Send your first campaign
The whole path in order — contacts, sending address, credit, design, send.
Inbox Penny sends email to people who asked to hear from you. Getting the first campaign out takes five steps, and two of them are easy to skip — so this walks the whole path in order, then covers what happens once it’s gone.
Before you start
Three things have to be true before any campaign can go out:
- Contacts who agreed to hear from you. A bought or scraped list will damage your delivery within one send, and it’s the fastest way to lose sending altogether.
- An address to send from — either your own domain or a free one on ours. Step 2 covers both.
- Credit on the account. You pay per email, with no monthly fee.
You don’t need any of it to look around: build a campaign, try the designer, send yourself a test. The requirements only bite at the moment you send to real people.
Step 1 · Get your contacts in
There are three ways in, and you can mix them: import a CSV (the usual route when you’re moving from another platform), add someone by hand, or publish a signup form so people can add themselves.
An import checks every address twice — that it’s well-formed, and that its domain can actually receive mail. Anything that fails is left out and handed back as a CSV with a reason per row, so a bad file never becomes a bad send.
If your file has a column of list names, we’ll create those lists and file everyone into them as they import. That’s what makes a migration arrive already grouped instead of as one flat pile.
Step 2 · Set up the address you send from
Open Settings and pick one of two routes. Both produce mail that’s properly signed; they differ in effort and in how high your daily limit goes.
- Use your own domain. You publish four DNS records once, we check them, and your mail is then signed as you. This is the right answer if you own a domain — better for deliverability, and it lifts your sending limit furthest.
- Or take a free address on ours, like
hello@yourname.inboxpenny.com. No DNS and no waiting — it works the moment you claim it, and replies go to your real mailbox. Daily limits are lower on this route.
This step isn't optional
A campaign can’t go out without one of the two. Without a signed identity your mail is unauthenticated, and Gmail and Yahoo largely refuse unauthenticated bulk mail outright — so sending it would waste your credit rather than reach anyone.
Step 3 · Add credit
You pay per email sent, there’s no monthly fee, and credit doesn’t expire. Your balance, the current rate and how many emails it buys are all on the Billing page.
If a send would cost more than you hold, we refuse it up front and say so — we won’t start a campaign we can’t finish and leave half your list unmailed. Anything queued but not actually sent is refunded to your balance.
Step 4 · Build the email
On Campaigns, choose New campaign. You’ll be asked where to start:
- Start with AI — describe the email in a sentence and Penny drafts it, subject line included. Read it, refine it, keep going until it’s right.
- Migrate — paste an email from another platform, give us its “view in browser” link, or drop in a
.emlfile. We rebuild it as an editable design and copy the images into your own media library, so nothing breaks the day your old account goes away. - A template — fifty designs across sixteen industries, all editable.
- Blank, if you’d rather build it yourself.
Either way you land in the designer, where you drag in text, images, buttons and columns. Use merge tags like {{firstName}} to personalize — each recipient gets their own value substituted at send time.
Step 5 · Choose who gets it, test, then send
In the campaign’s right-hand column, click Edit recipients and pick any combination of lists and segments. The subscriber count updates as you choose, and anyone who appears in more than one target is counted — and mailed — once.
Send yourself a test first, then run the pre-send review. It checks the things that are embarrassing to get wrong — a subject that’s too long, images with no alt text, a button still pointing at a placeholder link — and Penny reads the copy for anything else.
When it looks right, send now or schedule it for later. Either way you can watch progress live.
Test emails only go to your own team
Anyone on your account can receive a test; other addresses are refused. Everyone here shares a sending reputation, and an open-ended test send is the easiest way to spend it. To reach someone outside the team, send a real campaign to a small list.
What happens after you send
Sending is paced deliberately rather than dumped all at once, so a large campaign takes a few minutes. While it runs, the campaign page shows how many have gone out.
Then results arrive on their own:
- Delivered, opened and clicked land on the campaign report as they happen.
- Unsubscribes are handled for you. Every email carries an unsubscribe link and your postal address, as the law requires, and anyone who opts out is excluded from then on. You don’t have to remember.
- Bad addresses and complaints suppress themselves. An address that bounces permanently, or a recipient who reports the mail as spam, stops being mailed automatically.
Tips for a good first send
- Start small. Your first send to a few hundred people tells you more than a first send to twenty thousand, and costs far less if something’s wrong.
- Mail the people who know you first. Recent, engaged contacts are the ones most likely to open — and early engagement is what mailbox providers use to judge you.
- Judge it on clicks, not opens. Apple Mail opens messages on the recipient’s behalf, so open rates across the whole industry read higher than reality. A click is someone actually choosing to act. Our reports lead with clicks for exactly this reason.
- Send yourself a test and read it on a phone. Most people will.
Common issues
“Send now” is greyed out
A campaign needs a name, a subject, some content, and at least one list or segment. If you’ve just picked recipients, make sure the campaign has saved — the send panel reads the saved targets.
We refused the send and mentioned a sending address
Step 2 hasn’t been done. Add a domain, or claim a free address on ours, in Settings.
Your list came out much smaller than the file
Imports drop addresses that are malformed or whose domain can’t receive mail, and only subscribed contacts are ever mailed. The import screen hands back a CSV with a reason per rejected row — read that before re-importing.
Nothing is showing as opened or clicked
Tracking arrives over minutes, not instantly, and a test send is never tracked — it has no recipient record to attach results to. Check a real campaign’s report.
FAQs
Do I need my own domain?+
No. If you don’t have one, claim a free address on ours in Settings and you can send today. Your own domain is better if you have one — it’s stronger for deliverability and it raises your daily limit — but it’s not a prerequisite for getting started.
Can I send from my Gmail or Outlook address?+
Not as the From address, and no reputable platform allows it any more. Since 2024 Gmail and Yahoo require bulk mail to be authenticated against the sending domain, and nobody can authenticate as gmail.com except Google. Mail sent that way is refused or binned. Use your own domain or an address on ours, and put your Gmail in Reply-To so replies still reach you.
Why is my daily sending limit so low?+
Every new account starts with a modest daily limit and it rises on its own as you build a record of clean sending; verifying your own domain raises it further. Everyone here shares a sending reputation, so one account mailing a bad list would damage delivery for everybody — starting small and opening up is what prevents that. Your current limit and today’s usage are on the dashboard.
What happens if I run out of credit mid-campaign?+
It can’t happen: we check the balance before starting and refuse a campaign we can’t pay for in full, rather than sending to half your list. Anything queued and not sent is refunded.
Can I cancel a campaign after pressing send?+
A scheduled campaign can be unscheduled at any point before it starts. Once sending begins, email that has already left can’t be recalled — which is what the test send and the pre-send review are for.
Do unsubscribes carry across my lists?+
Yes. Unsubscribing is a property of the contact, not of one list, so someone who opts out is excluded from every future campaign in your account — you can’t accidentally re-add them by importing a file they appear in.