Your First Week

Sending your first email campaign

Quick answer: Pick a small, engaged audience (current families, recent prospects). Write a short, useful email — not a sales pitch. Send a test to yourself first. Watch the open rate and reply rate to learn what your audience responds to.

The right first campaign

Don't make your first campaign a sales pitch or a long newsletter. The right first campaign is something genuinely useful or interesting — and ideally something you can send to a small, engaged audience that's already familiar with your school.

Good first campaigns:

• A "welcome to Growth Suite" email to current families letting them know they'll be hearing more from the school
• An invitation to an upcoming community event
• A short update on a school project, achievement, or news item
• A "save the date" for an open house

Avoid for the first campaign:

• Re-engagement to cold contacts who haven't heard from you in years
• Long newsletters with 10+ sections
• Anything marketing-heavy or salesy

Step-by-step

1. Open the campaign builder

1. Click Marketing in the main menu.
2. Click Emails.
3. Click the Campaigns tab.
4. Click + New.

2. Set the basics

• Campaign name — internal name ("Welcome — September 2025")
• Subject line — short, clear, no clickbait. "A quick update from Oak Montessori"
• Preview text — the line that shows under the subject in inboxes
• From name — your school's name or a specific person ("Sarah from Oak Montessori")
• From address — a real, replyable address

3. Write the email

For your first campaign, keep it short. 3–5 short paragraphs, plain text or very simple formatting. The goal is to feel like an email from a real person — not a marketing blast.

If you have an email template ready (from Batch 4 Communications), use it. Otherwise, start with the simple text builder.

4. Pick a small audience

For your first send, start with 50–200 families. A focused audience is easier to learn from. Common first-campaign audiences:

• Currently enrolled families (the most engaged)
• Families who recently toured (warm prospects)
• Families with the active or current tag

Use a smart list to define this. See the "Find families using smart lists" article in Batch 1.

5. Send a test to yourself

Always test before sending. Use the "Send Test" option to email a copy to yourself. Check:

• How it looks in Gmail / Outlook
• How it looks on mobile
• That all links work
• That merge tags resolved (you don't see {{contact.first_name}} in the body)
• That the From name and address are right

6. Send the campaign

Three options:

• Send now — sends immediately
• Schedule — set a specific time (Tuesday-Thursday mornings tend to perform best for school audiences)
• Smart Send Time — AI picks the best time for each recipient

For your first send, schedule it for Tuesday morning at 9 AM your timezone.

7. Watch the report

A few hours after sending, check the campaign report. Look at:

• Open rate — for school audiences, 25–40% is healthy
• Click rate — 2–5% is typical
• Reply rate — even one reply is a win for a first campaign
• Unsubscribe rate — under 0.5% is fine; higher means the email didn't match expectations

What you'll learn from the first send

• Whether your authentication is working (low spam folder rate means yes)
• Which subject lines get attention
• What your audience cares about (replies are a goldmine of insight)
• Whether your sending domain has good deliverability

Tips

• Don't send to your full list on day 1. The ramp-up limit (250 emails in the first 24 hours) is real, and a smaller test audience is wiser anyway.
• Reply to replies. A campaign that generates replies is a campaign worth doubling down on. Reply personally to each one.
• Don't expect viral. First campaigns are learning experiences. The 4th and 5th campaign will perform better as you find your voice.
• Build templates from what worked. Save a high-performing email as a template you can reuse.

Related articles

• Setting up email and SMS sending
• Setting up automatic follow-up for new inquiries