How to Set Up Your First Email Campaign in Brevo (Step-by-Step)

You signed up for Brevo. You've got a product, a newsletter, or something worth saying to an audience. Now you just need to actually send the thing.

This guide walks you through the entire process — from account setup and building your first contact list, to designing your email, adding personalization, running an A/B test, and reading your campaign results. No assumptions, no skipped steps.

If you don't have a Brevo account yet, start here with their free plan — no credit card required.

What You'll Need Before You Start

• A Brevo account (free tier is fine for this tutorial)
• A verified sender email address — ideally from your own domain, not a Gmail or Hotmail address
• A list of contacts you have permission to email, even if it's just 10 people to start

That last point matters. Only import contacts who have opted in to hear from you. Sending to bought or scraped lists will hurt your deliverability and violate Brevo's terms of service.

Step 1 — Verify Your Sender Domain

Before you send a single email, verify the domain you'll be sending from. This is a non-optional step if you want your emails to actually land in inboxes.

Go to Settings > Senders & IP > Domains and add your domain. Brevo will give you DNS records (DKIM and SPF entries) to add through your domain registrar — this usually takes 5–10 minutes if you're comfortable in your DNS settings, and up to 48 hours to propagate.

Why this matters: Gmail and Yahoo tightened their sender requirements in 2024, and sending from an unverified domain will push your emails straight into spam folders. Get this done first.

Pro tip: Also set up a sender name that matches your brand. "Your Name from [Brand]" consistently outperforms generic sender names in open rates.

Step 2 — Build or Import Your Contact List

Your contacts live under CRM > Contacts in the left sidebar. You have two options for getting them in.

Importing an Existing List

If you have a CSV file from another platform, click Import contacts from the Contacts page. Brevo accepts CSV files and lets you map columns to contact attributes — first name, last name, email, and any custom fields you want to track.

A few things to know during import:

• You'll be asked to assign contacts to a List. Create a named list before importing (e.g. "Newsletter Subscribers" or "Free Trial Users") so your contacts are organized from day one.
• Map your columns carefully. If your CSV has a "First Name" column, make sure it maps to Brevo's FIRSTNAME attribute — this is what powers personalization tokens later.
• Brevo will flag and skip duplicate or malformed email addresses automatically.

Building a List from Scratch with a Sign-Up Form

If you're starting from zero, go to Marketing > Forms and create an embedded signup form or a hosted landing page. Brevo gives you a shareable URL you can post anywhere — useful if you don't have a website yet.

Forms created here automatically route new subscribers into whatever list you designate.

Step 3 — Understand Lists vs. Segments (This Will Save You Confusion Later)

Brevo has two contact organization tools and people mix them up constantly.

Lists are static. When you import a CSV or someone fills out a form, they go into a list and stay there until you remove them manually. Use lists to track where contacts came from — "Imported from Mailchimp," "Blog Signup Form," "Podcast Landing Page."

Segments are dynamic. They're rule-based groups that automatically update as contact data changes. A segment called "Opened last 3 campaigns" will always contain exactly those contacts — no manual updating required. Use segments when you want to target based on behavior.

For your first campaign, sending to a full list is fine. As you grow, you'll want to shift toward segmenting — targeted emails consistently outperform blasts in open rates, click-throughs, and unsubscribe rates.

Step 4 — Create Your Email Campaign

Go to Marketing > Campaigns > Email and click Create an email campaign.

You'll move through a setup flow with five main sections.

Name Your Campaign

This is internal only — your subscribers never see it. Name it something you'll recognize in three months: "Newsletter — June 2025" or "Product Launch — Announcement v1." You'll thank yourself later when your campaign list gets long.

Set Your Sender

Choose the sender name and email address that will appear in your recipients' inboxes. If you've already added and verified a sender in Settings, it may populate automatically. You can also set a separate Reply-to address if you want replies to go somewhere different from your sending address.

Choose Your Recipients

This is where you select which list or segment receives this campaign. Click the To field and choose from your available lists or saved segments. You can also add exclusions — for example, send to your full newsletter list but exclude anyone already tagged as a paying customer.

Write Your Subject Line and Preview Text

Your subject line is the single highest-leverage thing you can optimize in email marketing. Keep it under 50 characters so it doesn't get cut off on mobile. Be specific and direct — vague subject lines like "You don't want to miss this" consistently underperform against specific ones like "The 5 AI tools I'm actually using this week."

Preview text (the gray text visible next to the subject line in most inboxes) is your second line of defense. Don't leave it blank — Brevo will pull the first line of your email body if you do, which is often something like "View this email in a browser." Write a genuine teaser instead.

Step 5 — Design Your Email

Click Design Email and choose your approach.

Option A — Drag-and-Drop Editor

Brevo's visual editor lets you build emails by dragging content blocks — text, images, buttons, dividers, social links — into a layout. It's the fastest way to get something professional-looking without writing code. Templates are available organized by category (newsletters, promotions, events) if you want a head start.

The editor is mobile-responsive by default. Always use the mobile preview toggle before sending — a significant chunk of your audience will read on their phones.

Option B — HTML Editor

If you have a branded HTML email template from a designer or a previous platform, paste it directly into the HTML editor. Useful for teams with an established design system who don't want to rebuild from scratch.

Option C — Rich Text

A plain-text style editor. Surprisingly effective for personal newsletters and founder updates — it looks like a real email from a real person, which can improve both deliverability and engagement.

Step 6 — Add Personalization Tokens

Personalization goes beyond putting someone's name in the subject line — though that's a good start.

Brevo uses the format {{ contact.ATTRIBUTE }} for personalization tokens. The most common ones are:

• {{ contact.FIRSTNAME }} — subscriber's first name
• {{ contact.LASTNAME }} — last name
• {{ contact.EMAIL }} — their email address
• Any custom attribute you created during import

So in your email body, you can write: "Hey {{ contact.FIRSTNAME }}, here's what I've been working on this week..."

If a contact's first name field is blank (which happens with partial imports), Brevo won't display the token — it'll just be blank space. To avoid awkward gaps, set a fallback value: write it as {{ contact.FIRSTNAME | default:"there" }} so it reads "Hey there" instead of "Hey ," for contacts with missing data.

Step 7 — Set Up an A/B Test (Business Plan and Above)

If you're on Brevo's Business plan, you can run a proper A/B test before sending to your full list. This is worth doing even on small sends — the data compounds over time.

From the campaign creation flow, select A/B Test Campaign instead of Standard Email Campaign.

You'll define:

• What to test — either your subject line or the full email content (body). You can only test one element per campaign.
• Sample size — the percentage of your list that receives the test. Brevo splits this sample in half, with Version A going to one group and Version B to the other.
• Winner criteria — either best open rate or best click rate.
• Test duration — how long Brevo waits before determining a winner and sending that version to the rest of your list.

A practical example: send two subject lines — one curiosity-driven ("I almost didn't write this one") and one direct ("5 tools I used to cut my writing time in half") — to 20% of your list, wait 4 hours, and let the winner automatically go to the remaining 80%.

Over months of doing this, you build a genuine picture of what resonates with your specific audience.

Step 8 — Schedule or Send Immediately

At the final step, you choose whether to send now or schedule for later.

Send now does exactly what it says — useful for time-sensitive announcements.

Schedule lets you pick a specific date and time. This is the better default for newsletters. Research consistently shows that mid-week sends (Tuesday through Thursday) between 9–11am in your audience's local timezone perform above average — though your own analytics over time will tell you more than any general benchmark.

Send at best time is available on higher plans and uses Brevo's AI to deliver to each contact at the time they're most likely to engage, based on their historical open patterns. If your audience spans multiple time zones, this is genuinely useful.

Before you commit to send, always click Send a test email and check it in your own inbox first. Look for broken images, rendering issues, and make sure every link works.

Step 9 — Read Your Campaign Analytics

After your campaign sends, give it 24–48 hours to collect meaningful data, then go to Marketing > Campaigns > Email and click Report next to your campaign.

Here's what to focus on:

Open Rate

The percentage of recipients who opened your email. Average open rates across industries in Brevo's 2025 Marketing Benchmark (based on analysis of over 44 billion emails) vary significantly by sector, but a healthy newsletter open rate generally sits between 25–45%.

One important note: Since February 2025, Brevo's open rate calculation includes opens detected by Apple Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) and bot activity by default, which can inflate numbers. You can filter these out in the report settings for a more accurate read on real human engagement.

Click Rate

The percentage of recipients who clicked at least one link. This is your real engagement signal — someone clicking means they wanted more. A click rate between 2–5% is solid for a cold list; well-segmented, engaged lists will go higher.

Unsubscribe Rate

Keep this below 0.5% per campaign. Spikes here tell you that your content missed the mark for that audience, the subject line set a wrong expectation, or you're emailing too frequently.

Bounce Rate

Hard bounces are invalid email addresses — remove these from your list immediately. Brevo typically handles this automatically. Soft bounces are temporary delivery failures (full inbox, server issue) and are less critical, but contacts with repeated soft bounces should eventually be cleaned.

Heat Map and Link Clicks

Scroll down in the report to see which links in your email got clicked and how many times. This tells you where reader attention actually went — useful for deciding where to place your most important CTAs in future campaigns.

Quick Tips for Your First Few Campaigns

Keep your list clean from the start. Remove hard bounces immediately and set up a process to periodically remove contacts who haven't opened anything in 6+ months. A smaller, engaged list will always outperform a large, disengaged one — and it costs you less on volume-based plans too.

Don't overthink your first send. Paralysis over the perfect subject line or design is the enemy of getting data. Send it, read the analytics, and improve the next one. Ten campaigns of learning beats one campaign of perfecting.

Set up a double opt-in on your signup forms. Brevo supports this under form settings. It adds one confirmation step for new subscribers, which reduces fake signups and ensures your list is full of people who actually want to hear from you. Your deliverability will thank you.

Use the Google Analytics integration. Brevo can automatically append UTM parameters to all links in your campaigns. Go to Settings > Tracking and connect your GA4 property. Then you can see email-driven traffic, conversions, and revenue directly in Google Analytics — which makes the ROI of email visible in a way that Brevo's own reporting doesn't cover.

What to Do After Your First Campaign

Once you've sent one campaign and reviewed the analytics, you're no longer a beginner — you're iterating. A few things to tackle next:

Set up a welcome automation so every new subscriber gets a sequence of emails introducing who you are, what they can expect, and what your best content is. This is available in the Automations tab and is one of the highest-ROI workflows in email marketing.

Start building segments based on engagement. Create a "Highly Engaged" segment (opened 3 of last 5 campaigns) and a "Cold" segment (hasn't opened in 60+ days). Treat them differently. Send your best stuff to the engaged group, and run a re-engagement sequence for the cold one before deciding to remove them.

Consider upgrading to the Business plan ($18/month) once you need A/B testing, landing pages, and full automation without contact limits. For most people building a digital business, that's the plan worth paying for.

Email marketing has one of the best returns of any digital marketing channel — but only when you use it consistently and read what the data tells you. The setup above gives you a working foundation. Everything else is refinement.

Start your free Brevo account here — no credit card needed.

Feature information verified from Brevo's official help documentation and pricing pages as of June 2025. Some features (A/B testing, advanced analytics) require Business plan or above.

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