Email marketing overview

Email is built into your account: there's nothing to install, and every contact you already have can receive a campaign as soon as you've picked who to send from and who to send to. This article is the map. It walks through the handful of pieces — sending domain, from name and address, lists, unsubscribes, and where sent mail shows up — that every other email article assumes you already understand.

#The sending domain

Every email you send has to come from somewhere, and that "somewhere" is a domain. By default, new accounts send from a shared domain the platform manages, which works but caps how much control you have over deliverability and how your brand looks in a recipient's inbox. Most businesses that send more than the occasional one-off email set up a dedicated sending domain — a subdomain of their own website (like mail.yourbrand.com) that only they send from.

A dedicated domain matters for two reasons:

1. Reputation isolation. On a shared domain, your deliverability is partly tied to how well-behaved every other account on that domain is. A dedicated domain means your sending history is entirely your own.
2. Brand consistency. Emails from a dedicated domain don't carry a "via" disclaimer in the recipient's inbox, and your from-address can match your actual business domain instead of a generic sending domain.

Setting up a dedicated domain requires adding a few DNS records at your domain host — covered in full in the next article, Set up your sending domain and authentication.

#From name and from address

Every campaign and workflow email lets you set a From Name (what the recipient sees as the sender, e.g. "Nordstrand Roofing") and a From Email (the actual address, e.g. hello@mail.nordstrandroofing.com). Both matter for deliverability and trust:

• Use a real, recognizable business name as the From Name — not a generic label like "Marketing Team" or "No Reply."
• Use a From Email on your verified sending domain, ideally one that's actually monitored (or at least has a reply-to address that is). Recipients who hit "reply" and get nothing back learn to distrust future emails from you, and mailbox providers notice unusually high bounce or ignore rates on unmonitored addresses.

If your account has a Default Header configured for a dedicated domain (found under Settings > Email Services), that default overrides whatever From Name and From Email is set on an individual campaign or workflow. It's a way to lock every send from that domain to one consistent identity — useful for agencies or teams where multiple people build campaigns but you want one sender identity across all of them.

Note: Whatever From Email you use, its domain has to be authenticated (SPF, DKIM, and ideally DMARC all passing) or mailbox providers may reject or spam-folder the message outright. More on this in the next article.

#Lists: tags and smart lists

You almost never send an email to "everyone." The platform gives you two ways to define who receives a send:

• Tags — a manually applied label on a contact (like vip-customer or webinar-registrant). You add and remove tags yourself, or automate it with a workflow action. Tags are the simplest way to build a one-off audience.
• Smart Lists — a saved filter that automatically includes any contact matching its criteria (tag, custom field value, opportunity stage, activity, and more) and drops contacts that stop matching. A Smart List called "Engaged Last 90 Days" stays current on its own; a tag doesn't.

Use tags when you want manual, deliberate control over exactly who's in a group. Use Smart Lists when the group should stay current automatically as contacts change. Most accounts end up using both — tags to mark the raw signal (attended a webinar, bought a product) and Smart Lists to combine those signals into a send-ready audience.

Screenshot coming soon

Smart List builder with filter conditions for tags and last-activity date

#Unsubscribes

Every marketing email sent through the platform includes an unsubscribe link automatically — you don't have to add one manually to campaigns, and removing it isn't an option, because U.S. and international law require it (see Manage unsubscribes, bounces, and compliance for the legal detail). When a contact unsubscribes:

• They're marked opted-out of marketing email specifically. They can still receive transactional or one-to-one messages depending on how your account is configured.
• They stop receiving future campaigns and workflow emails automatically — you don't have to manually filter them out of every send.
• You can build a workflow off the Email Events trigger's "Unsubscribed" filter to do something with that signal — tag the contact, notify a team member, or remove them from other active workflows.

#Where sent mail shows up

Once you've sent a campaign or a workflow email fires, you can find a record of it in a few places:

• The contact's activity/conversation history — every email sent to that specific contact appears there, along with whether it was opened or clicked.
• Campaign statistics — if the email was sent as part of a broadcast campaign, the campaign's own stats page shows aggregate opens, clicks, bounces, and unsubscribes across every recipient.
• Email Events workflow data — opens, clicks, bounces, complaints, and unsubscribes are all available as workflow trigger conditions, so you can build automations that react to engagement (or the lack of it) instead of just watching the numbers.

#What done looks like

You should be able to explain, in one sentence each: what domain your emails send from and why it's set up that way, how the From Name and From Email you're using were chosen, whether your intended recipients come from a tag or a Smart List, and where to go to see whether a specific contact actually got (and opened) your last email.

#Related articles

• Set up your sending domain and authentication
• Email deliverability best practices
• Troubleshoot email problems
• Manage unsubscribes, bounces, and compliance
• Email templates overview

#Frequently asked questions

#Do I have to set up a dedicated sending domain before I send anything?

No. You can send from the shared default domain right away. A dedicated domain is strongly recommended once you're sending regularly, but it isn't a hard requirement to send your first campaign.

#What's the difference between a tag and a Smart List, in practice?

A tag is a static label you (or an automation) applies and removes. A Smart List is a live query — it's always up to date with whoever currently matches its filters, with no manual maintenance. If you find yourself manually re-tagging a group every week to keep it current, that's usually a sign it should be a Smart List instead.

#Can a contact unsubscribe from marketing email but still get appointment reminders?

Yes, depending on how your account separates marketing from transactional messaging. Appointment confirmations, receipts, and other transactional messages are generally treated separately from promotional campaigns — check your workflow and campaign settings to confirm which category a given automation falls under.