How to use email broadcasts
Email broadcasts allow you to send an email to your subscribers in bulk. You can use broadcasts to inform people about an ongoing promo, a new product or collection launch, the return of a beloved product in stock, and any other news you’d like to share with your audience.
You can craft your email and send it immediately, or schedule it for a specific date and time.
In this guide, we’ll walk you through the creation and launch of your first email broadcast, and show you all the options this feature offers.
1. Create a broadcast
For starters, log in to your Getsitecontrol account and switch to the Broadcasts tab.
Next, click + Create broadcast.
2. Craft your email
You can choose among three options to craft your email in Getsitecontrol:
- Create an email from scratch
- Choose a premade email template
- Choose an email you have previously created
Start from scratch
If you select Start from scratch, you’ll be working on a simple template that comes in three different styles. You’ll type your copy, choose a color palette, and add visual elements to the email: images, CTA buttons, countdown timers, product cards, etc.
Here’s an example of an email broadcast created in Getsitecontrol:
Use a premade email template
You can use a premade email template as a base to save time when creating your email. You’ll find them divided by category on the broadcast screen:
Premade emails are completely customizable.
Reuse a previously created email
The third option allows you to reuse an email you previously created or a template you have saved.
You’ll find an option to save your own email as a template in the email editor:
You can reuse your emails and templates as they are or tailor them for each promo.
📌 To learn more about crafting emails in Getsitecontrol, read our text guides.
Once you’re done editing your email, click Save & close and move on to the next step.
3. Select the recipients
Сlick the Schedule button at the bottom of the broadcast card.
At this point, you can choose between two options:
- Target contacts from an existing segment
- Target contacts who meet conditions of your choosing
Targeting contacts from a segment
When targeting contacts from a segment, you’ll simply choose the existing segment from a list:
📌 To learn how to create a segment, watch our video tutorial.
Targeting contacts who meet conditions
To manually select the conditions that your contacts need to meet to receive a broadcast, click + Add condition.
There are two groups of conditions in the menu. The first group includes conditions about the characteristics of the contacts:
The second group includes conditions about their interaction with previous emails from you:
❗ If you don’t select any conditions, the broadcast will be sent to everyone in your contact list with a 'Subscribed' status (refer to 'Marketing Status' in the next paragraph).
Let’s briefly discuss each condition.
Conditions about your contacts’ characteristics
- Segment — Use this condition to target contacts who belong to specific segments in your database.
📌 To learn more about audience segmentation, read this dedicated article on our blog. - Tag — Use this condition if you want to target contacts who have certain tags.
📌 To learn more about assigning tags to your contacts, watch our video tutorial. - Country — Your contacts need to be from a specific country or area to get your email.
❗The system retrieves the contact’s location from the Contacts section of the dashboard. The location displayed in the Contacts section might have been imported from a third party, detected by the widget that collected the contact, or entered manually. - Marketing status — A contact’s marketing status can be either Subscribed or Unsubscribed. With your broadcasts, you can only target contacts marked as Subscribed in your Getsitecontrol database.
- Email address — If you use this condition, your contacts’ emails have to match/partially match/not match a particular value to be included in the broadcast.
- Phone number — Your contacts’ phone numbers have to match/partially match/not match a specific value to be included in the broadcast.
- First name — Your contacts’ first names need to match/partially match/not match a specific value to receive your email broadcast.
- Last name — Your contacts’ last names need to match/partially match/not match a specific value to receive your email broadcast.
- Date added — Use this condition to target contacts based on when they joined your database: before, during, or after a specific date or time range.
Conditions about your contacts’ interaction with your emails
- Sent — Contacts who have received one or more of your broadcasts. You can set this condition so that they need to have received all the broadcasts that you select, or any of them.
- Opened — Contacts who have opened one or more of your broadcasts. You can set this condition so that they need to have opened all the broadcasts that you select, or any of them.
- Clicked — Contacts who have clicked a link or button in one or more of your broadcasts.
- Count sent — Contacts who have received more, less, or a given number of your broadcasts.
- Count opened — Contacts who have opened more, less, or a given number of your broadcasts.
- Count clicked — Contacts who have clicked on a link or button in more, less, or a given number of your broadcasts.
- Last date sent — Contacts who have received the last broadcast from you before, after, or during a given period of time.
- Last date opened — Contacts who have opened a broadcast from you before, after, or during a given period of time.
- Last date clicked — Contacts who have clicked on a link or button in a broadcast before, after, or during a given period of time.
It’s possible to assign more than one value to the same condition, for example to target contacts from several countries:
You can also combine different conditions using AND and OR operators:
When an AND operator connects the conditions, all conditions must be true for the contact to be included in the broadcast.
When an OR operator connects the conditions, at least one condition must be fulfilled for the contact to be included in the broadcast.
If you want ideas and examples of whom you can target with your promo emails, you can use a targeting template.
Built-in targeting templates
Targeting templates are sets of predefined conditions based on the most frequent scenarios in email marketing. Here are the templates you can choose from:
If you’re on Shopify, the templates will allow you to target your customers based on their purchasing habits as well:
So far, we’ve described how to create a broadcast starting from the Broadcasts section of the dashboard. As an alternative method, you can start from the Contacts section instead and select the recipients first:
First, select the conditions your contacts need to meet to receive your broadcast.
Next, select all of the contacts that have been filtered and click the Send email button at the bottom of the page:
After that, you’ll see a pop-up window that will prompt you to start creating an email, as we described in step 2 of this guide.
4. Launch or schedule the broadcast
Whichever route you choose, once those steps are complete, it’s time to launch or schedule the broadcast. Hit the Schedule button at the bottom of the broadcast card to proceed:
You can send the broadcast immediately or schedule it for a later date and time:
At the bottom of the popup, you’ll see how many emails will be sent with the broadcast and what your email balance is.
When you are ready, hit Start broadcast. Your broadcast will be sent to the recipients you have selected.
5. Resend broadcast
If a broadcast doesn’t perform as expected—for example, it gets low open or click rates—you can use Getsitecontrol’s Resend option to try again with better results:
This feature lets you resend the broadcast to:
- Contacts who didn’t open it
- Contacts who didn’t click any links
- New contacts who joined after the original send
You can choose to resend the broadcast as is or tweak the subject line and content to make it more compelling.
That wraps up our overview of Getsitecontrol’s Broadcasts feature. If you need help setting up your first broadcast, feel free to reach out — our Tech Support team is always happy to help.