Campaigns & SMS
Send email campaigns to lead lists and run SMS campaigns with opt-out rules.
Campaigns are broadcasts — one message to a whole audience at once, rather than a reply to one person. Email campaigns live under Marketing → Campaigns, text-message campaigns under Marketing → SMS Campaigns, and the reusable designs email campaigns can use under Marketing → Email Templates.
This guide covers building, sending, scheduling, and tracking both kinds of campaign. For designing templates and setting up a sending domain, see the Email guide.
Quick start
- Verify a sending domain under Domains → Email Domains (see Email).
- Go to Marketing → Campaigns and select New campaign.
- Fill in the details, pick a template (or paste HTML), choose an audience, and select Send now or Schedule….
- Open the campaign afterwards to watch deliveries, opens, and clicks come in.
Email campaigns
The Campaigns list
The list shows each campaign's Status, Audience, and counts of Recipients, Opens, and Clicks, plus when it was created. Select a row to open it. The row menu offers Edit (drafts and scheduled campaigns only), Send now, Schedule, Duplicate, and Delete.
Deleting a campaign keeps its historical recipient records for reporting.
Campaign statuses
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Draft | Saved but not sent |
| Scheduled | Will send automatically at the chosen time |
| Sending | Going out now |
| Sent | Finished sending |
| Paused | Stopped part-way; can be sent again |
| Failed | Sending didn't complete |
You can send from a Draft, Scheduled, or Paused campaign. Once a campaign is sending or sent, it can no longer be edited — duplicate it instead.
Creating a campaign
Select New campaign. The composer has three parts.
Details
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| Campaign name | Internal only — recipients never see it |
| Subject line | What recipients see |
| From name | The sender name shown in inboxes |
| From email | The sending address. Leave it blank to send from your verified email domain |
Content — choose one:
- Template — pick one of your saved email templates. Select the link to Email Templates to build one first.
- Inline HTML — paste a complete HTML email. You can use variables such as
{{firstName}}to personalize it.
Audience — choose a Lead list or leave it as All leads. The composer shows an estimated recipient count. Recipients without an email address are skipped, and duplicate addresses are sent once.
Send — pick one:
- Save as draft — save and come back later.
- Send now — start sending immediately.
- Schedule… — pick a Send at date and time. Recipients are worked out at send time, so anyone added to the list before then is included.
You need a name, a subject, and either a template or HTML content before sending.
Tracking a campaign
Open a campaign to see:
- Four cards — Recipients, Delivered, Opens, and Clicks.
- An Engagement funnel chart showing how recipients narrowed from sent to opened to clicked.
- A Recipients table with each address, its Status, and when it was Sent, Opened, and Clicked, with paging for large sends. Hover a failed row to see the error.
The recipient list is filled in when the campaign is sent, so a draft shows no recipients yet.
Recipient statuses
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Pending | Queued, not yet sent |
| Sent | Handed to the mail server |
| Delivered | Accepted by the recipient's server |
| Opened | The recipient opened it |
| Clicked | The recipient clicked a link |
| Replied | The recipient replied |
| Bounced | The address rejected it |
| Failed | Sending failed |
| Unsubscribed | The recipient opted out |
Opens and clicks are only recorded if tracking is turned on for your email domain — see Email tracking.
From the campaign page you can also Edit (drafts and scheduled), Send now, Schedule, or Delete.
SMS campaigns
SMS campaigns broadcast a text to every lead in an audience, sent from your workspace's SMS number. Go to Marketing → SMS Campaigns.
Creating an SMS campaign
- Select New campaign.
- Enter a Name (internal).
- Write the Message. Personalize it with variables such as
{{lead.firstName}}— each recipient gets their own values filled in. A counter under the box shows the character count and how many 160-character segments each recipient's message will use. - Choose the Audience — All leads with phones or a specific lead list. An estimated recipient count is shown.
- Save. The campaign is created as a Draft.
Sending
On the SMS Campaigns page, each campaign shows its status, its audience (the list name, or "All leads with phones"), and once it's underway how many recipients have been sent and the total segments used. Select Send on a Draft or Paused campaign to start it. You can Delete any campaign that isn't currently sending.
A few rules apply automatically:
- Leads without a phone number are skipped.
- Leads who have opted out of texts or are on your do-not-contact list are never messaged.
- Messages go out one at a time at a steady pace, so a large audience takes a while to finish.
- Every segment sent is billed to your wallet. Keep messages short to stay within one segment. See Wallet.
Email templates
Templates are designed under Marketing → Email Templates and reused by campaigns and automations. Creating, previewing, testing, and organizing templates in folders is covered in Email → Email templates.
Permissions
Both email and SMS campaigns use the campaign permissions:
- Viewing campaigns requires campaigns: read.
- Creating (and duplicating) requires campaigns: create.
- Editing drafts requires campaigns: update.
- Sending and scheduling requires campaigns: send.
- Deleting requires campaigns: delete.
Tips
- Send yourself a test of the template first (from Email Templates) before sending a campaign to a list.
- Use lead lists to target the right people instead of emailing everyone.
- Schedule for when your audience is awake; recipients are resolved at send time, so you can keep adding to the list until then.
- Watch the Bounced and Failed rows after a send — a high bounce rate hurts deliverability. See Deliverability basics.
- Keep texts under 160 characters so each recipient costs one segment.
Related
- Email — sending domains, templates, tracking, and deliverability.
- CRM — lead lists and tags.
- Automations — trigger individual emails and texts automatically instead of broadcasting.