Campaign
A campaign, also called a broadcast, is one message sent to many people at once: a newsletter, a product announcement, a release note. What separates it from transactional mail is who asked for it. A campaign goes to a list rather than to one person who has just done something, so it needs consent, a working unsubscribe and a postal address in the footer.
At a glance
- Category
- Marketing email
- Addressed to
- A segment, resolved when the campaign is sent
- Produces
- One ordinary message per recipient
- Must carry
- An unsubscribe control and a postal address
- Checked against
- The suppression list, before every recipient
How it works
You write the message once and address it to a segment rather than to a person. When it is sent, the segment's rule is evaluated, the suppression list is applied, and one ordinary message is produced per remaining recipient. From that point each copy behaves exactly like a single send: it has its own identifier, its own delivery event, its own bounce or complaint if one occurs. That symmetry is what lets the same webhooks, the same timeline and the same suppression logic serve both kinds of mail.
Why it matters
Bulk mail is judged more harshly than one-to-one mail, and rightly so, because the recipient did not ask for it at the moment it arrived. Large mailbox providers expect authentication, a one-click unsubscribe header and a complaint rate kept low, and they apply those expectations to the sending domain as a whole. A single careless campaign can therefore cost you the inbox for your password resets, which is the usual argument for keeping the two on separate subdomains.
Example
A monthly newsletter is addressed to a segment of contacts subscribed to the product news topic. Sending it resolves the segment to eleven thousand contacts, removes the forty on the suppression list, and produces the rest as individual messages. Each carries the one-click unsubscribe header and a footer with the company's postal address. Two days later the dashboard shows deliveries, opens, clicks and three unsubscribes, and each of those three is already excluded from the next one.
Common mistakes
- Sending a campaign from the same subdomain as password resets, so a bad campaign takes the transactional mail down with it.
- Treating an unsubscribe as a preference you can override for an important announcement, which is how a complaint becomes a legal problem.
- Resolving the audience days before the send, so the list you mail is not the list you checked.
In Rasket
A campaign is addressed to a segment and produces one ordinary email per recipient, so suppression, tracking and events behave exactly as they do for a single send.
Related terms
Frequently asked questions
Does a campaign need consent even for existing customers?
For marketing content, yes, and the form consent has to take depends on where the recipient lives. A receipt or a service notice is a different kind of message and is not governed by the same rule.
Can I see what happened to one recipient?
Yes, because a campaign produces ordinary messages. Each recipient has their own message with its own timeline of delivery, opens, clicks and any bounce or complaint.
How large can a campaign be?
The limit in practice is your sending volume and your reputation rather than the software. A sudden jump from a thousand recipients to a hundred thousand is the pattern receiving servers treat as suspicious, whatever the tool allows.
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