ImposeIQ Email Campaigns guide

Overview

Email Campaigns sends newsletters, offers and automated email series to your customers and prospects from this PC. It keeps your lists and subscribers, builds the emails, sends them at a pace your mail server accepts, and records who opened, clicked, unsubscribed or bounced. Sign-up forms, landing pages, a preference page, A/B tests, automations, reports, deliverability checks, an API and webhooks are all built in. Open it from Home › Utilities › Email Campaigns; the Help button in its title bar brings you back to this page.

Quick start: your first campaign

Examples to start from

Both the Campaigns and the Automations pages have an Examples… button with ready-made emails written for a print shop. Use this adds one as a draft and opens it: nothing is ever sent, and no automation is switched on, until you have read it and done so yourself. Change the wording, offers, codes, pictures and links (they point at example.com until you do), send yourself a test, then send it or turn it on. Use the same example as often as you like.

Example campaigns: Monthly newsletter, Holiday cards promotion (with an A/B test of two subject lines), New product launch (product cards — pick your own from the Storefront), Open house / trade show invitation, Customer feedback survey (one-click answers you read off the click map; customers only), Re-engagement campaign (people tagged Inactive only) and a plain, personal Seasonal deadline reminder.

The window

The menu on the left has one page per job:

A pill at the top right shows how many campaigns are sending right now, and Demo when the copy is unlicensed.

Setting up: sender and footer

• From name / From email: what recipients see. Use an address on your own domain (news@yourshop.com), never a Gmail or Outlook.com address — those are rejected or sent to spam by the big providers when they come from another server. A campaign can override both for itself.
• Reply-to: where replies go, if not the From address.
• Organisation and Postal address: shown in the footer of every email. A real postal address is required on commercial email in the US (CAN-SPAM) and most other countries; the review before sending warns when it is missing.
• Footer HTML: added to every campaign. It understands [UNSUBSCRIBE] (the unsubscribe link), [PREFERENCES] (the preference page link), [ORGANISATION], [ADDRESS] and [LISTS] (the list names the person is receiving this through). The template decides where it goes with [FOOTER]; otherwise it goes at the very end.
• Unsubscribe mailbox (optional): added to the email’s List-Unsubscribe header as a mailto, and used as the unsubscribe link when there is no public link address. Requests that arrive there have to be handled by hand — add the address to Suppression.

Setting up: the mail server

• Use the suite’s mail server: the SMTP server in the suite’s own Settings › Email (the one quotes and alerts use). Fine for a few hundred recipients.
• Use a separate server for campaigns: recommended for any real list. Office 365 and Gmail accounts cap a day at a few hundred to two thousand recipients and will lock an account that sends a newsletter. A sending service — SendGrid, Mailgun, Amazon SES, Postmark, Brevo, SMTP2GO — gives you an SMTP host, port, user and password; enter them here. Port 587 without the TLS box (STARTTLS) or 465 with it.
• Test connection logs in to the server without sending anything. The password is stored encrypted on this PC and never shown again.

Setting up: SPF, DKIM and DMARC

Gmail, Yahoo and Microsoft reject or junk bulk mail from domains that have not published these three DNS records. They are set at whoever hosts your domain’s DNS (GoDaddy, Cloudflare, your web host), with the values your sending service gives you:

Then open Deliverability, type your domain (and the DKIM selector if it is not a common one) and press Check. Each record shows green when it is right, amber when it works but could be better (DMARC p=none only monitors), red when it is missing or wrong — for example two SPF records, or an SPF record ending in +all. DNS changes can take an hour to show.

Setting up: public link address and the link server

The unsubscribe, preference, view-online, open-tracking and click-tracking links in each email, and the sign-up forms, confirmation links and landing pages, are answered by a small web server inside the suite: the link server. For those links to work for your recipients, it has to be reachable from the internet at an https address — the Public link address.

• Track opens adds an invisible 1-pixel image. Opens are under-counted: Apple Mail’s privacy protection and image blocking hide them, so compare open rates between your own campaigns rather than with other people’s.
• Track clicks sends each link through the link server, which records the click and passes the reader straight on. Clicks are exact.
• Every link carries a signed token, so a link cannot be edited into someone else’s unsubscribe, and the server reveals nothing about your list.
• With an https address, each email also carries the one-click unsubscribe header Gmail and Yahoo require from bulk senders, and they show their own Unsubscribe button next to your name.

Setting up: sending speed and time zone

• Messages per batch and Batch period: at most this many emails in each period. 60 per 60 seconds is 3,600 an hour. Set it inside your provider’s limit; 0 means no limit.
• Pause between messages: a short gap between emails, which some servers prefer.
• Automations share the same speed limit as campaigns.
• Default time zone (for example America/Chicago): used for same local time delivery when a subscriber has no Timezone attribute, and for the day a date automation (a birthday) fires.

Setting up: bounces and complaints

When your mail server refuses an address outright, Campaigns counts that bounce itself. Bounces that come back later as emails, and spam complaints, need a mailbox to read:

• Make a mailbox that only receives bounces (e.g. bounces@yourshop.com) and set it as the Return-Path or bounce address at your sending service. Sign up for the feedback loops your service offers so spam complaints come there too.
• In Settings › Bounces, tick Read bounces from a POP3 mailbox and fill in its POP3 host, port (995 with TLS), user and password. Check now reads it straight away; afterwards it is read every Check every minutes.
• A hard bounce (address does not exist) counts against the address; after Disable after this many hard bounces it becomes bounced and gets no more mail. Soft bounces (mailbox full) are recorded but not counted.
• A spam complaint (someone pressing “This is spam”) unsubscribes the address and puts it on the suppression list for good.
• Messages in the mailbox that are not bounces or complaints are left alone. Delete bounce messages once read keeps the mailbox small.

Lists and subscribers

• Lists are the mailing lists people are on (Newsletter, Trade customers…). A person can be on several and still gets one copy of a campaign sent to more than one of them. Public lists appear on the default sign-up form and the preference page.
• A subscriber’s status decides whether they get mail: active (yes), unconfirmed (waiting for double opt-in — no), unsubscribed, bounced and blacklisted (no). Only active subscribers are ever sent to, and the status is checked again at the moment of sending.
• Attributes are any other facts about a person — City, Birthday, Account manager. Each one becomes a placeholder: a City attribute is [CITY]. Two are special: Timezone (America/Denver) for local-time delivery, and any date such as Birthday for date automations.
• Click a subscriber to edit them, see their tags, groups, automations and every email they received with its opens and clicks.
• With selected… (tick the boxes first) adds or removes a tag, adds to or removes from a list, unsubscribes, blacklists or deletes. To stop mailing someone, unsubscribe or blacklist them rather than delete them — a deleted address can be imported again by mistake.

Importing and exporting

• Import CSV… takes a CSV or text export from Excel, Outlook, Mailchimp, phpList or your MIS. The first row should name the columns. Email, first name, last name, company and tags columns are recognised automatically (check the choices under the file); every other column becomes an attribute. A Tags column can hold several tags separated by ;.
• Choose the lists to add them to, and optionally a tag for everyone in the file (“Trade show 2026”).
• Tick These people have agreed to receive email only when they have; otherwise they come in as unconfirmed and get nothing.
• An address already on file is updated, never duplicated. Someone who unsubscribed, bounced or is blacklisted stays that way — an import never re-subscribes a person who left.
• Import from CRM… brings in every contact with an email address from the MIS customers and prospects, tagged Customer or Prospect, with the company, customer code and job title as attributes. Only import people who expect to hear from you.
• Imports do not start automations — a welcome series is for people who have just joined, not for a list you already had.
• Export CSV writes the subscribers currently shown (respecting the list, status, tag and segment filters), with their lists, tags, groups and attributes.

Tags

Tags are your own labels: VIP, Banner buyer, Trade show 2026. They are not case-sensitive. Add them from the subscriber list, a subscriber’s card, a CSV import, a sign-up form, an automation step or the API. Audience › Tags shows every tag with its count, and can rename one everywhere (segments follow the new name) or take it off everyone. Adding a tag can start an automation.

Groups

Groups are questions subscribers answer themselves — “What do you print?” with the options Banners, Business cards, Signs. Make them under Audience › Groups with one option per line. They appear as tick boxes on sign-up forms that include them and on the preference page (untick Show on the default sign-up form and the preference page to keep a group internal). Use them in a segment (Group interest has Banners) or in the email itself with [IF INTERESTED:Banners].

Segments

A segment is a saved set of conditions — “VIP customers in Texas who clicked in the last 60 days” — worked out again every time you send, so it is always up to date. Make one under Audience › Segments › New segment; the count underneath updates as you build it. Choose whether all or any of the conditions must match.

To send to a segment, pick it under Segment in the campaign editor: the campaign goes to the people on the chosen lists who match it. Conditions… next to it adds one-off conditions just for that campaign, without saving a segment.

Lead scoring

Every subscriber has a lead score: points for what they do, so you can see who is warm right now — the way ActiveCampaign and HubSpot score contacts. Set it up under Settings › Lead scoring:

• Points for opening an email, clicking a link and signing up on a form. Each email counts once for its open and once for a click, however many times it is opened.
• Points for tags, one per line as Tag: points — Requested quote: 25, Visited the showroom: 15, or negative (Competitor: -100).
• Points fade after a number of days (90 by default), so a burst of interest last spring does not keep someone hot for ever. 0 keeps them for good.
• Automations can add or take points with the Lead score ± step.

The score shows on the Subscribers page (15+ warm, 50+ hot) — choose Highest score first to put the hottest at the top — and on each subscriber’s card with the points behind it. The Dashboard counts the hot leads. Use it in a segment (Lead score greater than 40), and to start an automation with the Reaches a lead score trigger — for example notify the rep the moment a prospect passes 50.

Suppression

Addresses on the suppression list are never emailed, whatever list they are on or are imported into. Use it for people who asked by phone or letter, competitors, and role addresses you must not mail. Paste one or many with a reason. Blacklisting a subscriber and spam complaints add to it automatically. Removing an address from the list does not re-activate the subscriber; change their status yourself if they really have opted back in.

Sign-up forms

Every public list can be joined at <public address>/subscribe — the default form. Under Forms › Sign-up forms › New form you can build your own, each at its own address <public address>/f/<name>:

• Heading, Introduction, an optional Image (an https address), the Button text and the Thank-you message.
• Fields: email is always first. Add first name, last name, company, or any attribute (Other — City, Phone, Birthday as a date…), and mark any as required.
• Sign-ups join: the lists a sign-up is added to. A form can add people to a private list (a trade-only list, say); tick Let them choose among these lists to show the lists as tick boxes.
• Groups to ask about, and Tag sign-ups with (“Website”, “Trade show”).
• Embed code gives HTML to paste into your own website or Storefront page. It is a plain form with no script, so it works in any site builder; it posts to your public address. Open shows the hosted form in your browser.
• Forms include a hidden trap field that catches most spam bots.

Double opt-in, confirmation and welcome emails

• With double opt-in on (recommended, and expected in Europe and Canada), someone who signs up gets a confirmation email and is only added once they click its link. Until then they are unconfirmed and get nothing.
• Edit that email under Forms › Sign-up emails. It must contain [CONFIRMURL] — the link they click.
• The optional welcome email goes once they are confirmed (or straight away with double opt-in off). For more than one email, use an automation instead.
• Both understand placeholders and [IF] blocks. Someone already active who signs up again just joins the new lists — no second welcome.

Landing pages

A landing page is a page of your own with a sign-up form on it, for a trade show, a QR code on a flyer or an ad. Under Forms › Landing pages give it a title, an address (/l/<name>), choose its form and write the page in HTML; put [FORM] where the form goes, or it goes at the end. Scripts are switched off on landing pages for safety, so use plain HTML and CSS. The list shows how many times each page has been viewed.

The preference page

[PREFERENCES] in the footer links each person to their own page where they can correct their name and company, choose which public lists they get and tick their group interests. Unticking every list unsubscribes them. The unsubscribe page also offers it as “Rather get less?” — many people would sooner get one list than none.

Pop-up form

Any sign-up form can also appear as a pop-up on your website, as MailerLite and Sender offer. Under Forms › Sign-up forms press Pop-up code, choose how many seconds after the page opens it appears and how many days before it shows again to the same visitor, then Copy and paste the code just before </body> on your website. The form opens in a frame over the page; visitors close it with × or by clicking outside it. The form itself still runs on your link server, so your website never handles anyone’s address. Only the sign-up forms can be shown in a frame — every other page the link server answers refuses it.

Writing a campaign

The editor has three columns: the campaign’s settings on the left, the content in the middle, and a live preview on the right (switch between Desktop and Mobile). The preview is personalised for the first person who would receive it.

• Campaign name is for you; Subject and Preview text (the grey line after the subject in the inbox) are what recipients see.
• Send to: tick one or more lists. Segment narrows it (see Segments).
• Template: the frame round the content. None sends the content as written.
• Send at: leave empty to send when you press Send, or set a date and time to schedule it.
• Delivery time: see Send times.
• Save draft keeps your work; leaving with unsaved changes asks first.

The block builder

New campaigns open in Blocks: the email is a stack of blocks you add, drag and edit, written out as email-safe HTML that works in Outlook and Gmail and stacks columns on phones.

• Add a block from the row under the blocks, or drag one from there into place. Layouts… starts from a ready-made layout — Newsletter, Promotion, Announcement, Event invitation — replacing the current blocks.
• Click a block to open its settings; click again to close them. Drag the ⠿ handle to move a block, or use ↑ ↓. ⧉ duplicates, ✕ removes, ☆ saves it to reuse in other campaigns (Saved blocks…).

Visual and HTML are the other ways to write. Switching from Blocks to either turns the blocks into HTML you can edit freely — but it cannot be turned back into blocks (you are asked first). Plain text lets you write the text-only version yourself; left empty, it is made from the HTML.

Placeholders (merge tags)

Placeholders in square brackets are replaced for each person. Click one under Insert a placeholder to put it where the cursor is.

The review before sending lists any placeholder no subscriber has a value for — usually a typo.

Conditional content

Show some of the text to some people only. A block starts with [IF …] or [IFNOT …], may have [ELSEIF …] and [ELSE] parts, and ends with [ENDIF]. Blocks can sit inside each other, and work in the subject, the body, the plain text and the footer.

Brand kit and product blocks

Under Settings › Brand kit set your logo (an https address of a PNG or JPG on your website), brand colour, button text colour and font. In the block builder the Logo block shows the logo, and buttons and product cards use the brand colour unless the block sets its own — so changing the brand kit restyles every new campaign at once. The Newsletter, Promotion and Product showcase layouts start with the logo.

The Product block shows one product with an order button. Pick from the Storefront… lists the products in your storefronts; choosing one fills in the name, description and a “From $… each” price, and — once the storefront is published to the web — its picture and a link to the store. Edit any of it afterwards. The Product showcase layout is a ready-made product email.

Templates

A template is the HTML frame around every campaign that uses it: your logo, colours, width and footer area. Put [CONTENT] where the campaign goes and [FOOTER] where the footer goes. Edit them under Templates, with a preview beside the code. The Simple branded template shows your organisation name in a header. Images in templates must be on the web (https). A template used by a campaign that is still sending cannot be deleted.

Testing and the content check

• Send test… sends the email to one or more addresses with [TEST] in the subject. If an address belongs to a subscriber, it is personalised for them. Test links are not tracked and the unsubscribe link does nothing. With an A/B test you choose which version.
• Check content scores the email out of 100 and lists what spam filters dislike: a subject in capitals, !!!, spammy phrases, an email that is mostly images, images without alt text, link shorteners (bit.ly), links whose text shows one website and go to another, scripts or forms, and HTML over 102 KB (Gmail cuts it off, hiding the unsubscribe link). It is a guide; the receiving server decides.

Sending and scheduling

Review & send… saves the campaign and checks it. It shows how many people it will go to (active, on the lists and segment, not suppressed, one copy per address), the content score, and:

• Red — must be fixed first: no subject, empty message, no list, nobody to send to, no mail server or From address, no way to unsubscribe, broken [IF] blocks, scripts in the email.
• Amber — worth reading: no tracking, link server off, no postal address, unknown placeholders, a small A/B test pool.

Send now starts at once; with a future Send at the button is Schedule and it waits as scheduled. Either way it sends in the background, at your sending speed, while the suite is open. From the report you can Pause, Resume and Cancel (emails already sent stay sent; a scheduled campaign that has not started goes back to a draft). A campaign that has started cannot be edited — Duplicate it instead.

• If the mail server stops answering or refuses the login, the campaign pauses itself with the reason, so you can fix it and press Resume.
• Retry N failed tries again the emails the server refused for a temporary reason.
• Send to new subscribers sends a finished campaign to people who joined its lists since.
• Resend to non-openers… makes a new draft — optionally with a new subject — for the people who got this campaign and did not open it. Give it a day or two first, and do not resend more than once.

Send times

Delivery time in the editor:

• Everyone at once: as fast as the sending speed allows, from the start time.
• Each person’s best hour: each person gets it within 24 hours of the start, at the hour of day they have usually opened past emails. People with no history get the hour the whole list opens most.
• Same local time in each time zone: everyone gets it at, say, 9:00 in their own time zone, on the Send at date. It uses each subscriber’s Timezone attribute (America/Chicago, Europe/London — import it as a column), or the default time zone from Settings. People whose 9:00 has already passed get it straight away, so set Send at a day ahead.

A/B and multivariate tests

Tick A/B test in the editor to try different versions on part of the list and send the best one to the rest.

• Give two or more subject lines, from names or send times (one per line), and/or a second version of the content (HTML). Testing more than one thing at once makes every combination — a multivariate test — up to 8 versions, labelled A–H.
• Test on: the share of the audience that gets the test, split evenly between the versions (20% is typical; give each version at least a few hundred people for a reliable result).
• Winner by open rate or click rate, picked automatically after the hours you set — or I will pick.
• While it waits the campaign shows as testing. The report’s A/B test tab compares the versions, and Send this one picks a winner early. The winner goes to everyone held back.
• A test of send times only goes to the whole list, split across the times — there is nothing left to send a winner to; use the result next time.
• The preview has a Version menu to see each one.

Automations

An automation sends a series of emails by itself, person by person, as things happen — a welcome series for new subscribers, a birthday offer, a follow-up to people who clicked. Each person goes through the steps at their own pace.

• Each person goes through an automation once, unless you tick Let people go through it again. Date automations run once a year by their nature.
• Someone who unsubscribes, bounces or is suppressed leaves the automation at their next step.
• The list shows how many people are in each automation now, how many finished and how many emails it has sent; the editor shows each email’s numbers.

The campaign report

Click a sent campaign. The top shows progress and the totals: delivered to the server, opened, clicked, unsubscribed, bounced and spam complaints. The tabs:

• Overview: every link with its clicks and the number of people who clicked it, and the reasons people gave when they unsubscribed.
• A/B test (test campaigns only): each version’s results, and Send this one while it is waiting for a winner.
• Click map: the email itself with each link outlined and labelled with its clicks and share of all clicks — so you can see whether the button or the picture got the clicks.
• Activity: first opens and first clicks, hour by hour, for 48 hours after sending started — useful for choosing a send time.
• Domains: results by the recipients’ email provider (gmail.com, outlook.com, your customers’ own domains). One provider opening far less than the others, or bouncing more, often means it is filtering you.
• Recipients: everyone it went to with their status, version, opens and clicks, searchable.

Export CSV saves every recipient’s results for Excel. Reports in the menu puts all campaigns side by side — open, click, click-to-open, unsubscribe, bounce and complaint rates — with your averages; green is better than average, amber worse. Click a column to sort.

List health

Sending again and again to people who never open tells the big providers your mail is unwanted. Under Deliverability › List health, enter a number of campaigns and press Count to find active subscribers who ignored all of them. Then Tag them “Inactive” — and send them a win-back campaign using a segment Tag has Inactive — or Unsubscribe them.

Public archive and RSS

Like Kit and beehiiv, Campaigns can publish past issues on the web, so new subscribers can read back and your newsletter is findable. Switch it on under Settings › Public archive and give it a title. Then tick Show in the public archive once sent in each campaign you want there.

• <public address>/archive lists them, newest first, with a Subscribe link; each opens at /archive/<id>.
• /archive/rss.xml is an RSS feed of the same, for feed readers and website widgets.
• Archived issues are shown to an anonymous reader: no names (use [FIRSTNAME%%friend] fallbacks and [IF FIRSTNAME]…[ELSE]…[ENDIF] so they read well), no tracking and no unsubscribe link. For an A/B test, the winning version is shown.
• Only sent campaigns appear, and only while the archive is switched on.

Transactional emails

Transactional emails are one email to one person, sent the moment something happens — order confirmed, proof ready, job shipped, quote sent — like Mailjet’s and Brevo’s transactional email. Your website or MIS asks for them through the API; Campaigns fills them in and sends them at once.

• Transactional emails go to people who unsubscribed from your newsletters (a receipt is not marketing) but never to a suppressed or bounced address — the API answers 422 and says so.
• They carry no unsubscribe link or bulk-mail headers, no tracking, and the footer is just your organisation and address.
• The page lists how many of each have been sent or failed, and the most recent sends.

The API

The API lets your website, an online form service, Zapier or the MIS add contacts, tag them and start automations, without the Campaigns window.

curl -X POST http://127.0.0.1:8791/api/v1/contacts \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_KEY" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"email":"pat@example.com","firstName":"Pat","lists":["Newsletter"],"tags":["Website"]}'

• Answers are JSON; errors come back as {"error": "…"} with status 400 (bad input), 401 (wrong key), 403 (refused), or 404.
• A contact who unsubscribed or is suppressed is not re-subscribed by the API.

Webhooks

Webhooks are the other direction: Campaigns tells another system when something happens. In Settings › Webhooks › Add webhook, give the https address that should receive them and tick the events:

Each one is a POST of JSON — {"type": "unsubscribe", "firedAt": "…", "data": {…}} — with the headers X-ImposeIQ-Event and X-ImposeIQ-Signature: sha256=<hex>, the HMAC-SHA256 of the body with the webhook’s secret (shown when you add it and on Edit). Check the signature on the receiving end to be sure the request came from you. A delivery that fails is tried again after 5 and 30 seconds; the list shows the last result, and Test sends a test event.

Troubleshooting