Campaigns — DataRunner Docs

campaigns

Campaigns

Campaigns let you build and deliver emails to your contact lists on demand or on a schedule. Each campaign moves through a clear status lifecycle — draft, scheduled, sending, sent — with full per-recipient delivery tracking at every step.

Read: 6 min
Sections: 6
Types: Marketing · Tx · Announce

How campaigns work

A campaign has three parts:

Recipients — one or more broadcast lists, inline email addresses, or both
Content — a saved email template from your library, or an inline subject and body
Timing — send immediately or schedule for a specific date and time

When you trigger a send, DataRunner enqueues a delivery job for every recipient. The campaign status moves to sending while jobs are processed and to sentonce all sends complete. Follow progress in real time on the campaign's Sends tab.

draft

Campaign saved but not yet scheduled or triggered.

scheduled

Send time set; will start automatically at the scheduled datetime.

sending

Delivery jobs are being processed; cannot be edited or cancelled.

sent

All recipients processed; final per-send statuses available.

cancelled

Manually cancelled before send started.

Campaign types

DataRunner supports three campaign types:

Marketing — promotional content, newsletters, and announcements to opted-in lists
Transactional — account notices, receipts, and system-triggered messages
Announcement — product updates, release notes, and internal broadcasts

The type is a label for your own categorisation. All three types share the same delivery engine and tracking features.

Creating a campaign

Go to Campaigns → New campaign. Configure:

Name — internal label for the campaign
Type — marketing, transactional, or announcement
Email subject — subject line for the outgoing email
Email body — inline HTML body, or leave blank when using a template
Email template — optional saved template from your library; takes precedence over the inline body if both are set
Recipients — broadcast lists and / or individual email addresses
Scheduled at — leave blank to keep the campaign as a draft until you trigger it manually, or set a datetime to schedule

Draft vs. scheduled: A campaign without a Scheduled at datetime is saved as draft and will not send until you trigger it manually. Adding a datetime moves it to scheduled automatically.

Broadcast list targeting

Broadcast lists are reusable recipient groups managed in Contacts → Broadcast lists. Assign one or more lists to a campaign; DataRunner resolves all contacts at send time and deduplicates addresses across overlapping lists so no recipient gets the same email twice.

You can also add individual addresses alongside broadcast lists in the Recipients field. Both are merged at delivery time.

Editing a sent campaign: Campaigns with status sending or sent cannot be edited or re-sent. Clone the campaign to create a new draft from its configuration.

Scheduling

Set a Scheduled at datetime to queue the campaign for future delivery. DataRunner starts sending at that time automatically — no manual trigger required.

To send immediately instead, leave Scheduled at blank and use the Send now button on the campaign detail page. The campaign moves directly from draft to sending.

To cancel a scheduled campaign before it sends, open the campaign and click Cancel. The status moves to cancelled and no emails are sent. Campaigns that are already sending cannot be cancelled.

Delivery tracking

The Sends tab on each campaign shows the full delivery log. Each row represents one recipient:

Address — the email address the message was sent to
Platform — the delivery channel used (e.g. email)
Status — delivered, failed, or pending
Sent at — timestamp of the delivery attempt
Error — error message if status is failed

The campaign header shows aggregate counts: Recipient count, Delivered, and Failed — updated in real time as sends complete.

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