Campaigns Overview
A campaign sends one message to an audience. The platform could already send one message to one person; almost all the distance between those two things is the machinery that stops messages going out.
Where to find it
Architect Panel → Commercial:
- Campaign Manager — the console — build, schedule and monitor
- Campaigns — the underlying campaign records
Architect Panel → Automation:
- Tasks — E-mail Campaign Sender, every 5 minutes
Architect Panel → Activity:
- E-mail Log — individual sends
- SMS Log — text sends
Three channels
E-mail, SMS and WhatsApp. The channel is chosen per campaign and determines which account and template are used.
The lifecycle
A campaign moves through six states: Draft, Scheduled, Sending, Paused, Sent and Cancelled.
Paused is the one worth noticing. A campaign that has started can be stopped mid-flight — which is the feature you will be extremely glad of on the day somebody spots an error after the first few hundred have gone.
What a campaign holds
- A name and subject.
- The channel, and the account and template for it.
- A segment — who it goes to.
- A topic — what people are subscribing to or opting out of.
- A schedule, and a throttle in messages per minute.
- Open and click tracking switches.
Sending is a background task
The E-mail Campaign Sender task runs every five minutes and sends the next batch. It ships disabled — enable it under Automation → Tasks, or a scheduled campaign will sit at Scheduled forever looking correct.
Batched sending is also what makes pausing possible and what keeps a large campaign from overwhelming your sending reputation.
The stopping machinery
Before any individual message goes, the platform checks the suppression list and the recipient's topic preference. Those checks are the reason bulk sending is safe to use, and they are covered in their own articles.
It is worth understanding that they exist and are applied per recipient at send time — not when the segment is built. Somebody who opts out after a campaign is scheduled is still excluded.
Every recipient is tracked individually
Each one carries its own status, send time, a link back to the record it came from, and any error. So "did this person get it" is answerable, and a partial failure is visible rather than hidden inside an overall total.
Start small
Send to a segment of yourself and a few colleagues first, on the real channel with the real template. Every campaign problem worth catching — a broken merge field, an unsubscribe link that does not work, a subject line truncated on a phone — is visible in that test and invisible in a preview.
Worked example
A team builds a campaign, sends it to a three-person test segment, finds the merge field for first name is empty for two of them, fixes the segment mapping, tests again, then schedules to the full audience with a throttle. The campaign sends over an hour rather than a minute, and nothing needed pausing.
Recommendations
- Enable the sender task before scheduling anything.
- Always send a real test to a small segment first.
- Know where the pause control is before you need it.
- Set a topic on every campaign so opt-outs mean something.