Question 1

What is the Inbox OSS marketing campaigns platform?

Accepted Answer

The Inbox OSS marketing campaigns platform is a complete email marketing solution for newsletters, broadcasts, drip sequences, and lifecycle campaigns. It includes a **drag and drop email builder** with brand-kit inheritance and undo history, real audience segmentation across tags, custom fields, and behavioral filters, A/B/n testing with auto-promotion of winners, send-time optimization that picks the best moment per recipient, and revenue attribution that ties opens and clicks back to in-app conversions. The platform shares infrastructure with our transactional API — your marketing list and transactional address pool live in the same suppression system, so unsubscribes and bounces apply universally without sync glue.

Question 2

How does Inbox OSS compare to MailChimp for email marketing?

Accepted Answer

MailChimp is a mature marketing platform with broad template libraries and a good visual builder, but its **deliverability ceiling is lower than dedicated infrastructure platforms** because it pools all customers across shared IPs without granular reputation isolation. Inbox OSS gives you dedicated IPs at a much lower threshold, full DKIM/SPF/DMARC and BIMI authentication, and a 7-check pre-send validation engine baked in. Pricing is also structurally different: MailChimp charges per contact in your list regardless of how often you send; Inbox OSS charges per email sent, so dormant subscribers do not inflate your bill. Migration from MailChimp is one-click via our list importer, which preserves tags, custom fields, and unsubscribe state.

Question 3

How does it compare to ConvertKit and ActiveCampaign?

Accepted Answer

ConvertKit is optimized for creators with strong sequence-building and tag-based subscriber management; ActiveCampaign is enterprise-CRM-flavored with deep automation and lead scoring. **Inbox OSS sits between them on automation depth** — visual flow builder with delay, branch, send, tag, and webhook nodes is comparable to ActiveCampaign, while the simpler newsletter and broadcast workflows are creator-friendly like ConvertKit. The big structural advantage is the unified transactional and marketing platform: ConvertKit and ActiveCampaign cannot send transactional email at production quality, so creators who use both end up paying for two systems. Inbox OSS replaces both with a single account, suppression list, domain authentication, and billing relationship.

Question 4

Does the email campaign builder support drag and drop?

Accepted Answer

Yes. The visual builder is a full **drag and drop email builder** with starter templates, a branded block library, image asset management with auto-compression and CDN delivery, brand-kit inheritance (pin colors, fonts, button styles once and every new template uses them), undo history, and mobile preview. For power users, an HTML escape hatch with MJML and syntax-aware linting drops you into raw template code without losing the visual layer. Templates render server-side at send time with Handlebars personalization, so per-recipient substitutions like {{first_name}} or conditional content blocks are evaluated against each subscriber individually rather than at design time.

Question 5

How does audience segmentation work?

Accepted Answer

Segmentation combines three dimensions: **tags** (manually applied or automation-driven), **custom fields** (any structured attribute you store on a subscriber — purchase history, plan tier, signup source, etc.), and **behavioral filters** (opened any email in the last 30 days, clicked link X in campaign Y, has not engaged in 60 days). Segments are live — they recompute on every send, so a subscriber who matches the criteria at send time gets the email, and one who has since dropped out does not. Segments can be nested with AND/OR/NOT logic and saved as named lists for re-use across campaigns. For event-driven workflows, segments feed directly into automation triggers without sync delays.

Question 6

What is send-time optimization (STO) and how does it work?

Accepted Answer

Send-time optimization is a per-recipient feature where the platform uses each subscriber's historical engagement pattern to choose the best send moment for them individually, within a window you define. Subscribers who consistently open at 8am their local time get the email at 8am; subscribers who only engage in the evening get it at 7pm. Implementation uses a lightweight gradient-boosted model trained on the subscriber's last 90 days of engagement events, with a fallback to send-window timezone delivery for new subscribers with insufficient history. Customers running STO see open-rate lift of **3-9 percent on average** versus fixed-time sends, and the feature is included on all paid tiers — not a Klaviyo or Iterable premium add-on.

Question 7

Does the platform support A/B and multi-variant testing?

Accepted Answer

Yes. A/B/n testing supports subject line, content, sender name, and send-time variants. Configure the test size (commonly 10-20 percent of the segment), the winner metric (opens, clicks, or revenue), and the auto-promotion threshold. The platform sends the variants to the test slice, evaluates after the configured wait period, and automatically promotes the winning variant to the remainder of the segment. Statistical significance is computed and shown in the dashboard so you can verify the winner is not a small-sample fluke. Revenue-as-winner-metric requires the optional revenue attribution integration, which ties conversions back to specific campaign variants via a tracking pixel or server-side event.

Question 8

How does unsubscribe management work across campaigns?

Accepted Answer

The platform implements **unsubscribe groups** (sometimes called preference centers) so subscribers can opt out of specific streams — newsletters, product updates, promotional offers — without losing all email from you. Each account can define unlimited groups; every campaign is tagged to one group at send. A one-click unsubscribe link in the email footer (and the RFC 8058 List-Unsubscribe-Post header that Gmail and Yahoo require for senders over 5,000 messages per day) updates the subscriber's preferences immediately. Group-level unsubscribes are honored across every campaign in that group, account-wide suppressions block every send to that address regardless of group, and the preference center is fully customizable to your brand.

Question 9

Can I attribute campaign sends back to in-app conversions and revenue?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Revenue attribution works in two modes: (1) a tracking pixel on confirmation pages that pings our attribution endpoint with a transaction value, deduplicated by order_id, and (2) a server-side webhook from your backend that posts the conversion with the campaign attribution token preserved in the original link. The platform stitches the conversion back to the specific campaign, variant, and subscriber, and surfaces revenue-per-send in the campaign report. Attribution windows are configurable (default 7-day click, 1-day view) and the model can be overridden to first-touch or linear if your marketing stack uses a different convention.

Question 10

How is pricing structured for marketing campaigns?

Accepted Answer

Pricing is **per email sent, not per contact stored**. This is the structural difference from MailChimp and most legacy ESPs, and it matters at scale: a list with 100,000 contacts where you send a monthly newsletter pays roughly 1/10th the cost of an MailChimp-style per-contact plan. All marketing capabilities — segmentation, A/B testing, STO, automations, revenue attribution, brand kit — are included in the base Essentials plan with no add-on tiers. Dedicated IP and BIMI start on Pro. There is no per-seat charge for team members and no API-call charges separate from sends.

Newsletters, broadcasts, and drips — without a marketing degree.

Drag-and-drop builder

Smart segments

Schedule + STO

A/B/n testing

Unsubscribe groups

Image library

Signup forms

Localization

Know what worked. Repeat it.

Frequently asked questions about email marketing campaigns

Run your next campaign on Inbox OSS.