Sending and scheduling a campaign

Once the draft is ready and you have tested it in your inbox, two decisions remain: who you send to and when. Before both, one condition.

Before anything else: at least one active subscriber

A campaign only goes to the active subscribers in your account, so the natural order is subscribers first, campaign second. On the draft page, under “Send to”, it says how many there are. “This account has no active subscribers yet” means you have nobody yet: go to Subscribers, add them by hand or by import, then come back to the draft. The number updates on its own.

Who you send to

The choice is made under Send to, with the three targets covered in their own article. Check the recipient count before going further and compare it with the number you expected.

Check too that the tag is the right one, not a neighbouring one. On a real campaign there were two nearly identical tags, one with 16 people and one with 15. The email opened with “last year you signed up”, which was false for the sixteenth person, who came through a form in the current year. The difference between the two numbers was exactly the person the text did not fit.

When you send

“Send” starts the campaign right away. “Schedule” asks for the date and the time, in your local time: the day cannot be in the past, and the time must be at least two minutes ahead. The platform checks every five minutes which campaigns are due, so the email leaves within a few minutes of the chosen time, not on the second. If another campaign with the same subject is already scheduled for the same time, the second one is refused until you cancel the first.

Two things to check on the date and the time, both learned the hard way.

The day of the week, not just the date. A plan written as “Monday the 25th” can have the wrong date. Look at the weekday, not only the number.

The hour follows the people receiving it. A list of people learning something reads in the evening, a list of companies in the morning. Choose the hour for them, not out of your own habit.

What happens once you press it

The campaign moves to the Campaigns list with its status: “Scheduled” if you gave it a time, “Sending” and then “Sent” if you pressed “Send now”. The name can no longer be changed from this point, so it is worth setting correctly from the start.

A scheduled campaign can be moved or stopped. Open the campaign from Campaigns, then the three-dot menu in the corner (Campaign actions): “Change the time” reschedules it, “Cancel campaign” stops it for good. A cancelled campaign shows as “Rejected” and cannot be sent any more; if you still want it, “Copy into a new draft” makes a fresh copy in Drafts.

The segment is recalculated at send time, not at scheduling time. Anyone unsubscribing in between drops out on their own, anyone gaining the tag comes in. So the final number can differ slightly from the one you saw when scheduling.

The number sent can be lower than the preview

At send time, the platform automatically removes three groups on top of what your target says: anyone in the middle of an automation, anyone who came in transactionally without newsletter consent, and anyone who already received this campaign in an earlier attempt.

That is normal and shows in the report. It becomes a problem only when the difference is large, which usually means you started an automation and sent a campaign to the same people on the same day.

If the list has many new addresses: “Paused”

A new address is one you have never sent anything to from ClevMail. A campaign can carry at most 50 new addresses, or twice the number of emails delivered for you so far, whichever is more. A new account with a freshly imported list is therefore allowed 50. Over that ceiling, the campaign does not go out at all and stays as it was, and on “Send now” the message says how many new addresses it has and how far you can go: “Send to a segment of at most 50 first and check the bounce rate before continuing.”

The ceiling grows with every delivered email. With 1,000 imported addresses, all delivered, it takes four campaigns: 50, then 100, then 300, then the remaining 550. Send the first ones to a tag or a segment, as in “Who you send to: everyone, a segment, or tags”.

On the Free plan, the ceiling counts every campaign of the last 24 hours, not each one on its own, so a list cannot go out in pieces of 50: the new addresses of those 24 hours, added up, stay under twice the number of addresses that have already had an email from you delivered. On a new account, on the first day, with every address delivered, that is 50, then 50, 100, 200, 400 and the remaining 200. Also on Free, campaigns stop when, of the addresses written to in the last 7 days, more than 2% hard-bounced (from 5 bounces up) or more than 0.2% sent spam complaints (from 2 complaints up), even if the platform has already removed those addresses from the list. On Free, the refusal carries these rules' message, not the one above: it gives the current ceiling and how many new addresses still fit, and, when you have to wait, the date and time from which you can try again.

When the campaign has more than 50 new addresses but fits under the ceiling, it goes out in two steps: first to the people who have received from you before, plus the first 50 new addresses, and the campaign moves to “Paused”. After an hour, the platform reads the bounces, complaints and unsubscribes from that batch: if they are within limits, the rest goes out on its own; if not, the campaign stays “Paused” and does not resume by itself, and the list needs cleaning before going further. The same logic as in the article on your first campaign on a new domain, applied automatically: a small batch, read, then the rest.