Campaign Emails at Grip

Flexible, beautiful emails

A campaign is a customizable email that you can send to all of your event participants. The most common usage at Grip is for a ‘welcome email’, which is usually the first email that your participants receive, and contains their initial credentials and a link to log in to the event. However with our email designer, you can create emails for any purpose you like.

A fair use limit applies to our campaign emails - please refer to our terms of service for more detail.

In this article we’ll go through how you can set up and manage your campaigns, using tools like segmentation, scheduling and AutoSending, along with how to see email analytics and judge your campaigns’ effectiveness.

Select an event, and head to Engage > Emails. You’ll see the first tab displayed is for Campaigns.

Contents:

Statistics

Campaign List

Registration AutoSending

Creating your first Campaign

Unsubscribe Links

Copying Events

Deactivating Events

Statistics

Much like in the Automated emails tab, the first thing displayed on this page are the email statistics for any and all existing campaigns. You can hover over the ‘i’ tooltips next to each number for an explanation of what each statistic means.
These statistics are only for the campaigns shown on this page, and so are a good indication of the engagement level for your custom emails.

These statistics are totalled for all of your sent campaigns, but are also shown in the table below, if you’d like to view the statistics for an individual campaign.

All the campaign statistics are exportable by clicking the ‘Export as CSV’ button.

The Campaign List

If you’ve not created a campaign within this event yet, you’ll see a prompt to start creating your first one. You can jump to the steps further down this article.

If you’ve created at least one campaign, on the main page you’ll see a table displaying them, along with some key details. You can hover over the table headers for an explanation of each column. All of the sending and engagement statistics shown in the header are included in each row for each campaign.

There are three states that a campaign can be in:

• Draft - a campaign that has not been sent and is not scheduled to.
• Scheduled - a campaign that is due to be sent in the future.
• Sent - a campaign that has been sent.

For each campaign, at the end of each row, you’ll see an overflow button (three vertical dots). Clicking on this button will provide you a few options:

Edit/Resend

Takes you back to the Campaign editor where you can modify settings, design or anything else. You can choose to send the campaign out again to all of the participants currently in the segment.

Cancel sending

Only available if an email is Scheduled to send at a later time, this button removes the scheduled send time, so that no emails are sent out.

Delete

Permanently deletes the campaign and its associated design and statistics.

Registration AutoSending

Enabling Registration AutoSending for a campaign means that the system will automatically send this email to any newly-registered profile that enters the segment. Its purpose is to allow for you to create a campaign for a particular segment, and not have to worry about participants that are added to your event later. Note that this does not include profiles that were already registered, and are added to a segment afterwards. It only applies if the profile is a new registration and is added to a segment during registration.

AutoSending only begins after your email campaign is first sent, so that you can safely enable it in advance, even for scheduled emails.

It is essential for your welcome emails that you enable AutoSending - this means that you can launch your event by sending out your initial batch of emails, and you don’t have to worry about participants that register later on. As soon as the profile is added to the segment that you’ve chosen, a single email will be triggered and sent to the new participant.

Another example might be for use with the segment option ‘attendees of a session’. This would mean that any participant that adds a given session to their schedule will receive an email that you’ve created for this purpose, automatically.

Creating your first Campaign

If you’ve not created a campaign yet, you’ll see a prompt below the statistics bar to begin. Click on the ‘Create Campaign’ button to open our step-by-step email designer. Otherwise you can use the Create campaign button.

Campaign Name

Simple! Just give your campaign a name that you and your team can refer to later on. The only restriction is that it cannot be something that you’ve used before. Your email recipients will not see this name.

Choose Segment

A ‘segment’ is a term to denote who it is that you’d like to send this email to. On this step you can define some filters in order to target the right event participants. You can use multiple conditions on top of one another, so that each condition you add will further reduce the size of your segment - in other words, gradually reducing the number of recipients.

Each condition allows you to specify a filter and then an operator (‘equals’ or ‘does not equal’), so that you can be really specific!

The estimated number of recipients will be calculated in the background and shown to you later on the process, so that you can be sure you’ve got the right combination.

You have the following options for filters:

Filter Name	Description	Example Usage
Data type	All participants within the given data types	An instructional email that you want to send to only your Exhibitors
Custom groups	All participants within the given group	An email in a hybrid event, but just for Virtual members across any data type
Status in event	Either Inactive (the person has never logged in to the event) or Active (has logged in at least once)	A welcome email that you want to send to participants who’ve not logged in yet
Attendees of Session	Participants who have added a given session to their schedule	Important information about a session they are planning to attend
Invitees of Private Session	Those on the invite list to a given Private Session	An engagement email encouraging invitees to add the private session to their schedules
Attendees of Sessions on a Track	Any participant that has added at least one session from a given Track to their schedule	A marketing email regarding a specific topic of sessions
Attendees of Sessions at a Stage	Any participant that has added at least one session from a given Stage to their schedule	Important practical information about sessions happening at a particular Stage

Using the above, you can create combinations of filters to narrow down your target recipients, like so:

Example 1:

Data Type - Equals - Attendees
AND
Status in event - Equals - Inactive

Result: Only participants of the type ‘Attendees’ who have never logged in will be emailed.

 

Example 2:

Custom groups - Does not equals - Buyers
AND
Invitees of Private Session - Equals - “Roundtable with Elon Musk”
AND
Status in event - Equals - Active

Result: Only participants who have logged in, who are not in the ‘Buyers’ group and are already invited to this private session will be emailed.

Choose Template

Now you can pick a starting point for your design. We have some basic templates for you to use, which you can choose and customize, or you can start from a totally blank design.

Note that every template includes a section at the bottom containing an unsubscribe link. You must not break this link - see here for more details.

Template Name	Description
Session_Invite	A design geared towards encouraging participants to add a session to their schedule. Use the ‘Special Links’ feature in the button to choose a session to send the recipients to.
Welcome_Long	A welcome email containing credentials that the recipient can use to log in, along with some additional instruction and detail about what to expect.
Welcome_Short	A simplified email containing credentials and less detail.

Your Templates

It is possible to save the email designs that you make as templates, in order to use them in future campaigns. Templates are available across all events within your Grip application, in order to save you time in the future, however they are only visible to dashboard users of the App Admin role or above. Email designs can be multi-language, so if your Grip application is multi-language, then your templates can be multi-language too.

You will be given the option to save your email design later in the process (once it’s complete), so if you’ve already created some campaign email designs then you may see your saved templates on this step too.

Note that If you pick one of your own templates as a basis for this email campaign, you are not modifying the template itself, you’re merely using it as a starting point. Again, you can save whatever design you create later in the process, effectively creating another new template to use in the future.

To delete one of your own templates, hover over the template on this step and click the trash can icon. You will need to confirm this step - remember that you are deleting the template from the Grip application, and so it will be removed from all events.
This action does not affect any campaign emails that were designed from that template; it is only the template itself that is deleted.

Edit Design

On this step you can create your email design, using a simple drag and drop editor. This allows you total freedom to craft any kind of email layout, add buttons and links, upload images and even add your own custom HTML.

If you’ve started with a template you’ll see an existing design that you can modify as much as you like. If you’ve started from a blank design, you’ll see a single empty column.

In order to add components to your email, use the side panel on the right and drag things directly on to your design. There is very little that you cannot do!
For a quick rundown on features, you can watch this video on YouTube - otherwise you can just experiment.

However, here are some important things to note for working with emails in Grip:

Event-Specific Links

When adding a button, menu, image or any other type of object that contains a link, you’ll see a drop-down called ‘Special Links’. This is a really simple way of directing your recipients to common places in your event.

We have pre-defined these dynamic links based on your event data, and there are two options:

Smart Marketing Link

This is the standard link that you should use wherever you invite your attendees to log in to the platform. It is a dynamic link which will take your attendees to the web login page or mobile app depending on the device that they use to open the email.
If opening on the web, it will also help the email recipient by pre-filling data like their email address and Registration ID.

If you want to direct email recipients to somewhere really specific, and don't want them to be taken to the mobile app, then you can type in your own URL instead of the Smart Marketing Link.
An example might be to send an email reminder to Company Representatives to encourage them to create their Teams, which they have to do on the website.
The easiest way to do this is to navigate to that page yourself and copy the link in your browser's address bar, which will ensure that if you're using a Custom Domain, you are directing your attendees to the correct site. Alternatively, you can get quite creative with deep links if you want to!

Sessions

These are automatically generated links which will direct your attendees to one of the sessions in your event, after they’ve logged in to the event. This is particularly useful for Session Invite or promotion emails.

Note: Session links are most effective on the web - if you have a mobile app and your recipients click on a Session link via their cellphones, they will simply be taken to the event mobile app itself.

Merge Tags

Merge tags are an essential part of email design, and we have predefined a list of Grip-specific fields for you to use. These are especially important when it comes to welcome emails, where the login credentials shown are unique and specific to the intended recipient.

Whenever you’re typing text in one of the blocks, you’ll see an option to add a merge tag in the formatting bar - or you can type a curly bracket { to instantly see a drop-down list of tags.

The available merge tags refer to fields within the recipient's profile in Grip and are built with two curly brackets }{ surrounding the field. Unfortunately we cannot list them as copyable text in this article because our help center tries to convert them into its own merge tags! We've converted them into pictures so that you can write them out yourself from the table below.

 

Field	Merge Tag
First Name
Last Name
Name
Company Name
Email Address
Registration ID
Event Name

 

For welcome emails, you should always include the Email Address and Registration ID merge tags, so that your attendees have what they need to log in. Refer to the pre-built welcome email templates if you need some guidance on this.

It’s good practice to use merge tags in your templates, so that you don’t need to change much between events - for example using the ‘Event Name’ merge tag instead of writing out the name of the event itself within the design.

When using merge tags, make sure you’re confident that your attendees all have this data in their Grip profiles, otherwise you may end up with empty spaces in the resulting emails!

Images

You can upload images or just copy and paste a direct image link.
If you’re linking to images, make sure to use publicly-available image links, and ensure that you use a link to the image itself. An easy way to tell if your link is correct is to make sure that it ends in the file format of the image itself, for example “.png” or “.jpg”.
Google Drive or Dropbox links will not work, as they do not lead directly to an image, they lead to a google drive page with the image within it.

To overlay items on top of an image, add it as the background to an existing column. Otherwise, use an image block if you’re looking to add an image between other components.

Previewing

You can use the built-in preview tool at the bottom-left to check how responsive your email design is for different screen sizes. This is an important step in order to ensure that your email design looks as intended on a range of desktop and mobile devices.

Multi-Language Designs

In apps where multiple languages have been enabled for your events, you’ll also be able to design email variants for these additional languages. The journey has been designed so that you can complete your English design first (as it is mandatory), before moving on to the additional languages, where your English design is your starting point.

Note that your attendees will receive emails (and notifications) in the language that is set on their profile under the ‘User Preferred Language’ field. This is set either as part of the data import, and can be modified by the attendee themselves when they’ve logged into the web platform.

If you have a multi-language app, you will be prompted about additional languages once you click ‘Continue’ on the design step. You are given the option to design other variants or just use the English version for all recipients, regardless of their language preference.

Language Variants (only in multi-language applications)

On this step you can modify the design that you’ve just made with the intention of sending a different variant of the same email to attendees that have chosen other languages in your event. Again, this is not relevant in Grip applications where only English is supported, so in this case you will be taken straight to the final step after creating your design.

 

Functionally, this is identical to the previous design step, but you can use the language switcher at the bottom of the page to toggle between any available language variants.

You can totally change the design for each language, it’s entirely up to you!

Test and Send

On the final step, there are a lot of options - we’ll run through them from top to bottom.

Email Subject Line

Now that you’ve completed your design, make sure you choose an engaging Subject Line that recipients will see in their inboxes. Best practice for subjects is to keep them within 50 characters, although you can technically add up to 130 characters.

We support the use of emojis, and you can also use merge tags to personalize your subject lines. You will need to write them in the tag format, so as a reminder, here is the list of merge tags.

Example: “Start networking now for !”

Testing Emails

You can use this option to fire off a test to some attendees of your choice. Use the search bar to look up profiles within the current event and send the email to the email addresses on their profiles.

Again, if you have a multi-language application, you can choose which language design variant to send to the profile - regardless of their specific preferred language, your choice here will override their preference.

Estimated Segment Size

Based on the conditions and filters you set on the second step, you will see a number in this section which is an estimation of the (current) number of profiles that should receive your email. As noted in the text below, this number can change if profiles are added to (or removed from) the event matching your segment.

If this doesn’t look like the right number of profiles, it will be best to save your email as a draft and check the data in your event, ensuring it matches the segment options you chose.

Saving your design as a template

Now that you have created designs (in as many languages as your Grip application supports) you can save them as a template to use in future email campaigns.

As mentioned before, these templates can be used (and removed) by any App Admin in this Grip application. Modifying this campaign’s design later will not change the template you’ve already saved.

As these designs are files, unfortunately we cannot allow spaces or some characters (like slashes /\ ) in the template name. The template name must also be unique within this application.

Save campaign

If you’d like to simply save this campaign as a draft and send it later, click this button. All of your settings and any designs you’ve made will be saved and can be edited later.

If you’ve previously made a campaign and scheduled it to send in the future, clicking the “Save campaign” button will not cancel the previously set schedule.

Schedule

Clicking this button will allow you to set a date and time at which your campaign will be sent. The timezone is shown and will always match the timezone of the event, in order to make remotely managing events easier.
You can cancel sending from the main Campaign page before the scheduled send time, by clicking the three dots at the end of the campaign email row in the table, and selection 'Cancel send'.

You can also choose to activate ‘Registration AutoSending’ at this stage - see details here.

Send Now

Clicking this button will bring up a confirmation dialogue, and then will schedule the campaign to go out in 5 minutes from the current time. This grace period allows you to ‘undo’ the action in case there’s a last-minute issue!

You can cancel sending from the main Campaign page before the scheduled send time, by clicking the three dots at the end of the campaign email row in the table, and selection 'Cancel send'.

You can also choose to activate ‘Registration AutoSending’ at this stage - see details here.

Unsubscribe Links

You'll notice that the pre-defined templates and even the empty design include a section at the bottom containing an unsubscribe link. This is of course a mandatory link for legal reasons, and should not be removed.

If you are confident editing HTML you can modify the text surrounding this link, and the word 'unsubscribe' itself, but you must not break the link. We have added validation when testing or sending an email to check for the presence of the correct link, in order to safeguard the email system, and you, legally.

If you see this message, you have broken or removed the unsubscribe link in (at least) one of your email design variants. You will need to add it once more to be able to send the email.

If you have completely deleted the unsubscribe section you can recreate it from scratch - simply add a new HTML block to your email, delete the placeholder text, and copy and paste the below code:

<div style="font-size:11px;color:#8d8d8d;line-height:140%;text-align:center;word-wrap:break-word"> <p style="line-height:140%">You're receiving this email because you registered for {{event_name}}.</p> <p style="line-height:140%"> </p> <p style="line-height:140%">To stop receiving emails, please contact the organizer to de-register for the event, or you can <a href="%tag_unsubscribe_url%">unsubscribe</a>.</p> </div>

Copying Events

When you copy an event, the campaigns for that event are also copied into your new event, with their designs and subject lines. However, there are two things to note about this process:

1. Campaigns created in our legacy email designer will not be copied to new events. This is effectively any campaign created before the 18th of December 2023.
2. Segmentation options are not copied, as they are not necessarily compatible with your new event. This means that you'll need to make sure to target the right attendees before you send your new campaign, because if you leave the segment step blank, all your attendees will be emailed!

Disabling Emails or Deactivating Events

Deactivating your event or disabling emails via the Settings page will both have the same effect on your Campaigns:

• Emails will stop sending.
• AutoSending will be disabled for all Campaigns.
• Any scheduled emails that haven't already been sent will have their scheduled send time cancelled and be returned to a draft state.
• You will not be able to create or update any existing Campaigns.

Both of these actions can be undone but your campaigns will need to be resent - they are not enabled automatically.