# Campaigns

Create, target, schedule, and measure marketing sends.

## Campaign workflow

1. **Set the details** — Name the campaign, choose the sender, and write the subject line.
2. **Choose the audience** — Select a list or segment and confirm the number of sendable contacts.
3. **Create the content** — Write a plain message or build a designed email from sections and saved templates.
4. **Review and send** — Run a final test, then send now or schedule for later.

## Choose an audience

Campaigns send only to contacts who are subscribed and have an active email status. Unsubscribed, bounced, and complained addresses are excluded automatically.

## Send options

Send immediately when timing is not sensitive, or schedule the campaign for a specific date and time. A scheduled campaign can be paused or cancelled before processing begins. Only a campaign that never sent can be deleted — once it has reached anyone it is permanent, because its opens and clicks would otherwise be left in your reports with nothing to attribute them to.

Scheduling decides more than the hour. Three strategies control how the send rolls out:

- **All at once** — everyone goes at the scheduled instant. The default, and the right answer for most lists.
- **Gradual** — release the audience in batches of 1–50% every minute or hour. A large send warms up instead of arriving at the mailbox providers as one spike, which is gentler on your sending reputation and on whatever your links point at.
- **Smart send time** — each recipient gets the hour they have historically opened in, within 24 hours of the scheduled time. This stays locked until the account has enough engagement to learn from — 100 opens or clicks, from 50 different people, across at least two sends, in the last six months — and the send panel tells you which part is still short.

Separately, choose which clock the time is read against:

- **A specific timezone** — one instant for the whole audience.
- **Each recipient's local time** — the same wall-clock time everywhere, so a list spread across continents all get 8am rather than all getting your 8am. For anyone whose local time has already passed, you decide whether to send immediately or wait until tomorrow; waiting is the default.

You can also re-resolve the audience at send time rather than when you schedule, so people who join the list in between are included. That option isn't available with local-time sending, which takes a single snapshot just before the earliest timezone goes out.

## A/B testing

Test up to four versions on a slice of the list, then send the winner to everyone else automatically.

1. Turn on A/B and choose the test size (5–100% of the audience).
2. Add 2–4 variants. A variant only overrides what you change — set just the subject and every version shares the same body.
3. Pick the winning metric, **open rate** or **click rate**, and how long to wait before deciding (30 minutes to 7 days).

An A/B test always goes out as a single fixed send: the held-back remainder has no release time until the winner is picked, so gradual pacing and recipient-local timing aren't available on a campaign that is testing.

The test batch goes out first and the rest of the audience is held back. When the wait elapses the winner is chosen and the held contacts receive it — there is no second send to schedule, and nobody has to be at a desk when the timer ends. Live per-variant results are on the campaign while it runs, and you can call the winner early if the answer is already obvious.

A campaign waiting on its result shows the status **testing**. Part of your list has already received email at that point, so stopping it means cancelling: the held remainder is abandoned rather than sent.

## Campaign metrics

After sending, the campaign report shows delivery, human opens, clicks, click-to-open rate, bounces, complaints, and unsubscribes. Use Activity when you need the event-level timeline.