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This page is a workbook. Fill it in top to bottom before anything is built in your email platform. Each section has a “Concept review” dropdown explaining what the section is for. The dropdowns explain the thinking; the decision is yours.
This brief sits between the marketing campaign brief, which covers strategy across every channel, and your email platform, where the send is built.Grayed E.g. text is a placeholder. Delete it and replace it with your own. Examples use Doughnut Labs, a SaaS company that sells disruptive Doughnut Technology.
Email maps onto the same three levels as the ad platforms: the campaign or flow is the campaign, the segment is the ad set, and the individual send is the ad. The naming conventions apply at all three, using the list and segment type values in the ad set / ad group / variant conventions.

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Setup

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Send type

An exit condition is not optional on an automated sequence. Without one, a contact who converts on send one still receives sends two and three, asking them to do something they have already done.
The type decides how long the brief stays live. A broadcast is finished the day it sends. An automated sequence keeps running against new contacts for months, which means its copy, its links, and its offer all keep being seen long after the campaign that produced it has closed.That difference is why the exit condition and the review date matter more on a sequence than on a broadcast. An unreviewed sequence is the most common way an expired offer keeps going out to new contacts.

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Objective and conversion action

Open rate and click rate describe what happened inside the inbox. Neither says whether the email did its job, and open rate in particular has been unreliable since mail privacy features began pre-fetching images.Naming a conversion action from the event tracking plan is what connects the send to the outcome it was meant to produce. It also makes email comparable to the paid channels in the same campaign, which is not possible when one channel reports conversions and the other reports opens.

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Audience

List suppressions explicitly, including other campaigns sending in the same window. A contact receiving three unrelated emails from you in one day is a deliverability problem as much as an experience one.
A segment is a query, and a query written into a brief can be checked by someone else before it sends. A segment built directly in the platform at send time usually cannot, and that is where the wrong-audience sends come from.Consent basis belongs here because it governs whether the send is allowed at all, separately from whether it is a good idea. Recording where consent came from and when means a later question about a contact’s inclusion has an answer that does not depend on anyone’s memory.

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Content

Design has to meet the email creative specs.
Subject line and preview text are read together in the inbox and should be written together. Preview text left unset falls back to whatever the first line of the email happens to be, which is often an image alt tag or a “view in browser” link.Keeping the copy in the copy brief and the email copy template rather than typing it into the platform means it gets reviewed against the campaign’s message before it goes out, and stays findable in the copy drive afterward.

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Send settings

The reply-to address is the field most often set to something nobody reads. A campaign that invites a reply and then discards it costs more than the replies were worth, and on some providers reply behavior feeds into how your mail is treated.From name and sending domain are recognition signals as much as technical settings. Changing either mid-campaign resets the familiarity a list has built with you, so both belong in a brief rather than in whatever the platform defaulted to.

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Deliverability

Authentication is a hard requirement rather than a best practice. Major mailbox providers reject or filter bulk mail that fails SPF, DKIM, or DMARC, and a large send from a domain with no sending history can be throttled regardless of authentication. Warm a new domain before a large campaign rather than during one.
Deliverability problems present as performance problems. A send with a weak subject line and a send that landed in spam both show a low open rate, and only one of those is fixed by rewriting copy.Checking authentication and running a placement test before the send separates the two questions in advance. It is a short check that prevents a long argument about creative that was never the cause.

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Landing page and destination

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Naming and tracking

Use utm_content to tell the sends in a sequence apart. Without it, three touches collapse into one line in reporting.

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Experiment

Optional: fill this in only if the send carries a controlled test with a planned sample.
A platform’s built-in subject line test that picks a winner after a few hours is not the same as a controlled experiment. It stops early by design, which is the peeking problem. If the result is going into the learning library, run it through creating an experiment instead.

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Measurement

Where this campaign is reported: E.g. Lifecycle dashboard, rolled into the weekly report

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Post-send

Set a review date for every automated sequence. A sequence with no review date keeps sending an offer that may have expired, to contacts who joined the list long after the campaign closed.
Last modified on August 10, 2026