Messaging

Campaigns

A campaign is a named, grouped bulk send — the record that lets you see, at a glance, how a specific blast is doing and clean it up afterward. There's no separate campaign-builder screen; you create one from the same forms used for one-off bulk sending, on the SMS and WhatsApp Campaigns pages. This page covers what's specific to campaigns — for the mechanics of composing and targeting a send, see the SMS and WhatsApp pages.

Campaigns list, showing progress per campaign
Campaigns list, showing progress per campaign

Creating a campaign

Both Bulk send and Send from Excel — for SMS and for WhatsApp — open with a required Campaign name field. Submitting the form creates one campaign and one queued message per recipient under it, whether those recipients came from pasted numbers, selected contact groups, or an uploaded spreadsheet. Recipients are split evenly across whichever devices, gateways, or WhatsApp accounts you selected for the send.

Scheduling instead of sending immediately

To send later instead of right away, use Schedule a message from the Scheduled page rather than the Campaigns page. The form takes the same recipients, message, and device/gateway or account fields as a bulk send, plus a date and time and an optional repeat interval (in days) for a recurring schedule.

A campaign created from Bulk send or Send from Excel dispatches immediately, as part of that same request — it doesn't wait on anything in the background. Only entries created from the Scheduled page wait for the background cron job to pick them up and send them at their scheduled time. If a scheduled send never goes out, check that cron is configured correctly before assuming the message itself is at fault. See Cron jobs.

Spintax for message variation

Every bulk and scheduled send form supports spintax, so a campaign doesn't send the exact same wording to every recipient. Wrap alternatives in curly braces separated by pipes — {good|bad} — and one is picked at random per message; groups can be nested inside each other.

Shortening links

Every send form — quick, bulk, and Excel alike — offers a Link shortener dropdown. Selecting one runs every URL in your message through it before sending, replacing the original link with the shortened one. Shorteners aren't built in; an administrator installs them one at a time from Admin → Shorteners, and once installed, a shortener becomes selectable in every user's send forms.

If the Link shortener dropdown only shows "None," no shortener has been installed on this server yet — that's an administrator task, not something you can do from the SMS or WhatsApp pages yourself.

Monitoring progress

The Campaigns table lists every campaign with its creation date, name, the device/gateway or account it's sending from, the total recipient count, and a live status column: Completed once nothing from the campaign is left pending, or Processing (X of Y sent) while messages are still queued.

Deleting a campaign permanently deletes its entire message history — sent, failed, and pending alike, for both SMS and WhatsApp campaigns. There's no status filter on the delete: everything tied to that campaign is erased together, and this cannot be undone.