MARKETING CAMPAIGNS

Send an approved template to a built audience

A campaign is an approved template, an audience you can defend, and a drain that claims every recipient exactly once. The interesting part is not the sending — it is what happens when a batch is retried.

Every message a campaign sends is a message somebody is charged for and a real person receives. That is why the machinery below is about claims, pacing and refusals rather than about throughput.

How a campaign is assembled

Six steps, and the audience is chosen after the message, not before.

Pick the number it sends from

A campaign belongs to one connected number, so its sending limits, its quality rating and its template library are that number’s.

Pick an approved template

Only templates the transport has already approved can be sent, and only in the shapes it approved them in. A template still under review is listed with its state rather than hidden.

Fill its blanks

Each blank is filled in place, on the message itself. A value is either the same for everyone or taken from each contact’s own data, and you choose which, per blank, before you choose the audience.

Build the audience

From your CRM, a spreadsheet, a pasted list, the number’s own contacts, an earlier campaign or a saved list. The build refuses rather than guesses — see below.

Set the pace and the hours

A per-campaign rate that sits beneath the number’s own limit, plus the hours you are willing to send in and a cap on how often one person may be contacted.

Start it, and watch per recipient

Every recipient carries its own outcome and its own reason. Failures are grouped by reason, because two hundred rows saying the same thing is not diagnosis.

Why a retry cannot send twice

One statement, and it is the whole guarantee.

Charging for a message is not idempotent: ask for it twice and it happens twice. So the campaign drain does not ask twice. Each recipient is moved to sending and selected in the same database statement, which means two servers draining the same campaign cannot be handed the same person. A plain read followed by a write is the classic way to send a stranger two copies of the same offer, and it is the shape this avoids.

The second half is the bill. The identifier of the charge is written before the transport is called, so a recipient found stuck afterwards can be told apart from one that never started. A stuck recipient that already holds a bill identifier is retired for reconciliation and never re-sent; one with no bill is retried. Without that, a server replaced mid-batch — which happens on every deploy — would re-send and re-charge whatever was in flight.

Where a campaign stops itself

Four refusals, each of which is a campaign paused rather than a list burned.

The do-not-contact list is unreadable

The build and the send both fail closed. Sending around a suppression list because a query timed out is the one failure here that cannot be taken back.

The template changed under the campaign

If the template no longer takes the values the recipients carry, the campaign pauses instead of failing contacts one at a time.

The balance or the plan will not cover it

A campaign pauses on the first recipient it cannot pay for, so the rest of the list is still there when the balance is topped up.

The number is not available

A number that is suspended, disconnected or not yet live pauses its campaigns rather than failing every recipient against it.

What the pace actually means

A campaign never sends as fast as it can. The per-campaign rate is a bucket that sits under the number’s own hourly limit, so a campaign cannot spend the capacity the inbox needs to answer the replies the campaign produces.

The honest consequence: a large list takes hours rather than minutes, and the estimate the screen shows is withheld until enough recipients have actually been attempted to compute one. An estimate from two sends is a number with our authority behind it and no evidence under it.

Start with one list

Create an account See it on a live number