Sending Email Campaigns

Campaigns are the emails you send to your reader list — new release announcements, cover reveals, newsletter issues, ARC sign-up calls, anything you want to broadcast. This guide walks you through creating, scheduling, sending, and analyzing campaigns.

Creating a campaign

From the Email List panel, click + Campaign in the top-right of the Email Campaigns table. This opens the campaign builder with three sections: details, content, and audience.

Details

• Subject line — the subject your readers see in their inbox. Keep it under 60 characters for best display on mobile. Avoid all-caps and excessive punctuation.
• From name — how your name appears in the "From" field. Default is your author name, but you can customize it per campaign (e.g. "Sarah Jensen Books" or just "Sarah").

Content

Write your email in the content editor. You can use basic formatting — bold, italic, headings, and links. Keep it readable on mobile: short paragraphs, clear calls to action, and one or two links rather than ten.

Every campaign automatically includes an unsubscribe link at the bottom. This is required by law (CAN-SPAM, GDPR) and cannot be removed.

Audience

Choose who to send to:

• Everyone — all active subscribers
• A specific segment — send to a subset (e.g. only readers who signed up for a specific book, or only highly engaged readers). See Segments for how to create these.

The recipient count updates as you change the audience selection so you know exactly how many people will receive the email.

Sending now vs. scheduling

At the bottom of the campaign builder you have two options:

• Send now — the campaign goes out immediately. Delivery typically takes 1–5 minutes depending on list size.
• Schedule for later — pick a date and time in your timezone. Narrativ will send the campaign at that time automatically.

Saving as a draft

If you're not ready to send, click Save draft. Drafts are saved automatically as you type, and you can return to them anytime from the Email Campaigns table by clicking on the campaign row.

Duplicating a campaign

To reuse a campaign — for example, sending the same announcement to a different segment — click the Duplicate button in the Actions column of the campaigns table. This creates a new draft with the same subject, from name, and body. You can then edit it before sending.

Campaign analytics

After a campaign is sent, the table shows per-campaign stats that update in real time as readers engage:

• Recipients — how many subscribers the campaign was sent to
• Open rate — percentage of recipients who opened the email (unique opens)
• Clicks — total link clicks across all recipients
• Send date — when the campaign was sent (or the scheduled date for upcoming campaigns)

Click on any campaign row to see its full details including bounce count and unsubscribes triggered by that send.

Understanding open rate

Open rate = (unique openers ÷ recipients) × 100. A 20–30% open rate is considered good for author email lists. If you're consistently below 15%, it may indicate:

• Your subject lines aren't compelling enough
• You're sending too infrequently and readers have forgotten you
• Your list has aged and some subscribers are no longer active — consider a re-engagement campaign
• Your emails are landing in spam — see deliverability tips below

Deliverability tips

To keep your emails landing in inboxes:

• Only email people who explicitly signed up — never buy or scrape lists
• Email regularly (at least once a month) so readers remember you
• Keep your unsubscribe rate below 0.5% per campaign — high rates signal spam
• Avoid spam trigger words in subject lines ("FREE!!!", "WINNER", excessive exclamation marks)
• Keep your list clean — Narrativ automatically suppresses hard bounces and unsubscribes