Email Campaign Overview
What are Email Campaigns?
An email campaign is a coordinated set of email messages sent to a specific list of recipients over a period of time, with a particular goal in mind. It's not just sending one email; it often involves a series of emails designed to guide recipients through a specific journey, whether it's nurturing a lead, promoting a product, or building a relationship.
Think of it as a strategic conversation with your audience, delivered directly to their inbox. Each email within a campaign has a purpose, a call to action, and is usually tailored to the specific segment of your audience it's targeting.
Why Use Email Campaigns?
Email campaigns are a versatile, cost-effective, and highly measurable way to connect with your audience, build lasting relationships, and drive tangible business results.
Email campaigns remain a cornerstone of effective marketing strategies for a multitude of reasons.
Use Case Example
Let's say you own a car dealership. You currently have an inventory overflow of older tires in stock. To boost sales and move the older inventory (purpose), you create a personalized email campaign to let specific customers know about your big tire sale. You are able to personalize the email because you used the personalization tags feature to capture relevant customer records such as each customer's name, email address, and information specific to their vehicle(s).
To reach the right customers, you identify which customers your campaign targets using the segmentation feature. For example, your segment criteria might include only those customer's with specific tire sizes, car makes, and models.
As an added customer loyalty bonus, your email campaign includes a link to a sign-up for service form (a campaign "call to action"). If the customer completes the form, they receive a coupon code to use to waive the tire installation charge at the time of service.
Learn more:
Email Campaigns and Activities
Email campaigns may include multiple emails. Each email campaign contains a unique name and campaign identifier, and has a list of associated email campaign activities.
Email campaign activities are different types of email interactions you can have with your contacts. For example, sending a initial email to contacts uses the primary_email activity. The primary_email activity can be used to create an A/B email subject line test. In addition, resending an email to non-openers creates a resend activity. Constant Contact also provides you with a permalink activity that contains a permanent link to a web accessible version of your email. Email campaign activities include content such as the email subject line, email headers, and custom HTML.
For example, if you are using the email reporting unique opens method to track performance, a resend email campaign activity will return data on a resend to non-openers email. If you want to get data on your initial send, you can use the primary_email email campaign activity. Both of these separate activities are associated with the same email campaign.
Email Campaign Types
Constant Contact uses format types to support their different email editor versions and API email formats. You use the V3 API to create custom code emails (format type 5). Custom code emails support more features including using personalized content in emails and sending emails to segments. You can still retrieve, update, and schedule the other email format types, but you cannot use the V3 API to create them.
For information on using personalization tags to use contact, custom field, or account information in an email, see Designing HTML for Custom Code Emails.
Schema
Email Campaign Endpoints and Methods
Use V3 API endpoints and methods to create, update, and retrieve details about your email campaigns.
GET a Collection of V2 and V3 API Email Campaign Identifiers
GET /emails/campaign_id_xrefs
Use this method to migrate your local V2 API email data to the V3 API format. For each v2_email_campaign_id value that you provide, this method returns the corresponding V3 campaign_id and V3 campaign_activity_id UUID value.
Learn More about migrating your V2 API email data.
Try it!POST (Create) a New Email Campaign
POST /emails
Use this method to create a new email campaign in your email collection by specifying a unique name for the email campaign and all required email_campaign_activities properties in the request body parameter.
When you create a new email campaign using the V3 API, the system automatically generates the following metadata for each new email campaign:
campaign_id: The ID (in UUID format) that uniquely identifies the email campaign.current_status:The current status of the email campaign (set toDRAFTwhen first created).created_at: The date and time that the email campaign is created.updated_at: The date and time that the email campaign either created or was last updated.campaign_activities: Identifies therole(purpose) of each campaign activity within the email campaign, and thecampaign_activity_idthat is used to uniquely identify each campaign activity.primary_email: The primary marketing campaign email to use and send to contacts.permalink: The system-generated permanent link to a web accessible version of the email campaign content. The content does not include any personalized email information, such as contact email addresses.
Learn more about creating new email campaigns.
Try it!GET a Collection of Email Campaigns
GET /emails
Use this method to get a list (collection) of all existing email campaigns for your user account. If no campaigns exist for your account, the 200 response returns an empty list. To get details about a specific campaign, use the GET /emails/{campaign_id} method.
Use the following parameter to limit the number of campaigns to display on a single output page:
limit: Specify the number of campaigns, from 1-500, to display per page of output.
Learn more about getting details about your collection of email campaigns.
Try it!GET Email Campaign Details by Campaign ID
GET /emails/{campaign_id}
Use this method to get details about a specific email campaign; including a list of campaign activity IDs. To get details about a specific campaign activity, use the GET /emails/activities/{campaign_activity_id}
Learn more about getting email campaign activity by campaign_id.
DELETE a Single Email Campaign
DELETE /emails/{campaign_id}
Use this method to delete a specific email campaign (campaign_id) and any associated email campaign activities (campaign_activity_id). You cannot delete an email campaign when it has a Scheduled status. You can restore a deleted email campaign using the Constant Contact web user interface.
Learn more about getting email campaign activity by campaign_id.
GET Email Campaign Activity by Activity ID
GET /emails/activities/{campaign_activity_id}
Use this method to get a specific email campaign activity using the campaign_activity_id.
You can choose to include the following properties and subresources in the response (accepts a comma separated list):
- permalink_url
- html_content
- document_properties
- physical_address_in_footer
Learn more about how to get a specific email campaign activity and the type of email information returned in the API response.
Try it!PUT (update) an Email Campaign Activity
PUT /emails/activities/{campaign_activity_id}
Use this method to update a specific email campaign activity using the campaign_activity_id. Updating an email campaign activity allows you to change the content of an campaign activity when it is in Draft status. You can also use this method to add contacts to a campaign activity using either contact lists or segments.
Learn more about how to update a specific email campaign activity.
Try it!PATCH (rename) an Existing Email Campaign
PATCH /emails/{campaign_id}/
Use this method to rename an existing campaign.
Learn more about renaming an existing email campaign.
Try it!GET Send History Details for Email Campaign Activities
GET /emails/activities/{campaign_activity_id}/send_history
Use this method to get email campaign history details, such as the email ID and send status.
Try it!POST Schedule an Email Campaign Activity
POST /emails/activities/{campaign_activity_id}/schedules
Use this method to schedule an email campaign activity.
Learn more about scheduling email campaign activities.
Try it!GET Schedule Information for an Email Campaign Activity
GET /emails/activities/{campaign_activity_id}/schedules
Use this method to return the schedule information for an email campaign activity. This schedule information includes the date that Constant Contact will send the email to the contact lists or segment in the email campaign activity.
Learn more about returning the schedule information for an email campaign activity.
Try it!POST Test Send an Email Campaign Activity
GET /emails/activities/{campaign_activity_id}/tests
Use this method to send a test email. Test emails allow you to verify how the email campaign activity will look before you send it to contacts.
Learn more about sending a test email.
Try it!DELETE an Email Campaign
DELETE /emails/{campaign_id}
Use this method to delete an existing email campaign and all associated campaign activities.
You cannot delete email campaigns that have a Scheduled status.
Learn more about deleting an email campaign.
Try it!GET an HTML Preview of an Email Campaign Activity
GET /emails/activities/{campaign_activity_id}/previews
Use this method to get an HTML preview of an email campaign activity. This HTML preview allows you to verify how the email campaign activity will look before you send it to contacts.
Learn more about getting an HTML preview of an email campaign activity.
Try it!POST Resend to Non-openers for an Email Campaign Activity
POST /emails/activities/{campaign_activity_id}/non_opener_resends
Use this POST method to schedule a resend to non-openers email campaign activity.
Learn more about getting resend to non-openers details for an email campaign activity.
Try it!GET Resend to Non-openers Details for an Email Campaign Activity
GET /emails/activities/{campaign_activity_id}/non_opener_resends
Use this GET method to get details about a sent or scheduled resend to non-openers email campaign activity.
Learn more about getting resend to non-openers details for an email campaign activity.
Try it!DELETE a Resend to Non-openers for an Email Campaign Activity
DELETE /emails/activities/{campaign_activity_id}/non_opener_resends{resend_request_id}
Use this DELETE method to delete (unschedule) a resend to non-openers email campaign activity.
Learn more about getting resend to non-openers details for an email campaign activity.
Try it!GET A/B Test Details for an Email Campaign Activity
GET /emails/activities/{campaign_activity_id}/abtest
Use this GET method to get A/B test details for a primary email campaign activity.
Learn more about getting A/B test details for a primary email campaign activity.
Try it!