Introduction to Zoho Campaigns - Online Help | Zoho Campaigns

Introduction to Zoho Campaigns

Zoho Campaigns is an AI-driven multi-channel marketing tool that helps businesses communicate better with their customers. It allows you to create professional-looking email, SMS and WhatsApp based campaigns, send them to the right audience at the right time, and track how they interact with your messages. For example, who opens them, clicks on links, and so on. You can also automate follow-up emails so messages are sent at the right time without manual effort. 

In addition to email, Zoho Campaigns supports SMS and WhatsApp marketing, making it easier to reach customers through multiple channels. It integrates smoothly with other Zoho and third-party applications, helping you manage contacts, campaigns, and marketing activities from a single platform saving time and effort.

Some of the key features available in Zoho Campaigns are,

Email marketing 

Email marketing is a way to communicate with a large audience using emails. These emails can be used to stay in touch, share information about your products or services, and build good relationships with your audience. Businesses also use email marketing to guide potential customers and encourage them to take action (purchase a product, renew a subscription, etc) by sending messages that are relevant to them. When done right, email marketing helps businesses stay relevant, consistent, and connected with their audience.

Why email marketing matters   

Email marketing remains one of the oldest and most effective communication channels for businesses of all sizes. It allows them to reach the audience directly in their inbox, without relying on ever changing algorithms. These are some of the key reasons why email marketing matters:
  1. It is cost-effective compared to many other marketing channels.
  2. It allows personalized communication based on customer behavior and preferences.
  3. It helps build long-term relationships with customers.
  4. It provides measurable results, such as opens, clicks, and more. 

Who can use email marketing?    

Whether you are just starting out or are an established business, whether you are a solo entrepreneur or have designated teams managing different departments, email marketing can help you create a strong impact with your audience. It can be used by:
  1. Small and medium-sized businesses looking to grow their customer base
  2. Enterprises across industries managing large audiences and multiple campaigns
  3. E-commerce businesses promoting products and offers
  4. Nonprofits engaging donors and supporters
  5. Educational institutions, creators, and service providers sharing updates or resources.  
Idea
Use case
Sam runs a small business and wants to use email marketing to grow his customer base and build stronger relationships with existing customers. He decides to create an email marketing strategy that keeps his customers informed, promotes his products, and encourages repeat purchases. He starts by grouping his customers based on their interests and purchase history so he can send more relevant emails to each group.
When Sam launches a new product, he sends a promotional email to customers who are likely to be interested in it. He also plans regular newsletters to share useful content, business updates, and special offers. To bring back customers who have not purchased recently, he sets up an automated email campaign with personalized offers. He monitors metrics such as opens, clicks, and conversions to understand how his emails perform and uses these insights to improve his future campaigns.

AB testing 

You can use the A/B testing feature to create two versions of an email by changing elements like the subject line, sender name and email address, and email content including call-for-action button or CTA. This helps you understand what your audience responds to better.

After testing the best version of campaign that performed the best in terms of opens and clicks and can be sent to the rest of your contacts, helping you get better results from your campaign.
Idea
Use case
When Sam needed to send an email to promote a limited time sale, he wanted to ensure that the campaign performed well. He used the AB testing feature to create two versions of the same email and experimented with the subject line. He sent both versions to a small group of customers to see which one received more opens and clicks. Once the better-performing version was identified, Sam sent that version to the rest of his contacts, helping him get better engagement from his campaign.

Email templates and design        

  1. You can choose from an array of professionally designed email templates across different categories including newsletters, welcome and thank you emails, festival wishes, event announcements, and so on.
  2. The drag-and-drop template editor lets you easily customize email content within seconds that too without requiring any coding.
  3. All the templates available in Zoho Campaigns are responsive and optimized to look great on different devices and screen sizes, ensuring your emails display well everywhere.
  4. If you are comfortable with coding, you can use the HTML Code Editor available in Zoho Campaigns to design a campaign from scratch.
  5. In case you have an email template ready in a different tool, you can bring it into your Zoho Campaigns account using the Import/Upload HTML option.

Template Editor

Whether you're an expert or a beginner, Zoho Campaigns makes things simple with an easy-to-use drag-and-drop template editor that allows you to design beautiful campaigns. Here is a list of features that you can try out using our editor.
  1. More control over layout: You can have better control over your designs. You can style each section the way you want including background colors and images, spacing, padding, borders, and layout settings. Now you can build polished, sophisticated emails without fighting the tool.
  2. Mobile view: You can look at how your email would look like on the phone, so you get a separate space to design and fine-tune the mobile version on its own. Tweak the layout for smaller screens and your campaigns look great wherever they land.
  3. Dynamic content: You can set advanced criteria and tailor individual content blocks to different audience segments, all inside a single email.
  4. Reusable bookmarks and centralized design settings: You can save blocks you often use and reuse them anywhere, and control global design choices from one place so your branding stays consistent.
  5. Zia Content Analyzer: You can use the AI-powered spelling, grammar, and content suggestions that catch issues before you hit send.
  6. GenAI content creation - draft content right inside the editor instead of starting from a blank page. This will be landing in the final rollout, so that it can be up and running for all the data centers simultaneously. 

SMS Marketing 

You can send SMS campaigns using Zoho Campaigns’ own SMS gateway to the USA, Canada and India. You also have the option to integrate more than 15 third-party SMS service providers with Zoho Campaigns to send SMS to different countries, helping you manage your email and SMS marketing efforts from one single platform. After sending the SMS campaigns you can analyze the reports to see how each campaign has performed.
Idea
Use case
Sam uses the SMS campaigns feature in Zoho Campaigns to send updates about order confirmations and delivery alerts to his customers. He also uses SMS campaigns to inform customers about limited time sales, for example, when there is a limited period offer. He uses Zoho Campaigns’ own SMS gateway to send SMS campaigns to his contacts in the USA, and for customers in other countries, he connects a third-party SMS service provider to reach them easily. He also closely monitors the SMS campaign reports to understand what works and does not.

WhatsApp Marketing   

Zoho Campaigns lets you promote your business by engaging with your contacts and sending them customized promotional messages on WhatsApp. A WhatsApp campaign includes all the steps involved in sending a WhatsApp template to a set of recipients. You can choose who these recipients should be, which phone number should be used to send the campaign, and when they'll receive the campaign. When you draft a WhatsApp message content in Zoho Campaigns from scratch, it'll be automatically saved as a WhatsApp template that you can use in the future. 
Idea
Use case
Sam uses WhatsApp campaigns in Zoho Campaigns to stay connected with his customers and keep them informed throughout their buying journey. He sends WhatsApp messages to share order confirmations, shipping updates, delivery alerts, and other important notifications. He also uses WhatsApp campaigns for marketing, such as announcing limited-time offers, sharing personalized product recommendations, and reminding customers about abandoned purchases. By connecting a WhatsApp Business account, Sam can reach customers directly on a channel they frequently use and monitor campaign reports to understand message delivery, engagement, and customer responses.

Workflows 

Workflows in Zoho Campaigns is a go-to solution to automate repetitive tasks, such as sending purchase follow-ups, subscription reminders, updates on abandoned cart, welcome emails when a new contact signs up, and so on. You can set up automated emails using workflows that send emails to contacts based on their actions like opening an email or clicking a link. By automating emails, you can also ensure that the right message reaches the right audience at the right time, helping you stay consistent with the efforts to build a lasting connection with your contacts.
Idea
Use case
When a customer bought a product, Sam used workflows to send a follow-up email a few days later to collect feedback and suggest related products. He also set up a workflow that triggered an email when a customer left items in the cart without completing the purchase. This helped him build better customer relationships and improve his sales.

Contact management    

  1. Import contacts - Add contacts to your Zoho Campaigns account via file upload, integrations with Zoho and third-party apps, and APIs.
  2. Manage contacts - Group your contacts into list and segments based on their interests, purchase behavior, demography, campaign engagement, and so on. You can also assign topics to contacts so that they receive only relevant information.
  3. Advanced Segmentation - Create highly targeted segments by combining multiple criteria, engagement metrics, and layered condition groups with advanced targeting.
  4. Grow your contact list - Use our pre-designed sign up forms that can be customized to suit your requirements. You can add them to your website to collect information from new contacts.
Idea
Use case   
Sam runs a small online store that sells kids clothing. After subscribing to Zoho Campaigns, he imported the list of his existing contacts to Zoho Campaigns as a spreadsheet. He then grouped his customers based on their purchase behavior and how they engaged with previous emails. Topics are then assigned, such as 'Offers', 'New Arrivals', or 'Product Updates', so customers receive only the type of information they are interested in. He also added a signup form to his website, allowing new visitors to choose the topics they want to hear about. This helped Sam grow his contact list and send relevant messages to the right audience with minimal effort.  

Integrations    

You can integrate with other Zoho apps including Zoho CRM to sync contacts easily and customer data across your Zoho ecosystem. Connect with third-party apps you already use so that you can seamlessly bring in information, reducing manual work and saving time. Connect with e-commerce platforms like Shopify and Zoho Commerce to send purchase follow-ups, abandoned cart reminders, and so on.
Idea
Use case   
Since Sam is running an online kid’s store, he uses a few other tools along with Zoho Campaigns. He integrates his Zoho Campaigns and Zoho CRM accounts so customer details are automatically synced and always up to date. He also connects his Shopify account, which helps him to send abandoned cart reminders to his contacts.

Analytics      

  1. Zoho Campaigns gives you exclusive dashboards for Email, SMS, and WhatsApp,  Contact Dashboard and an ecommerce Dashboard (ROI, revenue, orders, cart performance).
  2. With Zoho Analytics integration, you can sync all your marketing data automatically, every contact field plus activity across email, SMS, WhatsApp, and workflows, so you can do unified reporting and dig into advanced analytics without piecing data together yourself.
  3. You can have Unified Contact Scoring across all three channels and UTM parameter management for consistent tracking.
Idea
Use case
After sending his campaign, Sam checked the reports to see how it performed. He looked at how many customers opened the email, clicked on links, or unsubscribed. He also noticed that most of his emails were opened on mobile devices and that many opens came from specific countries. Using these insights, Sam adjusted his future campaigns to be more mobile-friendly and focused on the regions that showed higher engagement, helping him get better results over time. He also tried to understand what could be done to improve campaign performance in places where it was not performing well.    

Email deliverability and compliance    

  1. Zoho Campaigns follows data privacy and compliance rules across different regions to keep your email communication safe and trusted.
  2. You can authenticate your sender domain using SPF, DKIM and DMARC in Zoho Campaigns so that your emails land in inboxes rather than spam folders.
  3. Your email campaigns will also be reviewed by Zoho Campaigns’ Content Compliance and Manual Moderation teams to ensure your campaigns follow email best practices, comply with regulations such as GDPR, CANSPAM, CASL, HIPAA and other regulations so that it is safe to send to recipients.

See also

  1. Get a quick overview of Zoho Campaigns UI.
  2. Check out specifications related to Zoho Campaigns.
  3. Begin your admin journey and set up Zoho Campaigns for your users.
  4. Use our developer guide to extend Zoho Campaigns.
  5. Learn about the terminology used in Zoho Campaigns in our glossary.

Support 

  1. Submit a support request.
  2. Join the Campaigns community to connect with your peers and learn from them.
  3. View release notes to stay in the loop about newly added features and enhancements.
  4. Join a live webinar to get an overview of Zoho Campaigns.