How to setup email campaign in Jira Software

[Darquise Leblanc]

Hi all,

I'm not to familiar with Email campaigns, however I have been tasked to create a Marketing projects to support email campaigns as well as other Marketing tasks. How would you setup email campaigns? Would you have multiple projects for the Marketing team. Or would you use Epics or Components.

What about using issue types or custom workflows? 

Basically, how would you manage and organize Marketing team tasks using Jira Software. I'm trying to avoid having both Jira Work Management and Jira Software. I want to be able to just use one Jira product, e.g Software + Confluence.

[John Funk · Accepted solution]

Hi Darquise,

There are a lot of questions there about how functionality and how your company creates email campaigns. Jira is just a tool and can capture information about your campaign, but it does not create campaigns. It should just reflect the structure of how your campaigns are built. 

So, you should start with the marketing department letting you know the requirements of what they are looking for to track the campaign work that needs to be done. 

[Julie d_Antin _Elements_]

Hi @Darquise Leblanc 

To build on @John Funk 's answer, I would start with asking the marketing team some more questions:

• Do they need to pass off campaign preparation to multiple different team members, say from a content team to a designer to an approver? Does the team need to know which campaigns are currently waiting for the designer to finish images or which are in testing/review? If yes to the previous questions, your team might need some custom workflows to get visibility on the progress of each campaign.
• Does the marketing team need to collect different information in the issue depending on the campaign? Is the process to follow for a campaign different depending on the type? If no to the previous questions, you can probably use just one issue type.
• Does the marketing team want to be able to see upcoming issues in a calendar view? Jira Work Management has a big advantage here.

For your question about having multiple projects, from my experience using Jira for marketing projects, I don't think this would be useful (or else you would be creating new projects every 1-2 months). Whether or not to use Epics or components depends on the complexity of the campaigns and the marketing team processes: do they need to break down a campaign into multiple different issues that are assigned to different people? Or can one issue progress through a workflow the different steps necessary for the email campaign?

If your marketing team is really new to Jira, they might not be able to answer all these questions, so you can use an iterative process to go from a template project to something more customized that meets all their needs.

[Darquise Leblanc]

Thank you @Julie d_Antin _Elements_ and @John Funk for you response.

For the 3 bullet points above, that does seem to be the case, with the exception of bullet 2, I don't think we need different types.

It would be unfortunate to get JWM just to get the calendar. I know there are apps, but obviously for a price.

I had another call with a member of the marketing team yesterday and this is my thought on how to organize the Jira SW project:

• Create 1 marketing project with different components, (e.g. Email Campaign, newsletter, Videos, Research etc)
• Create an epic for a email campaign that will have many tasks with different teams
• Create a custom workflow
• Create Dashboards with filters for different teams

Does the above sound like a good start/plan? Am I missing anything?

Thank you for your time and feedback - much appreciated.

[John Funk]

Thanks for the additional information. You can use Jira Work Management to do all of your bullets. AND have the calendar. :-)

[Darquise Leblanc]

Yes, I realize that, but we have Jira Software. I wanted to avoid having a 2nd product. Would I have to pay if the marketing team uses JSW and JWM? Probably a question for Atlassian unless someone already knows the answer ;)

[John Funk]

You already have JWM - it is actually the base product. You pay extra to add JSW. So if you are using JSW in your organization, you are good already to use both products at no extra charge!

[Darquise Leblanc]

Oh you just made my day :)

[John Funk]

Haha - great!

[Darquise Leblanc]

Actually, we don't necessarily have JWM, we are just slowly migrating our Jira server to the cloud, therefore we will get Jira Software Cloud (first we have to upgrade jira server to latest version, then migrate to cloud, but that is not happening until late 2022). But before we get a chance to migrate, we are just getting the marketing team setup to use Jira. So, basically, we are starting with JSW cloud just for the marketing team.

[John Funk]

Well, when you create a new Cloud instance, that IS JWM. Then you add on JSW from there. JWM is the old Jira Cloud Core and is base product. 

Shameless plug but I wrote a book on JWM that was recently published (a few months ago). You can find it with the publish here: https://www.packtpub.com/product/jira-work-management-for-business-teams/9781803232003

Or on Amazon here: https://www.amazon.com/Jira-Work-Management-Business-Teams/dp/1803232005

[Natalia Zhontsa]

Hi! You can try Proactive Campaigns for Jira to create customer lists and send mass email campaigns.

[Julie d_Antin _Elements_]

Hi @Natalia Zhontsa ,That app is new with 0 installs, so it sounds like you must be with the team at Growthdot. Can you check out the Community guidelines for vendors and update your display name?  

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Marketplace-Apps-Integrations/Atlassian-Community-online-guidelines-for-Marketplace-and/ba-p/689723

[Natalia Zhontsa]

Hi @Julie d_Antin _Elements_ ,

Yes, I'm a GrowthDot team member. Thank you for the tip.