Running promotions across your portfolio

You create promotions once, in your company’s view, and run each one on as many of your channels as you like, across every group. You’ll need to be a company admin to create and manage them. For everything else the Promotions area can do, see Finding your way around Promotions.

Create a promotion

1. Switch to your company’s view, open Promotions, and click Create promotion.
2. Fill in the details:
   • Title and Promoter name.
   • Channels: one, several, or all of them.
   • Zone, the lettered slot in your newsletters where it appears. Or turn on Auto injection for newsletters and choose a Position instead, so it lands in every send without a block.
   • Schedule: the dates it runs.
   • Type: text only, text and image, banner, or HTML. With HTML you can paste your own code or ad tags.
3. Add the content for that type: headline, text, image or banner, alt text and link.
4. Click Activate, or Save as draft to finish later.

Get it into your newsletters

A promotion shows in a newsletter that has a Promotion block in its zone, usually placed once in your template, or anywhere it’s set to auto-inject. Letterhead fills each block on every send with the active promotions that match its channel, send date and zone; if none match, the block is left out of the email. See Adding promotions to your templates and campaigns.

If a promotion is scheduled for the send date but the newsletter has no block in its zone, you’ll see a notice at the preview step. Go back and add the block, or continue without it.

A promotion runs only on its scheduled dates. If no newsletter went out on one of them, that day’s placement doesn’t carry over to the next send. To run it again, change its schedule to a current or future date.

Choose who sees a promotion

Set who a promotion is for once, on the promotion, and every placement follows it, whether you placed it by hand in a template or newsletter or it was auto-injected.

1. Open the promotion and find Conditions. Under Devices, choose All devices, Desktop only, or Mobile only.
2. Still under Conditions, pick the segments whose readers should see it, such as one of your own segments or a built-in engagement segment like Loyalists, and choose whether a reader needs to be in any of them or all of them (choose Any or All). Left empty, the segments read Everyone.
3. Click Save on a promotion that is already running. Saving a rule applies it to every placement of the promotion. A promotion that is not yet active offers Activate instead. Save as draft keeps the promotion, or makes it, inactive, so don’t use it to change a rule on a running promotion.

A few things to know:

• Nothing set means everyone. A promotion with all devices and no segments shows to every reader, exactly as before.
• A placement can override. A promotion block in a template or newsletter inherits the promotion’s conditions by default; its panel offers Inherit promotion conditions for both devices and audience. If you set the block’s own choice instead, including All devices or Everyone, the block’s choice replaces that part of the promotion’s rule (the device choice or the segments) for that one placement. A newsletter’s block keeps its own choice.
• Segments apply to company-audience sends from Letterhead. On other sends, such as through a third-party email provider, the promotion shows to everyone. The web version of a newsletter leaves out promotions aimed at segments.
• You can choose who sees it, but not who is kept from it. There is no way yet to exclude a segment.
• The device and segment choices work together. A promotion set to mobile only and to Loyalists shows only to Loyalists reading on mobile.
• You can see the rule without opening the promotion. The promotions list and a promotion’s detail page show Conditions, always naming both halves, such as “All devices · Everyone” or “Mobile only · Any of Loyalists, Fans”. A promotion block in a template or newsletter that inherits the promotion’s conditions shows the rule it follows, such as Inherit promotion conditions (Mobile only) for devices.
• Check who sees it before you send. In a newsletter’s preview, pick a contact or a segment to see each promotion the way that reader gets it. The All subscribers view shows everything, including promotions only some readers get, and says so. A newsletter you reopen at its preview step shows each promotion’s current rule, not the rule as of the last save.
• A zone with several hand-placed promotions that have different rules shows them without a rule, since the block can only hide or show as a whole. Give them the same rule, or place them in separate blocks.

Keep promotions current

The Promotions tab lists every promotion with its status, dates, impressions and clicks. Search or filter to find one, then open it to see its details and performance and to edit it. Edits apply to upcoming sends only; newsletters already sent stay as they went out.

To run a promotion again, update its schedule, or duplicate it and activate the copy. See Cloning, expiring and ending promotions.

See the schedule

The Schedule tab shows one channel’s promotions laid out by date and zone. Click a promotion to open or edit it, or start a new one from an open date.

Export metrics

On a promotion’s detail page, Export metrics downloads a CSV of its channels, dates, impressions and clicks. For performance across all your promotions, see Measuring promotions.

When it’s ours to fix

A promotion should appear when it’s Active, scheduled for the send date, on that newsletter’s channel, and in a zone the newsletter has (or set to auto-inject). If all of that is true and it still doesn’t show in the preview, contact support.

Prefer to have it done for you?

Penpal can list your promotions and their schedules, and reschedule, pause, reactivate, or edit them for you in conversation. See what Penpal can do with promotions.