Campaigns How to run a campaign: stages, budget against spend, channels, and the link back to revenue.

A campaign is the container for a piece of marketing intent. Everything else - content, assets, spend, results - hangs off it.

Creating One

Give it a name, a start and end date, a launch date, the channels it runs on, and a budget.

Name it so it is recognisable in a list six months later. "Q3 UAE retail launch" survives; "New campaign" does not.

The Board

Campaigns sit on a pipeline with stages you define. It is the same board engine as Sales, so it behaves the way your team already knows - drag to move, and the stages are yours to name.

Define stages that reflect how you actually work. A campaign that goes from idea to brief to in-flight to measured is four stages; borrowing a sales pipeline's stages produces a board nobody believes.

Channels And Allocation

A campaign carries the channels it runs on, and a channel allocation - how the budget is split across them.

Allocating deliberately is what makes the later comparison meaningful. If you put 70% into one channel and it returned less than the 30% channel, that is a finding. If the split was never recorded, it is an argument.

Budget Against Spend

The campaign holds both a budget and a spend. Spend accumulates from the connected channels rather than being typed in, so the comparison is real.

Ownership

Each campaign has an owner and can carry collaborators. Owner means accountable, not "did all the work" - an unowned campaign drifts, and it is the first thing to check when one has quietly stalled.

Linking To Revenue

A deal records the campaign that produced it. Once deals are attributed, a campaign can be read against revenue closed rather than against clicks.

This is the most valuable number in the module and the one most often missing, because attribution has to be set when the lead is created rather than reconstructed afterwards.

Tags And External Ids

Tags group campaigns across pipelines - by market, by product, by season.

External ids hold the campaign's identifier in each connected channel, which is how synced metrics find their way to the right campaign. If a campaign shows no numbers while the channel is connected, this is the mapping to check.

Running One

1. Create it with dates, channels and budget.
2. Set the allocation across channels.
3. Write a blueprint so content has something to work from.
4. Create content against it.
5. Move it through stages as it progresses.
6. Watch spend against budget while it runs, not after.
7. Read the result against revenue, not impressions.

Sending The Email

Open a saved campaign and choose Compose email blast. The button only appears once the campaign exists, so create and save it first.

Pick the list, write the subject and body, and send. Sending is handled by a scheduled worker rather than happening the instant you click, so a large send goes out in controlled batches.

Before Anything Sends

Three things are checked, and any of them will hold a send:

• A verified sending domain. Marketing goes out from your own domain, set up under Operations, then Email and Domains. Until a domain is verified, marketing cannot be sent at all. This protects you: mail sent from an unverified domain lands in spam and damages the reputation of your ordinary email.
• Consent. Anyone who has unsubscribed is removed before the send is built, so they never enter the queue.
• Frequency. Nobody receives more than three marketing emails from you in twenty four hours, counted across every campaign.

Unsubscribes

Every marketing email carries an unsubscribe link in the footer, and the headers that make the mail provider show its own unsubscribe button next to your name in Gmail and Outlook. Both work the same way and take effect immediately.

When someone unsubscribes:

1. It is recorded permanently against that contact.
2. They are marked do not email.
3. They are excluded from every future campaign, in this workspace, forever.

The exclusion is applied when the next campaign is built, before anything is queued, and checked again at the moment of sending in case someone unsubscribes while a send is in progress.

Hard bounces and spam complaints are treated the same way as an unsubscribe, and suppress the address automatically.

Common Questions

Can a campaign run across several channels? Yes, and most do. Set the allocation so the comparison is possible later.

What happens at the end date? Nothing automatic. Move it to your closing stage so the board reflects reality.

Why is spend zero? The channel is not connected, not syncing, or the external id mapping is missing.

Can I copy last year's campaign? Duplicate it and reset the dates. The structure is usually more reusable than the content.