Building Campaigns

A campaign is a single email send to a list or segment of your contacts. This page covers building the email, personalisation, testing, sending, and reading your analytics.

Creating a campaign

1. Go to Campaigns → New campaign
2. Enter a campaign name (internal label — not shown to recipients)
3. Set your From name (e.g. "Ada at Acme") and From address (must be a verified domain)
4. Write your Subject line and optional Preview text
5. Build your email content in the editor
6. Choose your recipient list or segment
7. Send a test, then send or schedule

Email editor

SES Mailbox uses an HTML email editor with a real-time preview pane. You can:

• Write HTML directly or paste from an existing template
• Use the toolbar for quick formatting (bold, links, images)
• Toggle between desktop and mobile preview
• Check your spam score before sending

HTML best practices for email

• Use inline CSS — many email clients ignore <style> blocks
• Use table-based layouts for consistent rendering across Outlook and Gmail
• Set a max-width of 600px on your outer container
• Always include a plain-text alternative — SES Mailbox generates one automatically from your HTML
• Test in at least Gmail (web), Outlook, and Apple Mail before sending a large campaign

Personalisation

Use double curly braces to insert contact fields anywhere in your subject line or email body:

Subject: {{first_name}}, your weekly report is ready

Hi {{first_name | there}},

You are on the {{plan | Free}} plan. Your account was created on {{subscribed_at}}.

<a href="https://app.sesmailbox.com">View your dashboard →</a>

Unsubscribe link

SES Mailbox automatically appends a one-click unsubscribe link to every campaign. You do not need to add this manually. The link is also set in the List-Unsubscribe and List-Unsubscribe-Post headers, which Gmail uses to surface the unsubscribe button at the top of the email.

If you want to place the unsubscribe link yourself within the email body, use:

<a href="{{unsubscribe_url}}">Unsubscribe</a>

The automatic footer link is still added unless you disable it in campaign settings (not recommended — Gmail bulk-sender rules require it).

Sending a test email

Before sending to your full list, send a test to yourself:

1. Click Send test in the campaign editor
2. Enter up to 5 email addresses (use addresses across Gmail, Outlook, and Apple Mail for broad coverage)
3. Test emails use your actual personalisation fields pulled from your own contact record — or placeholder values if you're not in your own list
4. Check: inbox placement, images loading, links working, subject/preview text rendering correctly, mobile layout

Sending the campaign

When you're ready, click Send campaign. SES Mailbox will:

1. Calculate the final recipient count (active subscribers in the selected list/segment, minus suppressions)
2. Show you a confirmation screen with the recipient count, subject line, and from address
3. Queue the send to AWS SES — large campaigns are sent in batches to respect SES rate limits

Sending time depends on your SES rate limit. At the default 14 emails/second, a 10,000-recipient campaign completes in about 12 minutes.

Campaign analytics

Go to Campaigns → [Campaign name] → Analytics to see performance data. Metrics update in near-real-time as emails are delivered and opened.

Exporting analytics

Click Export CSV on any campaign analytics page to download a per-contact engagement report — who opened, who clicked, who bounced. Available on Pro plan.