Campaigns

A campaign is one email sent once, to an audience you choose. Newsletters, product announcements and sale emails are all campaigns.

Creating one

1. 1Campaigns → New campaign.
2. 2Name it — this is internal, recipients never see it.
3. 3Write the subject line. This is the single biggest factor in whether anyone opens it.
4. 4Build the email in the block editor.
5. 5Choose the audience.
6. 6Send a test, then send.

Image formats

Upload whatever you have — PNG, JPEG, GIF. Nectazo resizes anything oversized and stores it as PNG if it has a transparent background, or JPEG if it does not. Animated GIFs are left exactly as they are, so the animation survives.

Deliberately not WebP, even though it is smaller. Gmail converts WebP to JPEG before delivering it, and JPEG has no transparency — so a logo with a transparent background arrives as a mess of solid blocks. Outlook on Windows does not display WebP at all. An image that arrives is worth more than a smaller one that does not.

Animated GIFs

Email cannot play video — no mail client will — but every one of them shows an animated GIF. In Media, Video to GIF takes an MP4, MOV or WebM, and a few seconds out of it, and produces a GIF you can drop into any image block.

• Up to six seconds, sized to the email's content width. The limits are not preferences: a GIF is downloaded in full by every recipient, so a careless one turns a campaign into hundreds of gigabytes of transfer and an email that crawls on a phone.
• Outlook shows only the FIRST FRAME. For those readers your animation is a still, so pick a start point that reads on its own.
• The video itself is not kept. It is used for the conversion and deleted — only the GIF joins your media library.

Whether a clip fits inside the size limit depends on how much movement is in it, which is not something you can tell by looking at the file. A few seconds of something being stirred or poured is far heavier than a slow pan over the same number of seconds. So if the first attempt comes out too large, Nectazo narrows it and tries again, and tells you what it settled on — you are never handed a smaller GIF without being told it is smaller.

A clip with so much movement that it will not fit even at the smallest sensible size is refused, and says that is the reason. A shorter or stiller few seconds is the fix.

Dark mode

Every email Nectazo sends declares itself a light-mode design, which stops most clients inverting it. Gmail on Android inverts anyway, whatever an email says — no sender can prevent that.

What survives it best is a logo with a solid background rather than a transparent one, or artwork that reads on both light and dark. Worth checking a real send in the Gmail phone app with dark mode on; it is the one client that will not take no for an answer.

Subject lines and personalisation

Use {{first_name}} in the subject or anywhere in your content. At send time it is replaced with each contact's first name.

Give it a fallback for the contacts who have not given you a name: {{first_name|there}} becomes “Ada” for Ada and “there” for everybody else. On a list built from a store this matters more than it sounds — most customers arrive with an email address and nothing else, so without a fallback “Hi {{first_name}},” reads “Hi ,” for the majority of them.

Without a fallback the tag becomes nothing at all, so write it to read either way.

Any of them takes a fallback the same way. A tag Nectazo does not recognise is left on the page exactly as you typed it rather than removed — so a mistyped {{firs_name}} is visible in a test send instead of silently disappearing.

Choosing the audience

Pick any combination of lists and segments. Nectazo sends to everyone matched by any of them, with each person receiving exactly one copy no matter how many lists they are on.

Automatically excluded from every send:

• Anyone not subscribed — unsubscribed, bounced, complained, pending or no-consent contacts
• Anyone on the brand's suppression list

Test sends

Send a test to any address before the real thing. A test uses the real rendering path, so what you see is what recipients get. Check it on a phone — most email is read on one.

Test sends do not count opens or clicks, and do not appear in your report.

Sending

Nectazo counts the audience and checks your plan has room for all of it before the campaign leaves draft. If it does not, nothing is sent — better that than discovering the limit with half your list mailed and half not.

Once sending starts the campaign is locked and progress appears live. Sending is paced to protect your reputation rather than fired all at once, so a large list takes a few minutes.

Scheduling it for later

Schedule next to Send picks a date and time instead of going out now. The time is your own local time, taken from your computer.

A scheduled campaign stays editable. It is still a draft in every way that matters — fix a typo on Tuesday for a Friday send and the saved version is what goes out. A banner across the top shows when it is due, with Unschedule to pull it back and Change time to move it. Send now overtakes the schedule entirely.

• Due sends are checked every minute, so a campaign may go out up to a minute after the time you picked.
• You can schedule up to a year ahead.
• Your plan's send allowance is re-checked when the time arrives, not just when you schedule it.

After it sends

The campaign page becomes a report: delivered, opened, clicked, bounced, complained, plus which links were clicked and by whom. See Reports and analytics.

Duplicating

Any campaign can be duplicated into a new draft, content and settings intact. This is the normal way to run a recurring newsletter.