Create and Manage Email Invitation Campaigns

Email invitation campaigns let you send a form to contacts, design the message and measure delivery and response progress. A campaign setup has four sections: Subject and sender, Content, Recipients and Schedule.

Every new campaign must be linked to a survey, quiz or form. Mailings does not currently create a standalone newsletter or broadcast email without a form.

You can start a campaign in either place:

• Open Mailings and select New campaign.
• Open a form, select Send, find Send email invitations, and select Send by email or Add another campaign.

If you have not added contacts yet, open Contacts first to import them and organise them into groups or segments.

Note

A campaign saves as a draft while you set it up. Nothing is sent until you review the campaign and confirm its sending schedule.

Complete Subject and sender first. Shout creates the campaign draft from those details, then unlocks Content, Recipients and Schedule.

Use these detailed guides as you work:

• Choose Campaign Recipients for groups, segments, exclusions, filters and marketing eligibility.
• Schedule and Manage Email Campaigns for drafts, scheduling, status and dashboard actions.
• Send Follow-up Reminders and Thank-yous for response-based audiences and multiple follow-ups.
• Understand Campaign Reports for delivery, engagement, recipient, link and form-response results.

1. Add the subject and sender

Open Subject and sender, then add:

• Subject: the line contacts see in their inbox.
• From name: the organisation or person shown as the sender.
• Replies go to: choose one of your verified sender addresses.
• Postal address: the physical address included in the email footer.

2. Choose the form and design the email

Open Content and choose the survey, quiz or form that the invitation should open. If you started from a form’s Send page, it is already selected.

Tracked or anonymous invitations

Leave Send anonymously off to give each contact a tracked invitation link. Tracking lets the campaign report connect delivery, opens, clicks and form progress to the invitation. It also enables targeted reminders and thank-you messages.

Turn Send anonymously on when every recipient should receive the same public link. Shout will not record which contact opened or answered from that invitation. The campaign report can therefore show delivery, but not opens, clicks or responses, and you cannot create tracked follow-ups from it. Answers that respondents enter in the form are still saved normally.

Select Design email to open the email designer. Add and arrange content blocks, adjust the overall email styling, and preview both desktop and mobile layouts. The postal address and unsubscribe link are required and cannot be removed. Changes save to the campaign draft automatically.

3. Choose recipients

Open Recipients to define the audience.

• Send to: choose one or more groups or segments, or all contacts.
• Except: exclude groups or segments from the audience.
• Only people who: add optional rules using contact details, groups, earlier campaigns, contact activity or survey progress.
• Preview list: check the contacts who currently match the audience before scheduling.

Survey rules can target contacts who Completed, Started but not finished, Haven’t completed or Haven’t started a selected form. Campaign rules can use activity such as whether a contact opened an earlier campaign.

Use And when a contact must match two rules and Or when either rule is sufficient. Contacts selected through several groups are deduplicated, and an Except match always removes the contact from the result.

The recipient total updates as you change these choices. Contacts without an email address or the required marketing permission are shown as ineligible and are not included.

Note

You cannot add new contacts or groups from the campaign setup. Open Contacts in the main navigation to manage them; your campaign remains saved as a draft.

For worked examples and the send-time eligibility checks, see Choose Campaign Recipients.

4. Schedule and review

Open Schedule and choose:

• Send now to place the reviewed campaign into the sending queue.
• Schedule to choose a future date, time and time zone. The selected time must be at least one hour ahead.

Before confirming, review all four sections, preview the email and check the recipient list. Once confirmed, a campaign can no longer be edited like a draft.

See Schedule and Manage Email Campaigns to change a scheduled time, understand sending statuses or copy, rename and move campaigns.

Find campaigns in Mailings

Open Mailings to see every campaign. Use the All, Drafts, Scheduled and Sent views to focus the list. The All view groups campaigns into stages such as Scheduled and sending, Drafts and Sent, with current progress or headline results on each row.

Select a draft to continue setting it up. Select a sent campaign to open its report.

Read a campaign report

A sent campaign report has four tabs:

• Overview: the invitation funnel from Delivered to Opened, Clicked survey link and Completed, plus first-day activity, recent responses and delivery issues.
• Recipients: each contact’s delivery and engagement status.
• Links: clicks for links included in the email.
• Email: the message that was sent.

The Overview keeps the original invitation and its follow-ups together. The same tracked survey link is used throughout that thread, so a contact can continue an unfinished response and is counted once.

See Understand Campaign Reports for the meaning of each figure and report filter.

Send reminders and thank-you messages

Follow-ups are available from the report for a sent, tracked invitation connected to a form.

• A reminder is sent to eligible contacts from the original invitation. By default this means contacts who have not started; you can also include those who started but have not finished. Eligibility is checked when the reminder sends, so contacts who complete in the meantime are left out.
• A thank-you is sent to contacts who completed the form.

You can create more than one reminder. They are numbered and shown under the original invitation in the report. A reminder is unavailable when the form is closed or everyone has completed it, and a thank-you is unavailable until at least one invited contact has completed the form.

Open the follow-up action, prepare its subject, content, recipients and schedule, then review it in the same way as the original campaign.

See Send Follow-up Reminders and Thank-yous for the complete reminder and thank-you workflows, including multiple reminders and changing a scheduled follow-up.