Email campaign planning
Plan email campaigns, subject to send
A per-client email planner that captures the theme, audience and subject lines with A/B variants, previews the inbox card, and routes the brief for approval before anything is sent. Try the demo below, or start your own workspace.
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- Plans from $99/month
- Built for multi-client agencies
- Your brand across the console
Plan · Email
Email campaign planning software for agencies
Before an email goes out, an agency has to decide the plan: which campaign theme it serves, who it goes to, what the subject line should say and how it gets approved. Email Planning in AI Marketing Dashboard is the guided blueprint for that decision — a per-client email campaign planner that takes a finished email from the Library, captures the theme, audience, subject and preview lines, and routes the whole brief for sign-off, so the send starts from an agreed plan instead of a guess. It is the planning step that sits between the email builder and the send, not the builder itself.
Plan before you send
Agree the send before anything goes out
The plan settles who gets the email, what it says and which template carries it.
Set it up
Name the campaign, pick its Theme, choose the audience from the client's CRM and the verified address it sends from.Write the subject lines
Pick up to three from the saved Copy library, or write them. With more than one the plan treats them as an A/B test, and one preview line goes with all of them.Choose the template
Pick an email built in the Library and preview it. For a drip, add up to nine follow-ups, each with its own template, subject and delay.Get it approved
Submit for approval and a review task opens in Projects. The reviewer signs off the exact plan, not a description of it.
Why plan first
A brief the builder can act on
Most email requests start as a sentence in a chat thread. A plan turns that sentence into decisions someone can check.
The request in a chat thread
- A subject line suggested in passing
- An audience described as the usual list
- A template mentioned but never named
- Approval collected by reply, if at all
Quick to ask for, slow to check.
The plan
- Subject lines and the preview line written up front
- An audience named, with a count of the contacts it reaches
- A template picked and previewed from the Library
- A reviewer's decision tied to the plan's content
Edit the plan after approval and it reads Changed since approval until it is approved again.
Settle the send before it goes out
Pick the audience, the subject lines and a Library template, then send the plan for approval before anything is sent.
Plans start at $99/month.
On this page
A guided blueprint for every email campaign
Pick the theme, name and audience in one flow
Each email plan starts the same disciplined way: choose the client it belongs to, attach it to the canonical campaign theme that frames the messaging, and give it a name and an audience. The builder walks you through those decisions step by step, so a planned send is never an ad-hoc one-off — it is anchored to a positioning angle and a target before anyone touches design.
Because the plan lives next to that client's other campaigns, you can see at a glance which themes already have email coverage and where a sequence is missing. The result is a blueprint a teammate can pick up and execute, rather than a vague request to 'send an email' that has to be reverse-engineered later.
A/B subject lines and preview text
Set the line that decides whether the email gets opened
The single biggest lever on an email is the subject line, so the plan treats it as a first-class decision rather than an afterthought. Write your own subject and preview text, or pull from the copy your team has already saved for this client and theme — the line that earns the open is chosen here, in the plan, before the send is built.
Testing is part of the plan, not a separate exercise: multi-select several subject lines and the first becomes the primary while the rest are queued as A/B variants. The campaign carries its own experiment intent forward, so whoever builds and schedules the email already knows which lines to pit against each other.
Define the audience the campaign is for
Target the right segment as part of the plan
An email is only as good as the list it reaches, so the audience is set directly in the blueprint. Specify the segment the campaign targets — the subscribers, the cohort, the slice of the client's list it is meant for — so the plan records not just what you are sending but who it is going to.
Capturing the audience at the planning stage keeps the whole campaign honest: the subject lines, the template and the timing are all chosen against a known recipient, instead of being decided in isolation and retro-fitted to whatever list is handy at send time.
Shape the send fast with a Library template
Begin from a proven structure, not an empty draft
Rather than describing a layout in prose for someone to interpret, the plan points at an email your team has already built for the client with the Library's email builder. Choosing it up front fixes the structure of the send, so the review is about the message and the audience rather than a layout nobody has seen yet.
It keeps planning quick and the hand-off concrete: the brief names the exact email that will go out, and the approval is bound to it, so editing that email after sign-off sends the plan back for another approval before it can launch.
See how the email lands in the inbox
A subject, sender and preview-text card before it sends
The plan closes with an inbox-card preview that shows the campaign the way a subscriber first meets it — the sender, the subject line and the preview text, rendered as the row that appears in a crowded inbox. It is the moment-of-truth check that the lines you chose actually read well at a glance, before anything is scheduled.
Previewing the inbox card at the planning stage catches a weak or truncated subject early, when it costs nothing to change, rather than after the email has been designed and queued. The plan, the subject test and the preview all live in one place, so the decision and its check sit side by side.
Turn the plan into a brief, approval and a scheduled send
Route sign-off as a tracked task and move toward send
When the plan is ready, assign it to the teammates who will execute it, write the brief, then choose a reviewer and submit it for sign-off. The plan creates a real review task in the project manager for the named reviewer — so the approval is a tracked piece of work on the board, not an email lost in someone's inbox — and the reviewer approves or requests changes in Team > Approvals or on the plan itself, against the actual campaign.
Once it is approved, the plan's status moves toward scheduling and send, giving the campaign a clear lifecycle from draft to live. The whole thing stays inside the console alongside the client's other work, so an email campaign is planned, signed off and tracked in the same place the agency runs everything else.
What an email campaign plan settles before anything is sent
An email plan fixes who gets the message, what the inbox shows first, which template carries it and who signed it off. The template has to exist before the plan can be submitted, so design it first in the email builder, then agree the send here.
| Decision | What the planner asks for | Why a reviewer cares |
|---|---|---|
| Send type | A one-off send, or a drip with follow-ups | A drip commits the client to several emails, not one |
| Audience | A CRM filter by pipeline, stage and tag, or a saved audience | The count says how many people can really receive it |
| Sender | A From address verified for the client | Launch refuses an address the client has not verified |
| Subject lines | Up to 3, plus one preview line | More than one subject line turns the send into an A/B test |
| Template | An email template from the client's Library | It is what the recipient will actually see, and the plan cannot move on without one |
| Approval | A reviewer and an optional note | Sign-off covers the whole plan as it stands, its templates and audience included |
The planner does not design the email. It points at a template that already exists in the client's Library, so the email builder is where the design happens, and a strategist can agree the send without opening a design file.
Plan a one-off send or a drip, step by step
Setup, Subject and preview, Template and Review make up a one-off plan. A drip adds a Follow-ups step before the review.
Set up the send
Name the campaign under one of the client's positioning themes, choose a one-off send or a drip, pick the audience and choose the sender. A new plan starts from the client's default verified sender.
Check who can really receive it
The audience count leaves out contacts who unsubscribed, are marked do not contact, hold an invalid or duplicate address or have no email, and shows how many it dropped and why.
Write the subject lines and the preview line
Add one subject line, or up to 3 to run an A/B split, then write the preview line that sits beside them in the inbox. Saved subject lines from the copy library can be picked in place of typed ones, and each recipient is given one of the lines, chosen by a calculation on their address that gives roughly equal shares.
Choose and preview the template
Pick a template from the client's Library and preview it as a recipient sees it, down to the unsubscribe link. For a drip, add every follow-up with its own template, subject, preview line and delay.
Submit for approval
Check the summary, confirm the reviewer and submit. A review task opens in Projects, while the decision itself is made in Team > Approvals or on the plan. Approval covers the whole plan, including the templates and the audience, so a change to any of it sends the plan back for a new decision.
Launch and follow the send
Launch checks the plan again and, where email sending is connected, sends it. Starting a launch takes the Publish permission, and an email send also takes access to the client's CRM; someone without Publish requests the launch and a publisher approves it. The Launch page then shows how many emails have gone out, and a launch can be set for a later time in your own time zone.
Who actually receives an email plan, and from which address
Filter contacts or use a saved audience
The audience step offers two routes. Filter contacts picks CRM pipelines, with optional stages and tags. Saved audience picks a dynamic segment or a static list from the client's Library. A segment is worked out again each time the count is shown and when the launch runs, so it follows the CRM. Either way the count comes from one set of rules, shared by the planner, the launch checks and the send itself.
Who is left out of the count
The count reports how many contacts were left out and why. A contact drops out when they:
- unsubscribed from this client's email
- are marked do not contact (Do Not Disturb in the CRM), or share an address with someone who is
- have an address that is not a valid email address
- repeat an address that was already counted earlier in the list
- have no email address at all
- are on a saved list but sit in a restricted pipeline that the person planning may not address
Note
Do Not Disturb travels with the address
The CRM sets this mark as Do Not Disturb on a lead, and the audience count lists it as do not contact. A mark on any of the client's leads keeps that address out of the send, even when the lead carrying the mark sits in a different pipeline from the one you chose. Leads live in the CRM.
The recipient limit and the verified sender
A single launch is limited to 2,000 recipients. A larger list has to be split across segments, pipelines or tags and planned as separate sends. The sender must be a From address verified for that client in its data settings; if none is, the planner says so and the launch checks fail until one is added.
Subject lines, preview text and how the A/B split works
The subject line and the preview text are what the inbox shows before anything else. The planner holds both on the plan.
The first subject line is the primary one and any others are variants. Recipients are split between the lines in roughly equal shares, and a small list can split unevenly. A given recipient always gets the same line, because the choice is calculated from their address. A drip follow-up carries a single subject line.
| Line | Limit | What the planner does |
|---|---|---|
| Subject line | Up to 200 characters | Turns the counter amber past 80, because inbox apps cut long subjects |
| Preview line | Required, up to 140 characters | Fails the launch checks when it is empty or too long |
| Variants | Up to 3 subject lines | Treats the first as primary and the rest as A/B variants |
| Starter subject | The Library's placeholder, Your subject line | Asks you to replace it before the plan can pass |
Test one thing at a time. Variants that differ only in the angle, such as a benefit against a question, teach you something. Variants that also differ in length, tone and offer do not. The planner splits the audience and the Launch page counts what was sent. It does not name a winning line, so compare the variants in your own results.
Drip sequences: follow-ups, delays and who gets them
A drip is a first send plus up to 9 follow-ups. Every follow-up brings its own template, subject line and preview line.
Each follow-up goes out from 1 to 90 days after the previous email, and the delay is counted from that email, not from the start. Follow-ups spaced 3 and 4 days apart finish a week after the first send.
Follow-ups go to the people whose previous email was sent, minus anyone who has since unsubscribed, been marked do not contact or left the CRM. Write what each follow-up adds to the last one, because the same people read all of them.
While a sequence is running the plan is locked, and it stays locked once the launch has finished, so to send a sequence again, duplicate the plan and adjust the copy. If a launch is canceled or fails, the plan can be launched again, and anyone it already reached will get the email again; the Launch dialog warns about this.
Approval, launch checks and what an email launch will not do
What an approval covers
The approval covers the plan together with every template it points at and any saved audience it uses, so changing any of them makes the approval stale. The plan then shows Changed since approval and has to be submitted and approved again before it can launch. Owners and notes in the brief do not count toward it. A reviewer can approve the plan or return it with a written reason, and an Agency Admin can approve a plan directly, recorded as a self-approval.
What the launch checks look at
| Check | What it does |
|---|---|
| Templates | Fails if a template is missing, and warns if one is not yet approved in the Library |
| Subject and preview lines | Fails when a line is missing, too long or still the placeholder |
| From address | Fails unless the address is verified for the client |
| Audience | Fails when nobody can receive the send or the list is over the limit |
| Images and size | Warns about images embedded in the email, which most inboxes block, and about an email large enough to be clipped; fails an email that is too large to send |
| Links and merge tags | Warns about links that go nowhere and about merge tags that would be left blank |
What an email launch will not do
Where email sending is connected, Launch sends the campaign itself and paces the sends. A launch can be canceled while it is sending. Where sending is not connected, the checks say so and the plan can still be approved. Every email carries a visible unsubscribe link and the standard unsubscribe headers. An email launch will not:
- go out from an address the client has not verified
- reach more than 2,000 recipients in one launch
- email anyone who unsubscribed or is marked do not contact
- send the same step to the same recipient twice within one launch
- start from a plan that has changed since it was approved
Plan
Plan availability
The planner is part of every plan, Studio at $99 a month included. A plan needs a template from the client's Library, though, and the email builder that makes templates starts with the Agency plan at $299 a month, so on Studio the Template step waits until a template exists. The text-message counterpart is described in SMS campaign planning.
Frequently asked questions
How do I plan an email campaign for a client?
Choose the client's theme, name the campaign and decide between a one-off send and a drip. Pick the audience and a verified sender, write up to three subject lines and a preview line, choose a Library template and submit the plan for approval. Launch then sends it once the checks pass, where email sending is connected.
How many subject lines can I test in one email plan?
Up to 3. The first is the primary line and the others are A/B variants. Recipients are split between the lines in roughly equal shares, and each recipient always gets the same line. A follow-up in a drip carries one subject line. The planner does not declare a winner, so you compare the variants in your own results.
Who is left out of an email audience count?
Contacts who unsubscribed from the client's email, contacts marked do not contact or sharing an address with one, invalid and duplicate addresses, contacts with no email, and members of a saved list who sit in a restricted pipeline the planner may not address. The count shows how many were dropped and the reason for each group.
Can I plan an email drip sequence with follow-ups?
Yes. A drip is a first send plus up to 9 follow-ups. Each follow-up has its own template, subject line and preview line, and goes out from 1 to 90 days after the previous email. Follow-ups reach the people whose previous email was sent, minus anyone who has since unsubscribed, been marked do not contact or left the CRM.
Does the email planner design or send the email?
Neither by itself. The design is a template from the client's Library, made in the email builder. The send happens at Launch once the plan is approved and the checks pass, where email sending is connected. The planner is the agreement between the two: audience, lines, template and sign-off.
Is there a limit on how many people one email launch can reach?
Yes. A single launch is limited to 2,000 recipients, and the checks fail a larger audience. Split a bigger list across segments, pipelines or tags and plan separate sends. Sends are also paced, so a large launch takes time to finish while the Launch page shows how many emails have gone out.
Which plans include the email campaign planner?
Every plan includes it, Studio among them. A plan cannot move past its Template step without a Library template, and the email builder that makes templates belongs to the Agency plan, at $299 a month; Studio costs $99 a month. The planner's own features, including subject-line variants, drips and approvals, do not change from plan to plan.