Set up your first campaign

Create the board from the Ecommerce Campaign playbook

Click New board and open the template browser. Pick Ecommerce Campaign. The pannable preview shows the structure you'll get: six phases (Research → Audience → Strategy → Create → Launch → Measure) with starter cards in place, including a campaign brief. Name the board Back to school (P&P Bookstore).

A playbook is more than columns. It teaches your agent the campaign process: which card types belong in which phase, and how each deliverable is structured. You never have to explain your process in a prompt. More on that in Templates.

Make sure workspace guidelines are on

The creation dialog has a checkbox for workspace guidelines, and it's on by default. Leave it on: on a guidelines-enabled board, your agent must read your brand rules before writing anything. If you haven't set guidelines up yet, take ten minutes for Set guidelines for a workspace first. That setup is what gets you copy in your voice instead of ChatGPT's.

Brief your agent

Now the brief: the same one you'd give a freelancer, typed once. It sends your agent into the first two phases of the board:

Open my board "Back to school (P&P Bookstore)" in Plainpaper and read it first: the phases, the seed cards, and the campaign brief.

Then run the Research and Audience phases for a back-to-school campaign for an independent online bookstore:

- Goal: €12k revenue in the two weeks before school starts
- Offer: 20% off curated back-to-school reading bundles
- Channels: email and Instagram
- Constraints: no countdown timers or fake urgency, and we say "readers", never "customers"

Research what makes back-to-school work for a bookstore, draft our primary audience as its own card, and fill in the campaign brief with the input above. Every piece gets its own card in the right phase with a one-line summary, and every research card cites its sources.

Keep the board open while it works. Cards appear and connect live, and a labeled cursor shows exactly what your agent is touching.

Review what came back

Click any card to open it: the full content, a one-line summary, and a Citations panel listing the sources it used. Check the links before you trust a research card. Where you want something changed, right-click the card and Add comment. Comments are your standing instructions; your agent reads them and does the work:

Check the open comments on my board "Back to school (P&P Bookstore)", make the changes each one asks for, and resolve every comment when you're done.

Strategy and the email plan

With research and audience agreed, ask for the plan:

On my "Back to school (P&P Bookstore)" board, write the Strategy phase: one campaign plan card that turns the research into a plan for email and Instagram, and one email sequence plan for three emails. Connect both cards to the audience they build on, and keep every summary to one line.

Those connections matter. Because the plan is linked to the audience it builds on, anyone, including a fresh agent session next week, can trace why the plan looks the way it does.

Draft the emails

Draft the three emails from the sequence plan as complete email cards in the Create phase of my "Back to school (P&P Bookstore)" board.

- Apply the workspace guidelines before writing a word
- Pick one final subject line per email instead of listing options
- Connect them in send order: Mail 1 precedes Mail 2 precedes Mail 3
- Leave the hero image as a placeholder slot in each email; I'll supply the images myself

Each email arrives as a real email card: subject, preheader, and the rendered HTML. Flip a card on the canvas to see the actual email, the same HTML that will land in an inbox.

Fill what you owe

The hero images render as labeled placeholder slots: your agent's honest way of saying "an image belongs here and I don't have it yet". Fill them either way: drop the files onto the card yourself, or give your agent a link to an image and it fetches and stores it on the board. Assets live privately in Plainpaper, so an email never breaks because a file moved. Details in Assets & media.

Approve the emails

Open each email you're happy with and set its status to approved. The status isn't a sticker, it's a gate: a card that still holds an unfilled placeholder can't reach approved at all. Plainpaper rejects the move and names the missing slot. So "approved" means the card is complete, on-brand, and ready to hand off. The full lifecycle is in Approvals & control.

Hand off

The handoff starts as a proposed action, a request that shows you what would happen and which cards it draws from, before anything does:

Propose pushing the three approved emails from my "Back to school (P&P Bookstore)" board to our email platform as a proposed action, so I can review it before anything happens. Don't execute anything until I approve.

Approve it in the decision drawer, and your agent executes through your platform's connector (Brevo, Mailchimp, Klaviyo, whichever you use). See Connect your marketing stack for wiring those up.

Bring the results home

A week after send, the same board can hold the outcome:

The back-to-school emails have gone out. Bring the results back to my "Back to school (P&P Bookstore)" board as a results card (a chart) with opens, clicks, and revenue per mail, and link it to the emails it measures. Lead with what we should do differently next time; put the raw numbers after that.

Plainpaper doesn't fetch analytics itself. Your agent brings the numbers in through your platform's connector and writes them as a results card, linked to the emails it measures. The campaign's research, plan, drafts, and outcome now live in one place, and the next campaign starts faster because of it.