Sending a campaign

Who can send

Owners and Admins, and anyone with Email Campaigns ticked on their row. To check, click Settings in the sidebar, open the Organization tab, then the Users tab, and find the person’s row in Team members. That is the same tick that lets someone build and edit a campaign. Without it, the recipient preview, Send test to me and Send are not shown, and the server refuses them with “Missing capability”. See Roles and capabilities.

Before you start: a comms style

You cannot compose a campaign until at least one comms style exists — the + New campaign button stays disabled, and the empty state says “Create a comms style first.” See Configuring a comms style.

Composing

1. Open Campaigns in the sidebar and click + New campaign. The window is titled New campaign.

2. Include organization logo — ticked by default. If your organization has no logo yet the box is disabled and the page tells you: “Upload a logo in Settings → Organization → Branding to use this.”

3. Comms style — pick one. Each option reads as the style’s name followed by the consent it requires, e.g. Quarterly Newsletter — marketing consent. This choice decides who is eligible.

4. Subject — what lands in their inbox.

5. Sender — read the sentence that describes who the email comes from and where replies go. You can change the From name. To change the address itself, click Change the sending name, which reveals a Sending name field; the part after the @ is fixed. See Sender and replies.

6. Recipient contact types — four checkboxes: Requesters, Volunteers, Customers and Donors (no records yet). The help text is exact and worth reading: “Leave all unticked to include every eligible type. Consent gate from the comms style is always applied on top.”

   Customers are your buyers, and for a gallery they are usually the point. Tick Customers for a show announcement, a private view invitation or anything aimed at people who have bought before.

   Ticking a box narrows to exactly that box. The tick list is not a filter applied on top of everyone — it replaces the default. So ticking Requesters alone means requesters only, and your customers are not included. Leave all four unticked and you get requesters, volunteers and customers together.

7. Message body — a rich-text editor. Use + Event or + Request link to drop in a styled button (see Insert helpers), or ✨ Draft with AI for a starting draft.

8. Optionally open Plain-text fallback (optional, for email clients that block HTML) and write a plain version.

9. Click Save draft. On an existing campaign the same button reads Save changes.

Checking who will receive it

The right-hand pane has two tabs, Email preview and Recipients. Until you save, Recipients says “Save the draft to preview eligible recipients.”

Once saved it shows the count and a sample under the heading Eligible recipients, with a line describing exactly how the audience was derived.

The audience is derived, never picked. There are no lists, no segments and no tags. A recipient is included when they have a sendable email address, have granted the consent the comms style requires, and match one of the ticked contact types — or, when nothing is ticked, requesters, volunteers and customers. That is the whole rule.

Read the line above the sample. It names the types the audience was derived from, in the same words as the checkboxes, so you can see at a glance whether anyone you meant to reach was left out.

Donors currently resolve to nobody. The checkbox reads Donors (no records yet) for a reason — that source is not wired up, so ticking it on its own produces zero recipients, which is a hard failure rather than a warning (see below).

Sending

1. Click Send test to me first. The page says so: “Always send a test to yourself before sending to everyone.” The test goes to your own address and its subject is prefixed [TEST].
2. Click Send to N, where N is the live recipient count. The button is disabled while that count is zero.
3. Confirm: “Send to N recipients now? This cannot be undone.”

The campaign’s status moves to sending, then sent.

The test send and the real send go out from different Resend accounts and different addresses — the test from the transactional sender, the real campaign from the broadcast sender. The body and header are identical, but do not use the test to check the From address or reply behavior.

Things that will stop you

• Zero eligible recipients is a failure, not a warning. The campaign is marked failed with the reason “No consent-eligible recipients.” A failed campaign opens with Edit, shows the reason, and can be corrected and sent again with Send again to N.
• Send again never sends a campaign twice. If the email service took the campaign but reported an error, the campaign shows failed. Send again to N first asks the email service what happened to that attempt. If it had gone out, nothing is sent again: the campaign is marked sent and the page says “This campaign had already gone out … so it was not sent again.” If the email service cannot be reached, nothing is sent and the campaign stays failed; try again in a few minutes. A campaign whose earlier attempt cannot be checked at all is refused with ”… it will not be sent again from here.” If you are sure nobody received it, create a new campaign with the same content.
• A campaign stuck in sending can be released after 30 minutes. A send that never finished leaves the campaign in sending. Open it with View: after 30 minutes it says it has not finished and offers Mark as failed. That checks with the email service first: if the campaign had in fact gone out it is marked sent, otherwise failed, and you can then correct it and Send again to N. Within the 30 minutes, Mark as failed is not offered.
• Unsaved changes are not sent. Send test to me and Send to N use the saved campaign, so while the form has changes you have not saved they wait, with “You have unsaved changes. Save them first.” Save, then send.
• A sent campaign cannot be edited, re-sent, un-sent or deleted. Editing is refused once it has gone; the row action changes from Edit to View, and Delete disappears.
• Demo mode sends nothing and records nothing. A workspace with no broadcast email set up says Demo mode — no email sent, with the number it would reach, and the campaign stays a draft.

What this module does not do

Each of these is genuinely absent, not hidden:

• No scheduling. See Scheduling a send.
• No duplicate or copy. See Copying a campaign.
• No merge fields. You cannot personalize with a recipient’s name — there is no substitution engine. See Insert helpers.
• No A/B testing, no send-time optimization, no open or click reporting in the product.

Last updated: 2026-09-20 · Applies to: CartonCrew v1.563+