Email Campaigns

The Communications module lets you send one-off email campaigns to your students — announcements, deadline reminders, re-engagement nudges, certificate pushes, or anything else that benefits from going out to a curated list rather than as an in-app notification.

When to use a campaign vs an announcement

Announcements live inside a course and reach enrolled students through their normal notification channels. Campaigns are broader broadcasts you craft yourself, tracked with their own open and click metrics.

Opening Communications

Click Communications in the sidebar (under the admin/staff group). You'll see a table of every campaign — Draft, Scheduled, Sending, Sent, or Cancelled — with quick stats: recipients, open rate, created date.

Click + New campaign in the top-right to start a new one.

The 4-step wizard

Step 1 — Audience

Decide who the campaign goes to:

• All students — every active student in your institution
• Selected courses — multi-select your courses; only students enrolled in any of the picked courses are included
• Advanced — narrower targeting (specific student lists, tags, or other criteria — your admin can configure these)

A live recipient counter sits at the bottom of the screen and updates as you change the selection (debounced so it doesn't spam the API). You'll know exactly how many emails you're about to send before you commit.

Step 2 — Content

Three things to fill in:

• Campaign name — internal label for your reference (students never see this)
• Subject line — the email subject; supports merge tags like {{firstName}} and {{courseTitle}}
• Body — rich-text body, also supports merge tags

You can start from one of six built-in templates:

Pick a template to prefill subject and body — then customise the placeholders.

Step 3 — Schedule

Two choices:

• Send now — fires the moment you confirm in step 4
• Send later — pick a date and time. The campaign sits in SCHEDULED state until then, and you can edit or cancel it any time before send.

Step 4 — Review

A summary screen shows everything you've configured: audience size, subject, body preview, scheduled time. Two buttons:

• Send a test email — sends one copy to your own address so you can sanity-check rendering before going to the whole list
• Send campaign (or Schedule campaign) — commits the campaign

A confirmation dialog asks you to confirm. Once confirmed, the campaign moves into SENDING (or SCHEDULED for later sends).

Tracking results

Click any sent campaign on the Communications list to open the detail page. You'll see:

• Status — Draft / Scheduled / Sending / Sent / Cancelled
• Funnel — Queued → Sent → Delivered → Opened → Clicked
• Open rate and Click rate
• Per-recipient deliveries — every email's individual status (Pending, Sent, Opened, Clicked, Failed, Bounced)

Click any failed delivery to see the failure reason — invalid address, bounced, marked as spam, etc.

CSV export

Click Download CSV on the campaign detail page to export every recipient's status to a spreadsheet. Useful for offline analysis, sharing with a non-OptiLearn admin, or auditing.

Tips

• Send a test first, every time. Merge tags can render unexpectedly; test before broadcast.
• Keep subject lines under 50 characters. They get truncated on mobile inboxes.
• Don't over-send. Email fatigue hurts open rates. One thoughtful campaign a week beats five scattershot ones.
• Use re-engagement campaigns sparingly. A re-engagement email to a student who's already actively using OptiLearn is annoying.
• Schedule for a sensible time. Tuesday-Thursday, 10 AM in your students' timezone, tends to perform best for institutional content.
• Watch open rate trends. A sudden drop usually means your subject lines have gotten stale or your sending domain is being filtered.

Related

• Notifications — automatic notifications vs broadcast campaigns
• Class targeting — for course-scoped messaging