Email campaigns overview: one-off broadcasts vs. automated sequences
What an email campaign is, how it differs from an automated workflow email, where campaigns live in the app, and what each campaign status means.
When you want to send an email to a group of contacts once — an announcement, a promotion, a newsletter — that's a campaign, not an automation. This article covers what a campaign is, how it's different from the emails inside a workflow, where to find campaigns in the app, and how to read a campaign's status while it's in flight.
What a campaign is
An email campaign is a one-time broadcast: you design a message, choose who receives it, and send it (immediately or on a schedule) to that audience all at once. There's no ongoing trigger — once it's sent, it's done, and sending it again means creating a new campaign or resending explicitly.
That's the key difference from the emails inside an automation (workflow): a workflow email fires individually for each contact as they hit a trigger, days or weeks apart from each other, based on their own timeline. A campaign is a single event sent to a defined list at a single point in time; a workflow email is a recurring, per-contact event tied to that contact's behavior.
| Email campaign | Workflow (automation) email | |
|---|---|---|
| Trigger | You send it, once | A contact's action or a time delay |
| Audience | A fixed list you choose at send time | Whoever enters the workflow, whenever they enter |
| Timing | One send (or a schedule you set) | Ongoing, per-contact |
| Best for | Announcements, promotions, newsletters | Welcome sequences, nurture, reminders, follow-up |
Neither replaces the other — most accounts use both. A product launch email is a campaign; the three-email welcome sequence a new contact receives after signing up is a workflow.
Where campaigns live
Campaigns are managed from Marketing > Emails > Campaigns. From there you can see every campaign on the account — draft, scheduled, sent, or archived — create a new one, or open an existing one to check its performance.
The Campaigns list showing draft, scheduled, and sent campaigns
A related but distinct area, bulk actions, lets you send a one-off email (or other message) to a specific filtered list of contacts directly from a smart list, without building a saved campaign first. Campaigns are the right tool when you want a reusable, trackable send with its own performance report; a bulk action is faster for a true one-off blast to a list you've already built. See the Bulk Actions articles for that path.
Campaign statuses
Every campaign shows a status that tells you where it is in its lifecycle:
- Draft — being created or edited; nothing has been sent yet, and you can change anything.
- Scheduled — fully configured with a send time set in the future; it will go out automatically unless you cancel or reschedule it first.
- Sending — actively going out to recipients. This is typically brief unless you've configured batch/pacing options (see Create and send an email campaign), in which case it can span hours or days.
- Sent — delivery is complete, and performance data (opens, clicks, bounces) is available on the campaign's report.
- Failed — the campaign couldn't send, usually due to a sending domain or configuration issue. Review your sending setup before retrying.
- Archived — manually removed from the active list. Archived campaigns aren't deleted and can typically be restored if needed.
Note: A recurring or automated send that behaves more like a drip sequence than a single broadcast usually belongs to a workflow campaign instead, which has its own simpler status set — Draft while you're building it, Published once it's live and running off its trigger.
What "done" looks like
Before you build your first campaign, you should be comfortable telling the difference between "this needs to go to a fixed list right now" (a campaign) and "this needs to happen automatically whenever someone does X" (a workflow). Getting that choice right up front saves you from either manually re-sending a campaign every week that should have been automated, or building an automation for a message you only ever intended to send once.
Related articles
Frequently asked questions
Can I turn a campaign into a recurring send?
Not directly — a campaign is fundamentally a one-time broadcast. If you find yourself resending the same campaign on a regular cadence, that's usually a sign the message belongs in a workflow instead, triggered on a schedule or a recurring condition.
Does a campaign go to every contact in my account by default?
No. You always choose the recipients when you build the send — see Create and send an email campaign for the targeting options. There's no "send to everyone" default; you have to select an audience explicitly.
Can I cancel a scheduled campaign?
Yes, as long as it hasn't started sending yet. Open the campaign from the Campaigns list and cancel or reschedule it; once it moves to "Sending" it can no longer be pulled back for recipients who've already received it.