Write and send email campaigns

Kite begins every campaign by naming the email's one job and the audience it's for. A campaign without a clear job turns into a newsletter of loosely related announcements, and those get skimmed and deleted.

Kite settles a short plan before it writes anything:

• The kind of email. Education, proof, a product or feature announcement, community news, or a sale or offer.
• The one job. The single action or change of mind the email exists for.
• The proof it rests on. A named customer review, a measured result, or a product fact from your knowledge base.
• The format. A plain-text email signed by a person, or a designed email.
• The subject line and preview text. Together, these are the email's hook.
• The call to action and where it goes. One button or link, pointing at one page.

Then Kite looks at your list. In Mailchimp, it reads your audiences, tags, and segments. In Klaviyo, it reads your lists and segments and can estimate how many people a campaign will reach before it sends. If the right group doesn't exist yet, Kite can build it. Say you want to announce a new feature only to customers on your paid plan. Kite can create that segment in Mailchimp so the announcement reaches the people who can use it today.

Before any campaign goes out, Kite also checks for people who shouldn't receive it. It looks for anyone marked as unsubscribed or suppressed in your email tool, anyone a connected CRM marks that way, and anyone who asked in an earlier reply to stop hearing from you. It leaves those people out, even when someone names them directly, and tells you which records it checked.

A promotional email gets opened when the subject line names what the reader gets, and it gets read when the first lines are about the reader rather than the company. Kite writes every campaign around those two rules.

The subject line says plainly what's inside, and Kite makes sure it differs from every other subject line the same reader has had from you. The preview text finishes the thought the subject line starts. The email then opens on the reader's situation, or on what a customer saw happen, with the strongest point at the top. "We're excited to announce" is company news, and nobody opens an email for it.

An offer email also needs a true reason. Kite names the real reason behind the offer, such as a launch, a plan change, a season, or a deadline you gave it, and it only offers what you've actually approved. It won't invent a deadline or lead with a bare percentage off.

Here's what that looks like for a small coffee roaster on Klaviyo. You tell Kite the holiday blend is back, you roasted 300 bags this year, and orders ship December 1. Kite plans an offer email to customers who bought a single-origin bag in the last year. The subject line is "The holiday blend is back: 300 bags this year," and the preview text is "Pre-orders ship December 1." The email opens with what last year's buyers said about the blend and ends with one pre-order button.

Kite writes in your brand voice and favors plain text over heavy design, because a plain email from a real person often reads like a note rather than an ad. A plain-text, founder-style email is signed by a real person you name, and a marketing campaign closes with a clear way to opt out. Kite reviews every draft for wording that sounds machine-written before you see it.

Kite builds the campaign inside the email tool you already use, because that's where your subscribers' consent, preferences, and history are kept. You don't move your list or learn a new sending tool. What Kite does in each tool depends on what that tool allows:

• Mailchimp. Kite creates the campaign, chooses the audience or segment, sets the subject line, preview text, and sender name, writes the email, uploads its images, and saves reusable designs as templates.
• Klaviyo. Kite creates the campaign, writes or updates the template, attaches it to the campaign's message, and chooses the lists and segments it goes to. You connect Klaviyo with a private API key from your account.
• HubSpot. Kite drafts the marketing email in your brand voice and sets its content, sender, and recipients. It can also create a HubSpot campaign and link the email's list or form to it. This depends on the marketing tools included in your HubSpot subscription.
• Resend. Kite creates a broadcast, writes its subject, preview text, and body, and points it at a segment. Your team can still open and edit it in Resend's editor.
• Brevo. Kite writes the content, subject line, and recipient lists for an email campaign you've started in Brevo, and your team sends or schedules it from Brevo.

If you don't use an email tool yet, Kite can set one up. In Resend, for example, it adds your sending domain, gives you the DNS records to add, and verifies the domain once they're in place.

Kite checks each campaign before it asks you to approve the send, and it gives you what you need to check it yourself. The most useful check is comparing the draft with its plan. If the plan says the email's job is to get pre-orders, and the draft spends its first paragraph on the roastery's history, you can see the mismatch at a glance.

Your email tool adds its own checks. In Mailchimp, Kite runs Mailchimp's send checklist and fixes what it flags, such as a missing subject line or a broken merge tag. Then it sends a test email to you, so you can read the campaign in your own inbox before anyone else does. In Klaviyo, Kite can preview the finished template with sample details filled in and check how many people the campaign will reach.

Kite doesn't preview how a designed HTML email looks across different inboxes and devices. Because it favors plain-text campaigns, that problem comes up less often. When a campaign does use a heavy design, an inbox-preview tool such as Litmus or Email on Acid is the right final check.

Kite asks for your approval before it sends a campaign. You approve it with the Approve button in the conversation or with a reply. You can work with Kite in your browser or in Slack. Once you approve, Kite sends the campaign right away or schedules it for the time you agreed on. In Mailchimp, it can also unschedule a campaign when a launch slips. In Klaviyo and Resend, it can cancel a scheduled send before it goes out.

Kite confirms the send actually went through. It counts a campaign as sent only when the email tool confirms it, and it tells you which sends were accepted and which failed, with the reason.

Some campaigns need a second email, and Kite plans it with the first. In Mailchimp, it can resend a campaign to subscribers who didn't open it, usually with a new subject line. For an event invitation, the plan includes a reminder shortly before the event and a follow-up afterward that treats attendees and no-shows differently. Kite can run those follow-ups on a schedule.

After a campaign sends, Kite reads what it earned and turns that into a recommendation for the next one. The numbers come from your email tool:

• Mailchimp. Deliveries, bounces, opens, clicks by link, unsubscribes, complaints, and the orders and revenue a campaign brought in when your store is connected.
• Klaviyo. Each campaign's performance numbers, such as opens, clicks, and conversions.
• HubSpot. Aggregated email statistics, plus the attribution and revenue reported for a campaign.
• Resend. Messages sent, delivered, opened, clicked, bounced, and unsubscribed, the links readers clicked most, and who opened or clicked.
• Brevo. Deliveries, opens, clicks, bounces, and unsubscribes for each campaign.

That's how a send becomes a lesson. If most of the clicks in last week's email went to the pricing link instead of the blog post above it, Kite can suggest leading the next email with pricing. Kite records what worked in your knowledge base, including subject lines, angles, and click and reply rates, so the next campaign it writes starts from your own results rather than generic advice.