lists yourselves or build out a separate device to capture who is "subscribed" to what and who isn't (which is what we did in the long run), that removes the threat in the first place.