Campaigns basics

What it is

Campaigns (Marketing, Campaigns) lets you write one marketing email and send it to a group of your contacts, then see how many were emailed, skipped, unsubscribed, opened and clicked. It only ever emails people who have given marketing consent for email, and it never sends without an audience you chose. Invoices, reminders and other service emails are separate and are not affected by any of this.

Who can use it

Team members whose role can create and edit in Campaigns (admins, managers and operators by default) can create and send. Viewers can only look. Deleting a campaign needs delete permission, which by default only admins have.

Before your first campaign

• Add your firm name and a postal address, email or phone under Settings, Portal branding. Every campaign email shows who sent it and how to reach you, and a campaign will not send until this is filled in.
• Make sure the people you want to reach have marketing consent for email recorded (see 'Who receives it' below).
• Optional: save a segment under Growth, Segments, or tag the contacts you want to reach. You choose one of these as the audience.

Create a campaign

• Click '+ New campaign'.
• Fill in 'Internal name' (only your team sees it) and 'Email subject'. Both are required.
• Write the 'HTML body'. This is an HTML box, so write simple HTML such as <p>Hi {{first_name}},</p>. {{first_name}} is replaced with each contact's first name, or 'there' if they have none. You do not need to add an unsubscribe link or your address; both are added to the foot of every email for you.
• Under 'Audience', choose 'Saved segment' or 'Tag', then pick one. You immediately see how many people are eligible, how many are excluded and why, the first few recipients, and a few who will be skipped.
• Optional: set 'Schedule send (optional)' to a date and time. Scheduling needs an audience. Leave it blank to keep the campaign as a draft.
• Click 'Save draft' (or 'Schedule' if you set a time). A draft with no audience is saved, but it cannot be sent until you click 'Choose audience'.

Who receives it

• Only the people in the audience you chose, and never more than the per-campaign limit (1,000 recipients by default). If the audience is bigger, the page says so and nothing is sent: narrow the segment or tag, or split it into several campaigns.
• Only contacts with an active marketing consent for email in the Growth consent ledger. A contact with no consent record is not emailed, because silence is not consent under the DPDP Act. You can record consent under Growth, People. Consent marked as inferred does not count.
• Anyone who has unsubscribed is never emailed again, from any campaign or Growth journey, until they are explicitly re-subscribed. If one contact record has unsubscribed, other contact records with the same email address are skipped too.
• Addresses that have bounced, contacts with no email address, malformed addresses and no-reply or mailer-daemon style addresses are skipped.
• Each email address is sent one copy per campaign, matched without regard to capital letters. If several contacts share an address, one of them (preferably one with consent) receives it and the rest are counted as duplicates.
• Before sending you see the breakdown in one line, for example '120 eligible, 30 excluded (no consent 20, unsubscribed 4, no email 3, duplicate 3)'.

Test it first

Click 'Send test to me' on a draft. One email goes to your own sign-in address only, never to contacts, with the subject marked [TEST] and the same footer. Tracking is switched off for tests and its unsubscribe link does nothing, so a test can never unsubscribe anyone. You can send a handful of tests a minute.

Send it

• On a draft, scheduled or blocked campaign, click 'Send now'. A confirmation states the exact number of people it will go to, for example 'Send to 118 people?', along with the breakdown. If the audience changes between your checking and your confirming, the send is refused and you are shown the new number.
• Emails go out a few at a time rather than all at once, so a large campaign takes a few minutes. The page shows 'Sending' and updates by itself when it finishes. A campaign can only be sent once.
• A scheduled campaign is sent automatically when its time arrives. Consent and unsubscribes are checked again at that moment, not when you scheduled it, so someone who unsubscribed in between is skipped. If the audience has been deleted, no audience was chosen, or the audience has grown past the limit by then, the campaign is marked Blocked with the reason and nothing is sent. Fix it and send again.
• Even during a send, each person is checked just before their email goes out, so an unsubscribe that arrives mid-send is honoured.

What your recipients see

• A footer with your firm name, your address or contact details, and an 'Unsubscribe' link.
• An Unsubscribe button in their mail app (Gmail, Apple Mail and Outlook show one), through the standard List-Unsubscribe headers.
• The unsubscribe link opens a simple page that asks them to confirm; it works without signing in and never expires. After confirming they see a confirmation, with a 'Re-subscribe me' button in case it was a mistake. That button only reverses an unsubscribe made from a campaign email.
• Unsubscribing stops marketing email only. They still receive invoices, reminders and other messages about their own work with you.

Read the results

• Click 'View results' on a sent campaign to see Delivered, Skipped, Unsubscribed (people who unsubscribed because of this campaign), Open rate, Click rate and Click-through (CTR, the share of openers who clicked).
• Delivered, skipped and unsubscribed numbers come from the send log and are exact. Opens are counted with a tiny tracking image, so they are undercounted if the reader blocks images. Links in your body are automatically changed to tracked links so clicks can be counted.
• 'View sent-to list' shows every address that was emailed, and the skipped ones with the reason (no consent, unsubscribed, duplicate and so on). This is your record of exactly who received the campaign.
• Deleting a campaign also deletes its sent-to list.

Existing campaigns

Campaigns you created before this change keep their history and numbers untouched. A draft or scheduled one has no audience chosen, so it will not send until you click 'Choose audience'. A scheduled campaign that comes due without an audience is marked Blocked instead of emailing anyone.