Sending Email

Introduction to email marketing with Quotient

Email is one of the most important tools in your marketing toolkit. Email marketing remains one of the most effective ways to nurture leads, build relationships with customers, and drive sales for your business.

Quotient allows you to craft, send, and measure emails with the help of the Email Agent.

Core Concepts

Broadcasts

Broadcasts are a one-time blast email to a portion of your audience. A broadcast is made up of...

• Content: HTML content that recipients will see in their inbox. You can edit the content of the email directly in the email editor, or you can have the Email Agent make updates on your behalf.

• Metadata: Additional data about the email including the subject line, preview text, and from address. Setting metadata correctly helps improve the performance and deliverability of emails.

• Send Time: The time at which the email will begin sending to recipients. We say "begin sending" because not all of the emails will be sent immediately at the send time. To improve deliverability, we send the emails in batches over the course of several minutes.

Email broadcasts follow the same status lifecycle as other deliverables in Quotient. Broadcasts must always be scheduled ahead of time, and they will become "Active" once that time arrives and the emails start to go out. Once they are active, they can no longer be modified - this is different from blogs, which can be re-published. Once an email has gone out, you can't change it.

Audience

“Audience” refers to the people you've designated to receive an email broadcast. The audience can be made up of both lists and segments. You can learn more about the difference in the article on Building Your Audience.

You can include multiple lists and/or segments in the audience for your broadcast. If a person appears in multiple, Quotient will deduplicate and ensure that they only receive the email once.

Analytics

If you're using Quotient to send email, we will automatically track the performance of your broadcasts, including:

1. Delivery Rate: Of the emails sent, how many were successfully delivered.
2. Open Rate: Of the emails delivered, how many were opened by the recipient.
3. Click Rate: Of the emails opened, how many people clicked on a link leading to your website.

Templates

Templates are reusable blueprints of email content. It's important to understand that templates are not directly sent out - they must either be cloned into a broadcast or used as part of a flow. There are two different ways you can use templates:

1. Starting Point for Broadcasts: It's common to clone templates as a starting point for email broadcasts. This ensures that all email broadcasts maintain a consistent structure and look. For example, you might have a template for your weekly newsletter, and each week you would clone it and replace the content for that week.
2. In Automated Flows: Templates can also be used inside of flows. In Quotient, flows are automated processes that can send email to customers based on pre-defined schedules or triggers. A common example would be sending new users an automated welcome series after they sign up for your product. To learn more about flows, check out the article on Automating Workflows.

Components

Components are reusable blocks of email content that can be used in both broadcasts and templates and stay automatically up-to-date. The most common examples of components are headers and footers.

Typically you want your headers and footers to stay consistent across all your emails, and if you change them, you want them to update automatically in all the templates/broadcasts where they're used.

Email Domains

Email domains are the domains that your emails are sent from (e.g., updates@yourcompany.com). Using a custom email domain is crucial for deliverability and brand consistency. It helps ensure your emails reach the inbox rather than being marked as spam.

Quotient helps you set up and verify custom email domains with proper DNS configuration. You can learn more about setting up custom DNS in our Custom DNS guide.

The Email Agent

The Email Agent can assist you with creating all of the above. It can create broadcasts, templates, and components and help you find the right audience for each email.

Like other agents, the Email Agent has access to your Knowledge Store, ensuring that it creates content that is consistent with your brand's voice and messaging strategy. The Email Agent will also frequently work with the Campaign Agent to create email broadcasts as part of larger campaigns.

Here are some tips for getting the most out of the Email Agent:

• When setting up your Quotient account, work with the Email Agent to create a standard header, footer, and "base template", and ask it to remember to always use those as a starting point. This helps keep your emails consistent and on-brand, and ensures that the Email Agent doesn't have to reinvent the wheel with each new broadcast.

• Formatting emails is notoriously difficult due to the esoteric requirements of legacy email clients. We recommend having the Email Agent take the first stab at creating the content. From there you can use the editor to tweak copy and styles. This is often easier than creating the formatting yourself.

• You can upload screenshots of emails from other brands to the chat panel and ask the Email Agent to copy them or use them as inspiration.

• Emails should always have CTAs that lead to pages on your website where readers can learn more and hopefully enter your conversion funnel. To set CTAs up properly, the Email Agent needs to understand your website structure. To familiarize the Email Agent with your website structure, you can ask the Brand Agent to crawl your website and create a Knowledge Doc describing it, which the Email Agent can then use to construct links.

Inbound vs. Outbound Email

It's important to note that Quotient is used for inbound email marketing, not outbound email marketing. Inbound marketing targets people who have already shown interest in your product - like signing up for a demo or newsletter - whereas outbound marketing, also known as "cold email", proactively reaches out to people regardless of their expressed interest.

There are a few key differences between inbound and outbound email marketing:

Inbound	Outbound
Typically comes from a company email address, e.g. updates@mail.company.com	Usually comes from an individual salesperson, e.g. max@getquotient.ai
Emails are not meant to be replied to and may come from a "noreply" address	Emails are meant to be replied to - the goal is to start a conversation with the salesperson
Emails may be somewhat personalized, but typically are sent as "broadcasts", i.e. sending the same email to many people	Emails are often highly personalized and tailored to each individual prospect
Emails typically contain rich formatting, images, and CTAs	Emails are usually written in plain text

If you’re looking for an outbound email marketing platform, here are a few we recommend:

• SalesLoft
• Apollo
• Outreach
• Unify

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