How to Set Up Email and Send Your First Campaign

Step 1: Connect Resend

Do this first, because it is the part that can take a day while everything else takes minutes.

1. 01Create a Resend account if you do not have one, and generate an API key there.
2. 02Verify the domain you plan to send from, inside Resend. That means adding DNS records wherever your domain is hosted.
3. 03Wait for the domain to show as verified. DNS changes are not instant, and slow is normal.
4. 04Add the Resend API key in Creaiter's Settings alongside your other integrations.

Step 2: Import your contacts

An unverified sending domain is the most common reason a first campaign never arrives. Start the verification now and work through the rest of this page while it propagates.

Next, get your list out of whatever holds it today and into Creaiter, then check that it arrived intact.

1. 01Export your contacts from your current tool. Keep the columns simple: email address, name, and any field you actually segment on.
2. 02Clean the file before importing. Remove anyone who already unsubscribed and anyone whose address bounced.
3. 03Import it in Creaiter.
4. 04Compare the number of contacts that landed against the number you exported. If they differ, find out why before sending anything.
5. 05Only import people who agreed to hear from you. A purchased list gets your domain flagged as a spam source, and that damage follows the domain, not the tool.

Step 3: Build a segment

A segment is a group of contacts that share something. Sending everything to everyone is the fastest way to train people to ignore you.

Creaiter builds segments with AI help, so you describe the group in the chat instead of assembling filter rules by hand.

1. 01Everyone who signed up in the last 30 days and has not opened anything yet.
2. 02Contacts in the UK who came from the guide download.
3. 03People we have not emailed in three months.
4. 04Then check the size before you use it. A segment of four people usually means the description did not match your data, not that your list is small. Ask the chat to show you who is in it.

Step 4: Write and send the campaign

Describe the email you want and who it goes to. The chat drafts it, you edit it, and it waits for approval like any other content.

1. 01Say the goal, the audience, the tone, and the one action you want the reader to take.
2. 02Write the subject line yourself. It is the highest-leverage line in the email and worth your own words.
3. 03Send yourself a test first and open it on a phone, because most people will.
4. 04Check every link by clicking it in the test, not by looking at it.
5. 05Confirm the segment is the one you built, then send.
6. 06Watch the first few minutes. If nothing arrives at all, the answer is almost always Resend domain verification rather than the campaign.

Journeys: email that runs on its own

A campaign is one send. A journey is a sequence that runs per person, triggered by something they did, such as joining a segment. Build the first one small. A three email welcome sequence teaches you more than a fifteen step monster you cannot debug.

1. 01Describe the trigger and the steps in the chat, in order, with the wait time between them.
2. 02Read every email in the sequence as if you were the person receiving all of them in a row.
3. 03Enroll yourself first and let the whole thing run before anyone real is in it.
4. 04Audit live journeys occasionally. They keep sending after you stop paying attention, which is the point and also the risk.

Unsubscribes and the rules you cannot skip

Every marketing email must give the reader a way out, and honoring that request promptly is a legal requirement in most of the world, not a courtesy.

1. 01Before your first real send, confirm the unsubscribe path is present in the email you are about to send. Send yourself the test and look for it.
2. 02If you cannot find one, do not send. Ask the chat where it is, and contact support if the answer is not clear.
3. 03When someone unsubscribes, treat it as permanent. Do not re-add them from an old export three months later.
4. 04Keep your own record of who opted out, so a future import cannot quietly resurrect them.
5. 05Read an unsubscribe as information, not failure. A shrinking list of people who want to hear from you outperforms a big list that resents you.